The Devil's Staircase - Helen Fitzgerald

The Devil’s Staircase follows naive eighteen year old Bronny as she decides to leave her dead end Australian town for London to fully experience life. The decision is prompted by her desire not to know whether or not she has inherited Huntingdon’s disease from her mother. She runs away from the hospital, her older sister and her father with enough money for a one way flight and no luggage.

In London she falls in with a group of friendly hostellers and soon finds herself drinking, taking drugs and yearning for her first sexual experience. When a large town house next to the hostel becomes vacant the group decide to break in and squat for as long as possible. Now in the squat, Bronny begins to hear strange noises at night, they seem to be coming from under the floor, but they can find no way to a lower level. As the blurb states, “She thinks it’s her imagination, or the drugs. It isn’t”. At this point Fitzgerald steers her novel in the direction of a dark thriller. Although we discover the source of the noises well before Bronny, The Devil’s Staircase speeds the reader through the horror and suspense of the terrifying situation that Bronny becomes mixed up in.

The thriller aspect of the novel is definitely the best executed. I don’t think the aforementioned terrifying situation has the desired effect. In my experience it has become a disappointingly easy choice for ‘serious literature’. (I won’t ruin the plot, but hopefully you’ll know what I mean if you read it). However, this aside, Fitzgerald sets up the situation and the characters in such a way that it does create suspense and kept me turning the pages. As more clues or suggestions were added to the mystery the pages were turning faster and as the characters get closer to the truth the frustration each time they fail gets worse.

While I can commend this aspect of the writing it poses Fitzgerald a problem. Unfortunately, I was never really engulfed by the story; my imagination was never ignited by the words on the page. The story is grounded in reality, the people and places are all familiar and easy to picture, and the situation is certainly plausible. Despite this, it never seemed to be anything more than a story. I believe all of it could happen, and that a lot of it has, but I was never captured by a scene, I could never really picture myself in the story, even though there are some situations which I have experienced myself. The continuation of suspense prevented my full attention to each detail because I was too keen to see what happened. However, this is not a good enough excuse. Fitzgerald just didn’t do enough to make me care about each scene, or each character. I kept reading because I wanted to know how it would end, not because I was captivated by the story or characters, and because you can’t get all the answers from the just reading the last paragraph.

Another problem along these lines was the characters in the story. They are all rather two dimensional and too close to caricatures. There are a lot of characters like this in a lot of other stories and I don’t always mind it. However, in The Devil’s Staircase they were too undeveloped to make me care about them. It was hard to identify with them or see them as real. The major problem is that Bronny is no different, despite being the main character. Again, I wanted to know what happened to her, but I didn’t especially mind how she ended up. This was the same for all the characters bar one, and I would have to be psychopathic not to care about that one. Due to these character flaws The Devil’s Staircase was never particularly emotionally engaging. It should and could have been, but sadly wasn’t.

Fitzgerald does have a get out clause here. By the end of the novel I was left with the suggestion that we never really know who the people we involve ourselves with are. Unless we really get to know someone we can never be sure about their past and who they are now. The undeveloped characters greatly aid this statement. Close to the end the reader is given some brief back stories, but they are too brief and still didn’t bridge the gap between me and them. I have no preference as to whether or not literature should have a message or make a statement, but I do mind if it does and doesn’t execute it properly. So to end on a positive, Fitzgerald does provide the reader with a statement that, whilst not being profound, is well conveyed. She doesn’t beat your head in with it, but it is recognisable and not too subtle.

I would suggest this novel to anyone who wants a few thrills and a bit of suspense. Although the subject matter shouldn’t make it so, it is an easy, page-turning read. It isn’t ‘fun’, but it’s quick and, I guess, entertaining. If you’re looking for something to get your teeth into or lose yourself in then sadly Devil’s Staircase may not be for you.

Tim B-G