HAZARDOUS SPIRITS
Anbara Salam 
(Baskerville, £16.99)
 
Though perhaps not on a par with its Victorian heyday, spiritualism enjoyed a revival in the 1920s, as the loved ones of those killed by the war and subsequent flu pandemic sought comfort by trying to make contact with their spirits on the other side. “It’s a land of ghosts, now. For the rest of us,” declares one of the characters from Anbara Salam’s new novel, set in Edinburgh in 1923, in which the well-to-do Evelyn Hazard’s world is turned upside-down by her husband Robert’s revelation that he can talk to the dead and intends to become a medium.
 Such a thing, if it were to become common knowledge, would be a calamity for Evelyn. Her family was once very prosperous and she lived in a mansion with her sisters, Kitty and Dolores, before they were forced to downsize in the “big move” when their father’s business collapsed. 
These days, they’re comfortably middle-class and want for little, but that fall in status weighs heavily on the family, and Evelyn is terrified of the social scandal that would erupt if Robert were known to be an active spiritualist.
 After a war, a pandemic, the “big move”, a family divorce and the death of her beloved sister Dolly, Evelyn craves normality. Why is her stubborn, deluded husband so determined to spoil it? She opposes his new interest vehemently, but Robert’s determination wears her down and she relents, joining him for services at a spiritualist church and meeting his mentor, Clarence, who to her horror turns out to be a prodigiously talented young boy.
 As time passes, Evelyn’s resistance to the paranormal lowers somewhat. Her family has, predictably, ostracised her, but she sees the results the mediums have at their séances and finds that Robert’s new vocation is actually an entrée to the kind of fashionable high society that she expects she would have been a part of anyway, had it not been for her father’s business collapsing. She might almost be persuaded that there’s something in it. But that suggests a terrifying possibility: if ghosts are real, then Robert might gain access to Dolly and the secrets she took to the grave, and that’s something Evelyn can never allow.
 Wisely, Salam keeps us in suspense as to whether this is all fraudulent or genuine psychic ability. Throughout, Robert remains essentially elusive and unknowable. Behind his benign (if pushy) demeanour, and his protestations that he simply wants to do good and ease people’s grief, it’s impossible to say for sure if he is mad, a fantasist or a genuine medium.
 But that was never really the point, as Hazardous Spirits is more the study of a woman’s response to trauma wrapped up in a paranormal mystery. 
Having tried to cope with the grief of her sister’s death with stoicism, and dealt with deeply personal traumatic events by emotionally distancing herself from them, Evelyn has settled for a lower station in life on the condition that it stays under her tight control. Robert, the former orphanage boy her parents advised her against marrying, has thrown a spanner in the works and brought uncertainty into every aspect of her life, and Evelyn’s coping mechanisms start to work against her.
 Evelyn is not the most likeable of protagonists, but Salam gives full rein to her voice, depicting her sympathetically without trying to gloss over her flaws. It’s a compelling portrait of a woman spiralling down into an irresolvable crisis, only likely to disappoint readers who were anticipating a supernatural thriller of apparitions, clanking chains and jump-scares.
 
ALASTAIR MABBOTT