The Room Beyond by Stephanie Elmas is a ghost story. When Serena comes to Marguerite Avenue to apply for a job, she is intrigued to find as she walks down the street that is next to number 32 at number 36. Interestingly, number 34 does not appear to exist. A mere curiosity, perhaps?
The job Serena is looking for is also a curiosity. She is applying to be the babysitter, partner, teacher or perhaps partner in crime for Beth who, Stephanie Elmas tells us, is only four years old. This girl is quite strange. She has just graduated from toddler status, but throughout the story she appears to display the maturity, vocabulary, and sensibilities of middle age, let alone early adulthood. Serena is intrigued from the beginning by the origins of this little girl and does not believe everything they tell her.
Beth’s apparent wisdom beyond her years may test some readers’ ability to suspend faith. But there are rewards for those who do, because The Room Beyond makes for an engaging read, not least because author Stephanie Elmas’s style is always lucid and clear, and yet she can deliver a revealing style of expression. When books include a child as the main character, writers tend to use implicit innocence as a vehicle to make statements that no one else dares to say, or to make observations that the merely conventional overlook or fear. Thankfully, Stephanie Elmas simply avoids overusing Beth’s child status, though she remains at the center of the unfolding story.
A time shift takes us to 1892, to a time when 34 Marguerite Avenue definitely existed. We meet the Piedras Blancas and the Edén, Mrs. Hubbard who cooks, and various characters, including Miranda, Lucinda, Tristan, and Alfonso, whose lives are intimately intertwined. There is intrigue on this street, where a lot happens behind curtained windows.
Back on present-day Marguerite Avenue, Serena gets the housing job offered by the Hartreve family and thus enters the house to meet little Beth, whose hidden origins immediately interest the new nanny. It is later discovered that Eva, a taciturn teenager, knows a lot about the child’s birth and is partially willing to talk. Eva’s revelations should be momentous, but Serena takes them in stride, a response we soon began to associate with her. Eva is a strange young woman, resembling an abandoned girl, almost ghostly, but it seems that we hardly ever get to know her as she enters and leaves the story.
The character of Serena, the current narrator, is intriguing. She is a wounded young woman. He lost his parents in a car accident. She herself is scarred and harbors a morbid fear of glass. Even more intriguing about Serena is her rather unpredictable impetuosity. When he feels an urge, he unleashes his expression and, at all times, displays an almost unbridled sexuality that simply does not give “no” for an answer. Serena comes across a number of potential liaisons, and when she feels like it, she links up. One particular encounter gives rise to something that develops as an obsession for Serena, who as a result becomes increasingly obsessed with the non-existence of the house next door. Who could have lived there and for what reasons could it have been eliminated from history? Maybe it still exists. Perhaps we simply convince ourselves that it is not there. And if all this is not enough, we have another character who paints black pictures that hang in a house full of eccentrics!
At the end of the 19th century, there is another strange figure. Walter Balanchine is part vagabond, part magician, part psychoanalyst, and part eminence-grise. He slips in and out of history, leaving enigma and mystery wherever he steps. Like today’s Beth, she seems to appear whenever something more than expected happens.
Overall, The Room Beyond is a satisfying read, but undemanding. With so many characters, two time periods, and multiple settings, we could never hope to reach an ending where all the ideas are resolved, all the loose ends tied up. Stephanie Elmas’s style is still a delight, so the text always flows through her events with ease. But in the end, for this to be a fiction of its kind, there may be very little tension, along with very little interest to spark literary interest. But The Room Beyond presents an interesting and engaging story that is well told. Stephanie Elmas herself cites a debt to Mary Elizabeth Braddon, who wrote mysterious and eye-catching works that sent middle-class housewives flying to bookstores. The Room Beyond hopes to emulate this success by presenting a new drama with a Gothic Victorian feel, but with the present intertwined within. Through the character of Serena, Stephanie Elmas may well have achieved her goal.
