What is it with ghost stories this year? First Sarah Waters’ The Little Stranger, now Audrey Niffenegger’s Her Fearful Symmetry, not to mention Stephenie Meyer’s ongoing Twilight series; for a reviewer with a strongly rationalist streak, the boundaries of credulity are being uncomfortably stretched…

The comparison between Waters and Niffenegger is quite instructive: Waters keeps one foot firmly in the rational camp, and treats the ghostly forces lurking within her decaying stately home as an understated and unproven speculation, while her pace of narrative remains appropriately slow and sombre; whereas Niffenegger leaves us no shadows of doubt, and has her ghosts sitting at the kitchen table, writing screeds of messages from the other side, and finally leaving the house in someone’s open mouth. Do we really want our ghosts so decisively embodied, or shouldn’t they remain in the nebulous realms of imagination and hallucination?

One explanation for the outlandish developments of Niffenegger’s narratives is that she says her plots and characters develop organically as she writes: she starts with a tragic death in a hospital, but then decides she’d like to keep the character of Elspeth alive, so brings her back to us; she has two sets of twins as key characters, and this gives her the possibility of switched identities, which she therefore exploits beyond the bounds of belief with a duped husband; we soon begin to lose track of which ghostly identity is inhabiting which terrestrial body, with the pace of plot twists accelerating unnervingly towards the end. She says it was all inspired by visits to Highgate Cemetery, but it ends up as rather a rollercoaster ghost-train ride round the cemetery avenues.

It’s all rather a macabre jumble of plot lines; for even the apparently sane characters are grossly exaggerated, like Martin who suffers from obsessive compulsive disorder, so tapes up his windows to keep out the light, and yet implausibly leaves his flat door open. You wonder whether ‘social problems’ are being thrown in to season the stew, but in no way does this book help anyone come to terms with death, or loss, or identity, because these feelings are so mocked by the body-snatching escapades in the graveyard.

Sorry, it’s just not my bag; but I’m quite sure it will be for the thousands who bought Time Traveller’s Wife, and will no doubt be beating a path up the Northern Line to the cemetery gates; stay well away, for sanity’s sake!