There are two sides to every marriage. Maybe three, if a child is involved. Or make that four, in cases where a "consulting spiritualist" enters the picture.

It's a tale of being haunted, taking some cues from Henry James' "The Turn of the Screw." It's also a study of psychosexual struggle, in the manner of Arthur Schnitzler (the writer whose "Traumnovelle" was the basis for Stanley Kubrick's "Eyes Wide Shut").

To a lesser but still lively degree, it's a late-Victorian picaresque about struggling actors-turned-mediums. And ultimately it's a profound meditation on the shortcomings of memory, especially memory's unconscious capacity to invent the facts.

The novel's ambiguities are evident right from the start: "I suppose my prescribed busywork should begin as a ghost story, since that was surely Constance's experience of these events."

Constance Barton is the wife of medical researcher Joseph Barton and mother of Angelica. Her efforts to give her husband a child have triggered miscarriage after miscarriage, and she is, understandably, continually anxious about her one surviving child's welfare.

She is also increasingly fearful of any conjugal attentions from Joseph, since her doctor has warned her another pregnancy might kill her. When Joseph suggests that Angelica, at age 4, might finally be moved from her parents' bedroom into a separate nursery and might even start going to school, Constance dreads the worst: separation from her daughter and the resumption of sex in her marriage.

She also starts seeing the worst. With Joseph's every nighttime touch, no matter how casual, Angelica on the floor below signals a distress of her own. Constance, rushing to her side, soon starts catching glimpses of a protean, predatory presence - sometimes with Joseph's face, sometimes with the faces of other men - hovering over her daughter "like an angel of death or ancient god of love."

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