Waiting for Lulu at Wuthering Heights: A Flash Novella

A ‘Flash Novella’, the author tells us ‘[... ] is a collection of short stories that work by themselves but also link together to form a complete work.’ The link here is the love that Dan and Lulu have for each other from their teenage years into middle adulthood—Dan from a seemingly normal household and Lulu from an orphanage. Like Cathy and Heathcliff though, they lose contact and are destined to be apart. Well, sort of! We are getting used to the transformation of the Bront€e story, and stories, into various types of fiction. Traditionalists may grumble but it is all part of the Bront€e legacy. The Bront€e siblings themselves, after all, wrote fictional novels based on their real-life events— though less so in the case of Emily perhaps. Orphan Lulu was given Wuthering Heights (by a supervising nun!) which became her lifelong companion. The novel fuelled a poetic talent, with Lulu leaving enigmatic messages on tree stumps and stones. Dan was into pop culture—Johnny Cash, Prince, and Echo and the Bunnymen feature in the narrative— before becoming the minister at Haworth. The structure of the finished work is a little unusual. Despite its 150 pages though, line spacing and page layouts are generous with ‘white space’ and the whole can be read in an hour or so—more like a slim volume of poetry than a novel. The prose is indeed richly poetic and the whole work bittersweet. It remains in the memory long after the author’s epilogue is read. On a lighter note, I’m still chuckling over the idea of a pub on the edge of Haworth Moor called ‘The Wuthering Heights’, and that Emily’s novel itself could be used as therapy for a disturbed child! Andy Houstoun is a philosophy teacher and a much-published short story writer.