What a book! Crazy as a song by Kate Bush!

The book starts with a posh bloke who is the narrator. He has a chat with Nelly the Maid, who takes over the narration duties. She’s like a narrator inside a narrator. At points in the story, Narrator II hands the narration over to Narrator III, and we peak at four nested levels of narration. The first narrator had nothing to do with anything, really, until he shows up at the end.

You’ll need a cheat sheet to follow the relationships. There were three men called Mr Earnshaw, and Emily always makes us guess which one she is talking about. The Earnshaws have Christian names, too, and you have to guess which Christian name goes with which Mr Earnshaw. There are only two Mr Lintons, but Emily gives us another Linton later to keep us on our toes — though he is not a Mr Linton.

There’s only really one Heathcliff, but what a Heathcliff! And what a villain! He would have made a good Tony Soprano or a Nurse Ratched. Like most villains, Heathcliff only has one name, but he makes up for that with his cruelty and his temper — too hot, too greedy.

Another Heathcliff comes along later (he was also a Linton), but he’s not nearly as tough as the first one. He is evil in a pathetic kind of way; more of a Gríma Wormtongue than a Lord Denethor.

There are only two women called Cathy, though the first one is amazing. If Kate Bush wrote a song about her, it would probably be the most successful song by a woman. I would expect thousands of women to go out on the wiley, windy moors each year, wearing flowing, red dresses and doing weird dances to pay tribute to Cathy and Kate.

Cathy has all her emotions dialled up to eleven. Her jealousy is as unbridled as Heathcliff’s temper. And, you know that bit in The Lord of the Rings, where Galadriel imagines wearing the Ring of Power, and she gets all fiery in her eyes? Cathy is like that most of the time. The rest of the time, she is more like the lovely Galadriel. The other Cathy is just lovely — until she is captured by the Heathcliffs, and then she becomes mean and miserable.

Cathy Earnshaw was going to marry a Heathcliff, but she marries a Linton instead. Cathy Linton marries another Heathcliff — Linton Heathcliff. She also marries an Earnshaw — just to round things off — and then she becomes lovely again.

One thing I especially like is that Emily keeps forgetting to tell us when one of the main characters dies. She’d be like blah blah blah — oh, she died months ago — blah blah — oh, and she had a baby. It was another Linton.

I enjoyed all the characters (even the servants) speaking in the same posh voice; the kind of voice that would get you into a nineteenth-century debutante ball. All except Joseph, who you’ll need a Yorkshire/Debutante Dictionary to understand. Eventually, you’ll give up trying to understand him, because most of what he says doesn’t make sense anyway. The last of the Earnshaws only knew seven words, and they didn’t make sense either.

I was sure I had guessed the ending, but I got that completely upside down — I couldn’t have been wronger. Who was supposed to have those bad dreams in the night? Who was supposed to lose the fight? They told Cathy she was going to lose, but she grabbed my soul away anyway, and we’re coming home to Wuthering Heights.

As I said at the start, the book was crazy. I hated it. I loved it, too.