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The Hundred and Ninety-Nine Steps

3.4 of 5 stars 3.40 · rating details · 359 ratings · 42 reviews

Sian, tired of nightmares in which she meets a grisly end, decides she needs to get out more. Joining an archaeological dig at Whitby Abbey, she uncovers a mystery involving a long-hidden murder. Faber's novella is in turn thriller, romance, ghost story and meditation on the nature of sincerity.

Published (first published 2001)

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Sep 15, 2011 MJ Nicholls rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: other-parts-of-europe, novellas

Sometimes I write reviews and have nightmares about how appalling and misinformed and rubbish these reviews must look on the ALMIGHTY WALL OF REVIEWS, and I must step back into the reviewing box and tackle books with a heroic second heave, like a bleeding Ali lunging for the last time at Trevor Berbick.

So: this novella is an endearing mixture of modern horror and romance. It falls into the camp of modern “character piece,” focusing on Siân, a Welsh-born student architect digging up remains at W...more

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Dec 28, 2011 Roberta rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2007

"La mano che le accarezzava la guancia era delicata ma di una grandezza inquietante: sembrava quasi grossa quanto la sua testa. Lei intuiva che se avesse osato schiudere le labbra e gridare la mano avrebbe smesso di accarezzarle il viso per attanagliarle la bocca con quelle dita enormi.
«Non fare resistenza,» le sussurrò la voce maschile, rovente, all'orecchio. «Non serve a niente. Tanto succederà comunque.»
Lei aveva già sentito quelle parole, avrebbe dovuto sapere che cosa l'aspettava, ma era...more "La mano che le accarezzava la guancia era delicata ma di una grandezza inquietante: sembrava quasi grossa quanto la sua testa. Lei intuiva che se avesse osato schiudere le labbra e gridare la mano avrebbe smesso di accarezzarle il viso per attanagliarle la bocca con quelle dita enormi.
«Non fare resistenza,» le sussurrò la voce maschile, rovente, all'orecchio. «Non serve a niente. Tanto succederà comunque.»
Lei aveva già sentito quelle parole, avrebbe dovuto sapere che cosa l'aspettava, ma era come se i ricordi le si fossero cancellati dalla mente dopo l'ultima volta che l'uomo l'aveva stretta fra le braccia. Chiuse gli occhi con una gran voglia di fidarsi di lui, con una gran voglia di poggiargli la testa nell'ansa soffice del braccio, solo che all'ultimo momento, lanciando un'occhiata di sbieco, vide il coltello che lui stringeva nell'altra mano. L'urlo venne soffocato dalla lama che le affondava nella gola, recidendo ogni cosa fino all'osso della spina dorsale e sprofondando la sua anima terrorizzata nelle tenebre."
Siân è un'archeologa che sta lavorando ad uno scavo presso l'abbazia di Whitby nello Yorkshire. Impossibilitata a dormire bene dagli incubi su un uomo che vuole sgozzarla e da un persistente e crescente dolore all'anca, che cerca di ignorare senza riuscirci, Siân si dibatte fra un'ammirazione estatica nei confronti del mondo monastico che sta studiando e la sua incapacità di importare questi ideali di frugalità e rettitudine nella sua stessa vita.
Un giorno lungo i centonovantanove gradini che deve percorrere per arrivare agli scavi, Siân incontra Mack (Magnus) e il suo cane Hadrian. Mack le affida un cimelio che gli ha lasciato il padre, una pergamena ingiallita custodita dentro una resistentissima bottiglia di vetro, e le chiede di aiutarlo a svelarne il segreto. La pergamena contiene la confessione di Thomas Peirson, baleniere e mercante d'olio. Una confessione che, pagina dopo pagina, promette un risvolto sempre più macabro. Così come il dolore all'anca di Siân, unito ai suoi incubi notturni, promette un climax di puro sapore gotico.
Ma Faber gioca solamente con il gotico, con un'ironia che evita la caduta nella banalità, e gioca anche con il feuilleton, promettendoci risvolti romantici e poi...
Non ho ancora capito bene il romanzo di Faber. Un gioco di stile, un rincorrersi di clichè sventati all'ultimo minuto, nell'arco di un centinaio di pagine che si leggono velocemente e volentieri. Il romanzo è accattivante, e non posso dire che non mi sia piaciuto, ma mi riservo il diritto di aggiungere un altro commento quando affronterò anche i suoi Sotto la pelle e I gemelli Fahrenheit, che sono nella mia pila di libri da leggere.
Qui
http://web.dsc.unibo.it/~vbaroni/ig/
troverete fra le altre cose una breve biografia di Faber (lo sapevate che vive in Scozia in una vecchia stazione ferroviaria? O che uno dei suoi lavori prima di conseguire il successo come scrittore è stato quello di cavia per ricerche mediche?).
Per approfondire, in inglese:
http://www.contemporarywriters.com/au...…
E ancora, un'intervista all'autore:
http://www.ilportoritrovato.net/html/...(less)

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Jan 17, 2013 Tom Ruffles rated it 3 of 5 stars

I was assuming I would like this more than four times as much as I like The Thirty-Nine Steps, which is a lot, but it didn’t turn out quite like that. It is a fairly topical read at the moment (January 2013) because Whitby, where the novella is set, has been in the news, firstly because bones are falling out of the eroding cliff-top graveyard onto the hapless residents below; and because Peggy in The Archers has recently dragged her unwilling and complaining daughter Lilian up those very 199 ste...more I was assuming I would like this more than four times as much as I like The Thirty-Nine Steps, which is a lot, but it didn’t turn out quite like that. It is a fairly topical read at the moment (January 2013) because Whitby, where the novella is set, has been in the news, firstly because bones are falling out of the eroding cliff-top graveyard onto the hapless residents below; and because Peggy in The Archers has recently dragged her unwilling and complaining daughter Lilian up those very 199 steps to visit the abbey while reminiscing about the great time she had in the town during the war.

Michael Faber manages to cover a lot of ground, in emotional and historical terms, if not geographically, in this novella’s slight compass. Siân, an expert on manuscripts and paper conservation, is staying at a local hotel while learning archaeology at a dig as part of a group excavating first millennium human remains at the abbey. Her back-story slowly unfolds, the reasons for her current loneliness and why she suffers such terrible nightmares. One day she meets Magnus, a doctor and medical researcher, out running with a dog. Magnus later shows her a two-hundred year-old manuscript, intriguingly hinting at a murder confession, rolled up in a bottle which his father had rescued from a demolition site many years before. The narrative follows the parallel tracks of their developing relationship, her work on salvaging the text from the ravages of time, and how she comes to a more positive view of herself.

Siân is the focus of the story, and she is a well-rounded, credible character. However, Faber had a problem with Magnus. Siân is attracted to him at the beginning, but in order to prevent this turning into a glib romance, Faber has introduced some grit. Thus Magnus is not an entirely sympathetic character, and is prone to saying the wrong thing. Unfortunately some of his remarks are pointlessly, and implausibly, antagonistic (especially given that he wants to start a relationship). This friction sets up the opportunity to examine the mores of the past, by allowing Siân to provide a more nuanced defence against Magnus’s blunt, and though often reasonable (particularly his point about how we reconstruct the past), at other times philistine, views. However, Magnus remains a two-dimensional foil against which Siân’s transformation can be seen in relief. We never get inside his personality as we do hers, which makes the characterisations unbalanced.

On the other hand, the painstaking rescue of the manuscript is an excellent narrative hook driving the mystery, because you have to wait while Siân teases out each instalment, trying to generate meaning from the partial information in much the same way an archaeologist has to decipher the partial remains left by the past, or how we decipher the personalities of those with whom we come into contact, re-evaluating as we go. Once we hear the whole confession, it transpires that what happened is not what we had assumed, warning us that we can make easy judgements about the past that are erroneous, and do not do our ancestors justice.

The blurb says that Faber deploys “a masterful sense of ambiguity”, like The Turn of the Screw. Well, I don’t think that on this evidence Faber will be bothering Henry James, but on its own more modest terms this slight work is a breezy visit to a charming, atmospheric spot, and is excellent publicity for English Heritage, which receives numerous name-checks.
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Aug 06, 2011 Sam Quixote rated it 2 of 5 stars

"The Hundred and Ninety-Nine Steps" follows an archaeologist at a dig in Whitby and her relationship with a well to do London doctor she meets one day climbing the steps who's visiting Whitby to clear up his dead father's affairs.

The book feels like Faber's filled out a short story and made it into a novella. The relationship between the female protagonist and the cliche good looking doctor (and thats all it is by the way, about as 2-dimensional as you can get) feels like it's come out of a bad...more

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Jan 03, 2011 Blair rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: contemporary, read-on-kindle

Short but sweet. This is a very brief novel, more like a short story, but I still found myself getting very involved in the plot. It's a sign of how good the characterisation is that I started to feel attached to the protagonist, Siân, very quickly; in fact, Faber manages to evoke everything - characters, setting, relationships, elements of history - so well, so concisely. The story, set in a beautifully described Whitby, encompasses Siân's almost-romance with a stranger, Mack, who she finds bot...more

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Jan 06, 2011 Nikki rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: mystery, short-stories-novellas

More of a novella than a novel, I think. I never really found myself engaging with it: most of it was just too perfunctory for me. The relationship between the main characters never really goes anywhere; the digging that is supposed to be absorbing her certainly doesn't absorb me; her emotions regarding her accident barely seem to manifest; the charged emotions between the main characters fail to move me; her obsession with the man's dog just seems a little odd...

There were two things I found we...more

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Mar 07, 2012 Ape rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: england

I've not read any Michel Faber books before, but I really enjoyed this one. It's a great little read, kind of a comfort short escape break to Whitby. It's fun to read books set in local, familiar places as well, although this had me thinking that I haven't been to Whitby for a few years now.

I like the way a lot of this story revolved around the 199 steps up to St Marys Abby. Ha ha. I do seem to be picking up a lot of fiction set in Whitby at the moment.

It's a simple tale, about an archaeologist,...more

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Jul 08, 2011 Ryandake rated it 4 of 5 stars

what a lovely little gem of a book.

it's a quick read, only 116 pages in my edition. but i imagine i will re-read this one a few times. it's one of those books that i am sure will reveal more with each read.

at one level, it's a boy-meets-girl romance, albeit on the prickly side. at another, it's a sweet meditation on death and the immortal (if there is to be immortal), with some really fine points made about honor and dignity, and what we live for. for all that it deals with some heavy stuff, its...more

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Jan 29, 2011 Charlotte rated it 3 of 5 stars

I was in two minds about how to rate this book. I loved the story, but was disappointed that it wasn't longer and that the relationship between the two main (and arguably, only) characters didn't develop further. That said, I do like that the book didn't entirely wrap everything up in a neat ending and I'll probably be thinking about what might have happened next for Magnus and Sian for a while.

I loved the characters and their strange relationship. I thought that Faber described the nuances of t...more

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Jun 12, 2012 Sx rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: read-in-2012

Short novels usually don't leave an impression on me- they are a hit or miss, so I was pleasantly surprised when reading The Hundred and Ninety Nine Steps. What was a simple archeological dig turned out to be something a lot more than that for our heroine Sian. At the end of the novella, a lot of pieces of the puzzle came together to form a whole picture. That is what I love, a novella that gets you thinking.

On the other hand, The Courage Consort was a sure miss. I tried to like it, I really di...more

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Jan 26, 2013 Lauren Skelton rated it 2 of 5 stars

I read this book December before last - it was a Christmas present - and I was so disappointed. As a huge fan of anything Gothic, Dracula-esque or Whitby-ish, I thought this book would be right up my street. Sadly, it lacked a real... something. I think what just happened to me in writing this review, happened to the author; he started writing and didn't know how to end. It was enjoyable in that it was easy to read, however I was hugely let down by its many tangents and tangles that were never r...more

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Sep 17, 2011 Emily Randall rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I really enjoyed this read!! The first story drew me in quickly and became a total page turner, it was a short read but the characters involved had enough depth and I found it to be really enjoyable. Faber gradually revealed more and more about the main character and I felt the approach worked out really well.

The Courage Consort, this one took a little longer to get into yet once I got there I couldn't put the book down and had to keep going until I ran out of pages to read!!! The reason I got s...more

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Jul 23, 2012 Sarah Hale rated it 2 of 5 stars

This novella starts out very promisingly; an archaeologist with an unhappy background is beset by recurring nightmares of being throttled to death by a mystery man with a strong and massive grip. While climbing the hundred and ninety-nine steps to her dig at Whitby Abbey, she meets a handsome yet enigmatic stranger who incidentally is a tall man with muscular arms and large hands. Attracted to one another, they become involved in untangling a mystery contained within a centuries-old scroll, roll...more

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Jan 02, 2012 Laura rated it 3 of 5 stars

I enjoyed this book, for the most part. It's very reminiscent of AS Byatt's 'Possession'. I didn't particularly like main character, and I agree with other comments about her fascination with the dog being very strange. I liked the love interest in it, even if I couldn't buy that.she was genuinely into him . I liked the argument between them about past/present - it's all well and good being interested in the past but you shouldn't try to live in it.

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Mar 03, 2012 Kaylol rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I read the hundred and ninety-nine steps in a couple of hours. When I read it I asked myself "Did I just spend this time reading about nothing?". Basically nothing happens, it's like a tale that grandmas would tell - but much less captivating. It's too boring for me, thank god it was so short.
I started reading The courage Consort but it seemed even less interesting than the previous and I gave up.

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Nov 18, 2012 Michelle Kilburn rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I enjoyed the first half of the story, Faber quickly draws you in with his characters and their histories, however, by the time the story came to an end he hadn't satisfied my curiosity (the curiosity that he himself created). It was as though he ran out of time and had to end the story quickly/abruptly. As a short story though it was an enjoyable, if not a little frustrating, read.

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Mar 26, 2011 Wanrong rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I found the ending a little abrupt - at the end, I literally went "Huh, that's it??". So there was a sense of incompleteness. Think the story tried to be a bit of everything - romance, historical novel, mystery, but never really played out the full potential of any of the components.
(Didn't read the accompanying novella "The Courage Consort")

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Jan 26, 2011 Laysee rated it 3 of 5 stars

Faber’s novella is a curiously compelling story that cleverly and imaginatively weaves together an 18th century murder mystery, a gothic romance, a recurring nightmare, and ghoulish encounters. But this is no sensational thriller. What appears quirky is surprisingly thought-provoking. Sparse but powerful.

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Aug 02, 2011 Philippa rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: read-in-2011, kindle

I was really enjoying this book, I could partially relate to the characters. They had a relatively interesting story to tell. However for me it was entirely ruined in the last ten pages, when it almost seemed the author became bored of the characters and wrapped the whole thing up in a completely unsatisfying way.

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Jan 30, 2011 Kirsty Darbyshire rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: kindle

I didn't realise how short this book was when I bought it. (It was only £1 in a Kindle sale though so I don't feel too shortchanged!) The print copy is only just over 100 pages I think, and I flew through this in a fraction of a lazy afternoon.

I bought it because I know the setting, the steps up to the abbey at Whitby, well and it sounded intriguing. It's short but perfectly formed and I wouldn't have minded spending a lot longer with the characters, but this worked nicely. I'll look out for mor...more

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Oct 14, 2012 Anna rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I think this was originally a short story that was expanded to a novella, and as such feels a bit drawn out. Not a lot happens, although it is still just short enough to hold your attention. It is however beautifully written, worth it for the prose and descriptions of Whitby etc.

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Feb 01, 2011 Lin rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2011, li-fi

This, unlike what the blur says isn't really a thriller, romance or ghost story. Its the story of a archeologist (no, not like Indiana Jones) who meets a guy who gives her a bottle with a letter in it. She unpeels the letter and worries about the pain in her leg while alternately lusting after the guy and being angry at him for not being a prude. The authors language can be over the top at times.

Which makes it sound awful, its not, its just not great. It does though feel very english (and not ev...more

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Mar 02, 2012 Sang Ayu Putu rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: read-in-2012

fastest read ever by your truly?? well cor blimey, i've only got Mr Faber to thank for. His prose is as always, engaging and absorbing. Please do continue to grace me with your writing Sir, for i will always wait it with sheer exuberance and anticipation. #end_gushing

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Jun 25, 2009 Twila rated it 5 of 5 stars

The setting for this one really caught my attention. I can practically smell the wharf and hear the bustle of the little town. It was so very well written; so vivid and ALIVE. Another set of five stars to Michel Faber.

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May 15, 2012 Jo rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: crime-fiction-and-thrillers

Two novellas in one. The first is the titular tale which features Sian, a thirty something conservator working on an archaeological dig in Whitby. She meets Mack, a doctor from London who shows her a historical artefact left him by his father. Together they untangle the mystery behind it whilst dealing with their feelings for each other. I loved this, especially the history side and Sian's passion for the subject. The second story, The Courage Consort, deals with a group of vocal performers hole...more

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Jul 27, 2011 Abby added it · review of another edition

A charming little book in its way, although nothing phenomenal. Read it in three hours, which is about what I'd be willing to spend on it.

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May 10, 2011 Alesa rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This was a fun little romp, I suppose, but lacked substance.
Glad I got it from the library instead of buying it. :)

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Feb 04, 2012 Deanne rated it 3 of 5 stars

Would love to read this as a longer novel, was just getting hooked when I found I'd reached the end.

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Jul 01, 2007 Elaheh rated it 2 of 5 stars

من اين كتاب را برحسب تصادف در ايستگاه قطار بروكسل خريدم و در مسيرم تا پاريس خواندم. چيزي در اين كتاب هست كه من دوستش دارم. نوعي فضاي راز آلود كه البته نويسندگان انگليسي در آن استاد هستند. دلم ميخواست آن را ترجمه كنم شايد ده پانزده صفحه اي هم ترجمه كردم بعد رها كردم چون كار من ترجمه نيست و آن حوصله و دقت لازم را براي اين كار ندارم.

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Jan 04, 2010 Sheila rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: ebooks

Happiness is a dog named Hadrian, a Finish Lapphound, a good nights sleep, a pebble in your hand and freedom from pain. At least that's what it is for Sian. I was very moved by this part historical drama, part ghost story, part recuperation of an accident victim to a physical and emotional state of well being, all set in Whiby. A very short novel at 72 pages but it works very well, no excess baggage padding it out, no squashing it into a smaller container, no cutting it back roughly to mould a s...more

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About Michel Faber

Michel Faber (born 13 April 1960) is a Dutch writer of fiction. He writes in English.

Faber was born in The Hague, The Netherlands. He and his parents emigrated to Australia in 1967. He attended primary and secondary school in the Melbourne suburbs of Boronia and Bayswater, then attended the University Of Melbourne, studying Dutch, Philosophy, Rhetoric, English Language (a course involving translat...more

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