A Transition
By Way of a Short and Incomplete List of Books I Have Read as a Direct Result of Reading The Time Traveler's Wife
Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone
Rainer Maria Rilke's Duino Elegies
Lewis Carroll's (a.k.a. Charles Dodgson's) The Annotated Alice
A.S. Byatt's Possession
That is to say, TTW has had a rather significant effect on me. So naturally, waiting for Audrey Niffenegger's new novel to come out was a wee bit torturous. Now, you've heard the phrase "ask and you shall receive"? Well, usually I really don't like asking for things, especially material things. But I made an exception and asked around and managed to procure an early copy of Her Fearful Symmetry (the title comes from Blake's poem "The Tyger," which Audrey also quoted in The Time Traveler's Wife). The official release date is today, so I won't be giving anything away if I write about it here. [If you haven't read it and are planning to (what are you waiting for? It came out today!), you might want to skip this bit for now. Come back Thursday for pictures of Fondue Night!]
Her Fearful Symmetry is the story of a pair of twins, Julia and Valentina - themselves the daughters of a twin, Edie - who inherit the London flat of their aunt Elspeth, their mother's sister. However, there are two conditions: they must live in the flat for a year before they can sell it, and their parents are not allowed to cross the threshold.
Julia and Valentina have few distinguishing characteristics other than their dependence on each other: they are American teenagers (actually they are twenty at the outset, but seem younger), their speech peppered with "like"s, and they have no real interests - they are "out of school, unemployed, and rather indolent". Though they are mutually dependent, their closeness doesn't seem like something warm and positive and dynamic; it's just how they are.
The twins move to Elspeth's flat, which borders on Highgate Cemetery. In the apartment below them lives Robert, a guide at the cemetery and Elspeth's former lover (he is 37; she was nine years older, and died of leukemia). Robert is a likable chap, still grieving over Elspeth's death and shy to introduce himself to the twins upon their arrival. In the apartment above lives Martin, whose wife of 20-some years, Marijke, has finally left him, driven away by his OCD, and returned to her native Amsterdam. When Martin isn't counting or scrubbing the floor with bleach, he's quite likable as well; he makes crossword puzzles for the paper. Elspeth herself is still around, too - it wouldn't be a proper ghost story without a ghost. She is confined to the apartment, forced to observe as Valentina and Robert make their clumsy way into a semi-relationship. Julia, meanwhile, befriends Martin, trying to help him by slipping him medication on the sly so he can return to Marijke.
Valentina, the weaker of the two twins, is the one who seems interested in having her own identity. She expresses an interest returning to school and studying fashion design, whereas Julia hates school and doesn't seem to have an interest in anything. Nevertheless, she is wholly resistant to Valentina doing anything without her, whether it's returning to school or having a relationship.
Not much action so far - until Elspeth manages to make her presence known. She communicates at first by writing in the dust on the piano, and thereafter via a homemade Ouija board. Elspeth isn't happy being dead and trapped in the flat, and she isn't entirely benign. Valentina, who is desperate to escape her sister and live her own life, hatches a plan, in which Elspeth agrees to play a crucial part; a reluctant Robert is brought in as well. Elspeth, however, has her own plan...and that's as much as I can say in the way of plot, without giving everything away. There is a twist, of course, and things end happily for some and tragically for others.
On second thought, maybe that's not quite right; maybe all of the endings are half-happy, half-tragic. If any author can pull that off, it's this one. There's no redeeming love story here, though there is love: between Martin and Marijke, between Robert and Elspeth, between Julia and Valentina. The places and themes that fascinate Audrey, not just here and in TTW, but in the graphic novels The Three Incestuous Sisters, The Adventuress, and The Night Bookmobile, are by nature dark themes and places. She writes about death and loneliness, cemeteries and letters, mirrors and twins; identity, longing, ghosts; sexuality; presence and absence. (One way for Valentina to separate herself from Julia - simpler than the route she ultimately chooses - would have been through sex: the one thing that she and Julia must experience separately, the thing that would have divided them.)
Her Fearful Symmetry is not long on action or plot twists; its central characters, the twins, aren't nearly as deeply compelling as Henry and Clare, perhaps because they simply aren't strong individuals. What Audrey is able to do here, where she excels, is to create a mood that comes over the reader like the gray London fog ("like a damaged nerve, like a dark bird"). It settles over you and chills you, and you're not entirely able to say why. By the end of page 50 I felt profoundly lonely; by the last page of the book, ineffably sad. Yet already I've dipped into it again, not from the beginning but opening to any random page and reading from there, as I've done with TTW since my first reading in 2004. It is hard not to compare HFS to TTW, and I haven't, in fact, avoided comparison. I knew that HFS would not be like TTW, but I also had faith that I would be completely satisfied, that it would be, in some way, haunting; that's just the kind of writer she is.
In case this didn't come through clearly: I loved it, and I highly recommend it.
What I'm listening to: London Calling by The Clash
What I'm reading: Possession by A.S. Byatt
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