I was given The Time Traveler’s Wife sometime in 2005, about the time it came out in paperback I think. And, like millions of other people, I loved it. I’m a sucker for forbidden love, but it was more than that — its intelligence, its admirable control of language for a first time novelist, and of course, its ability to make me sob my precious heart out. It had both literary and mass appeal. Because of this, I think it was the first book I presented at the real-life KIRBC. My friend Kara stayed up all night after the meeting until she finished it when she called her boyfriend sobbing. Now that’s a good book.
So naturally, when I found out that Niffenegger had a new book coming out, I was thrilled, and for some reason, not the least bit worried for her. Her Fearful Symmetry is a very different beast, and yet, many of the things that made The Time Traveler’s Wife so successful (sans a movie with naked Eric Bana) are at work again here. The same careful consideration of the supernatural (though this time with ghosts, rather than time travel), a swiftly moving plot (though a quibble about this later), and language laced with just the right measure of sentiment.
Her Fearful Symmetry has a few principal players, though at the heart of the novel are two sets of twins: Elspeth and Edie, and Edie’s daughters, Valentina and Julia. Elspeth and Edie are long estranged, but when Elspeth dies, she bequeaths her flat and her estate to the nieces she’s never met on one condition — they must live their for a year. So the 20-year-olds move from America to England. They take up residence next to Highgate Cemetery in an apartment building shared with three other colourful characters: Robert, Elspeth’s bereaved lover; Martin, a brilliant crossword creator confined to his home by his severe obsessive-compulsive disorder; and his wife, Marijke, who is confined by Martin’s disease. Though the girls have landed a seemingly sweet deal, there’s one catch, the former occupant hasn’t completely vacated the premises.
Highgate Cemetery
I thought about the title a lot as I was reading this book, perhaps more than I normally would. This is very clearly a novel about symmetry, about doubling and mirroring. We have two sets of twins (one composed of “mirror” twins), but there are other essential pairings at work — notably soulmates (here Martin and Marijke) and body and soul (at one particularly interesting point in the book, Elspeth is frustrated because as a ghost she cannot see herself in the mirror — she has literally lost half of herself — both her body and reflection). While this kind of pairing can be seen as ideal, it requires two parts to make a whole, without one of which, the other part is left incomplete. A person is no longer self-contained, but completely dependent on another. It’s inherently perilous, and so it’s possible that’s where the fear comes in, fear of loss of the other, whether twin, lover, or body. Or perhaps it’s the fear of the power of this twinning, of our powerlessness in its grasp.
Like The Time Traveler’s Wife, Niffenegger once again crafts a beautiful love story, though it’s not the book’s focus. Martin and Marijke’s relationship is hobbled by his disease, and yet despite this, their eventual long distance love consistently moved me. Take this passage from Martin’s letter to Marijke on her birthday, which was accompanied by a pair of cerulean-blue gloves:
“I wish I could see you today; I wish I could embrace you. But since that isn’t possile, I send you surrogate hands to slip over your own hands, to lurk in your pockets as your walk through your city, to warm you, to remind you of blue skies (it’s grey here too).”
One would never think gloves could be so intimate. Martin and Marijke’s relationship provides the light in a novel that is otherwise fogged by darkness, an example of a healthy symmetry, of a love, like Henry and Claire’s, that is greater than a dehabilitating illness.
So yes, I thought the book wonderful. I was 100% with it for about the first 3/4 of the novel, but there was one plot point that stretched the my credulity. BIG TIME SPOILER ALERT: I didn’t believe that Valentina had to kill herself (and be brought back to life) to escape Julia. It seemed she would have at least tried a less dramatic (and less dangerous) method first. You know, like just leaving. Unfortunately this one point is crucial to the rest of the book, which introduced a new distance between me and the novel. What did you think? Was that kind of an extreme necessary? Is death, the ultimate severing, the only way to escape our pairings in life?
So while it won’t be a hit of Time Traveler’s Wife proportions (and rightfully so), I think Niffenegger has still escaped the sophomore slump, and can be said to have authored a fine, if fearful, pair of novels.
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