Book review: Her Fearful Symmetry

Published on Saturday 3 October 2009 15:27

Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger Jonathan Cape, 390pp, £18.99hbk Review by TOM ADAIR

AUDREY Niffenegger's debut, all of six years ago now, was a wow. People adored The Time Traveler's Wife. It became a television book club choice, a movie, and was voted No. 11 in the Top 50 Books of All Time. People gushed.

Will Her Fearful Symmetry have them gushing again? Most probably. It is stylish, easy to read and has its moments, along with a dark delicious plot which has several neat twists – two deaths, one body (work that one out!) – but unlike its predecessor, nothing to give the novel coherence or any ultimate satisfaction as a fully fledged work of fiction.

It tries to do too much, bringing in characters who are slightly off the track, though in one instance I found myself wanting the author to sideline her main pursuit – to take a supporting player (one with far more potential than the novel's central characters) and beef him into the makings of perhaps another novel.

Set principally in north London, Her Fearful Symmetry leaves you wondering if it's a ghost story, a detective tale or a romance. It may be the story of female relationships, of sisterhood, of bonding.

Whatever it is, it isn't susceptible to summary without giving too much away. Its principal characters are the 21-year-old twins Valentina and Julia (still virgins) and their aunt, who dies on page one, spending the rest of the tale as a ghost.

Aunt Elspeth manipulates. She shrewdly bequeaths her Highgate flat to the twins on condition that they live in it for a year, and that their parents do not set foot in it at all. The parents are Edie – Elspeth's (also identical) twin – and Jack ("handsome, in a corn-fed, college-athlete sort of way"), with whom Elspeth had a fling before Edie and Jack headed off to live in America.

To complicate things further, Elspeth's ex-lover, scholarly Robert (a bit of a toy-boy at 36 to Elspeth's 44) lives downstairs, while upstairs is Martin, whose wife has left him, driven mad by his refusal to leave the building, and his obsessions and compulsions.

Unlike Martin, the story itself gets out quite a bit – to Amsterdam, Illinois and downtown London – and is especially strong on place. When it steps indoors, that's when the hokum starts. There's a body snatch, candles, roses, ghostly writing on the furniture – all the hammy, pseudo-spooky stuff of Hammer horror movies way back in the shock-proof 1960s. Trouble is, none of it raises a single hair on the back of your neck. Though it does raise smiles.

This wouldn't matter much if the characters were substantial. Take the "mirror-twins", pretty Valentina and Julia. They have face-moles on opposite cheeks, and hearts positioned on opposite sides. And they're different too in disposition – one fierce and defensive, the other fey – though both appear vacuous until very late in the book, which makes them difficult to relate to as they flibbertigibbet around in their pretty attire, cocooned in twinness, awaiting the gothic drip of Niffenegger's pen to poison their days.

Of the seven relationships presented in the storyline (such as it is), none gets much mileage on the page. The author's strength is for framing significant moments precisely. Painting neat images. A visual gift that shoots a range of scenes from interesting angles and doesn't dwell over-long on one setting.

The twins, as intended, move to London and form relationships with beguiling Robert downstairs and Martin upstairs. And very gradually they tune in to their ghostly aunt's subversive presence. We're meant to wonder – just as the twins are – what must have happened to break their mother and aunt's relationship forever? And what must old Jack have done to boot?

All is revealed; the loose ends are tied up, and the plot is clever in its deviousness. Its principal victim is Robert, not quite what Elspeth might have intended, and its neglected soul is Martin, who has grist and is by far the most potentially interesting character in the book, described as possessing "the beauty of damage".

A little more of the beauty of damage and less of the vacuousness would have given this novel more depth, and perhaps the relationship between Martin and his wife may yet come to captivate Niffenegger's fertile musings. If so, that's a novel I'd happily read.