Carrion Crow by Heather Parry review: 'not much flesh on the bones'

Heather Parry

It seems that “Victoriana” is a style, if not quite a genre, in its own right. I have seen “Neo-Victorian” as a similar epithet, and it appears to refer to works not just set in the 19th century (like The French Lieutentant’s Woman, or Possession, or Alias Grace, or The Luminaries), but somehow self-consciously about the period’s preconceptions, aesthetics and self-image; often with a concentration on the marginalised and suppressed as the “real”. It is a wide field, and would include Sarah Waters, Michel Faber, Alasdair Gray, ES Thomson, Jess Kidd and Ambrose Parry. Heather Parry’s Carrion Crow is an interesting and clever take on the form, which highlights both its strengths and weaknesses. “Victoriana” seems to relate to 19th century literature much as chinoiserie stands to Chinese art and design (or, at worst, how The Mikado relates to Noh Theatre): that is not to say that you cannot have fine examples of chinoiserie.

If there is such a thing as an academic classic, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman In The Attic – its title obviously referencing Jane Eyre – would be one; and Parry’s book is clearly winking at it: the central character, Marguerite, is so confined. Parry is clearly talented, but is this more than an imaginative re-fleshing of a thesis? If you heard it as an elevator pitch, your response might well be the question “And?”

Marguerite has been incarcerated by her mother, Cécile, in to prepare and perfect her for her marriage to an older, impecunious fiancé, a Mr George Lewis. The eaves are to be, darkly, a kind of finishing school. Her mother intermittently puts up plates of food and correspondence (in which Mr Lewis offers her every opportunity to call off their engagement), and her sole company is a nest of the titular carrion crows. Cécile Périgord is herself the result of a transformation, having been born Cecilia Hargreaves. Although the Périgords are refugees from the Revolution, the Hargreaves are “new money”, specifically detergents and soaps, but enough of it to finance a model village like the Cadbury family’s Bournville or more closely the Port Sunlight of the Lever Brothers. It is just one of the many period details, alongside Doulton Sanitary Works (before its royal warrant and association with designers like Hannah Barlow, it produced “utilitarian ware”), Lincrusta-Walton wallpaper, a taxidermised platypus, pre-gummed envelopes and a Singer sewing machine. More significantly, Marguerite’s unsentimental education involves Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management, which is quoted and détourned throughout to become a kind of unwitting gothic scrapbook. Towards the end of the book, Parry reveals its talismanic significance: “It was the book that had taught Cécile Périgord how to turn from one thing into another”, a kind of domestic science version of Ovid.

Heather Parry

Carrion Crow, like a great deal of contemporary gothic, is much concerned with bodily matters. It is unremittingly physical, describing crusted scabs, knots and hanks of hair, gobbets of phlegm and blood alongside marzipan fruits, ox hearts in aspic and “snow eggs”. There is an element of Northrop Frye’s Menippean satire here, its grotesque anatomies and “satura lanx”; although the novel itself is more pared than the usual triple-decker form. Marguerite’s own secret is her love for Alouette, and the marriage to older Lewis is a capitulation that might secure the possibility of her true romance: indeed, on page one she is labelled as “such a queer girl”. (The preponderance of Victorian queer stories is enough to make one wonder how the 20th century ever came into being). These flashbacks are done with considerable tenderness, and therein lies part of the problem. There is a tremulous quality in the attempt to encompass both modes, as if Jean-Pierre Jeunet were trying to make Delicatessen and Amélie as one film. It is an uneasy marriage of femgore and femcore. That said, it is more restrained that Parry’s debut, Orpheus Builds A Girl, and I preferred the less compromised version.

The story, rather ironically, boxes itself in, and has to provide two endings, like John Fowles; a mythopoetic apotheosis and a melancholy dissipation. I was left with a rather empty feeling. In part, this may be because there are certain references which seem significant but whose semantic cash-value is uncertain. As well as Mrs Beeton, Marguerite has a collected set of Victor Hugo’s novels (which is possible); she is told he is a “fine Frenchman who knew about families like theirs”. Marguerite finds them a source of “a million dreary half-worlds to remake for yourself” and “tedious thoughts on class and culture”. Why does Parry choose Hugo? If it’s just as a fuddy-duddy, Scott was more popular and already foosty. It cannot be as simple as Les Misérables, and Carrion Crow is not as extravagantly grand-guignol as The Man Who Laughs or as plangent as Notre-Dame de Paris. Secondly, it is set on Cheyne Row, which in the period everyone would have known as the residence of Jane and Thomas Carlyle. Other addresses in London are available. Is Thomas a symbol of patriarchy? Is Jane sequestered female genius (Thomas on Jane: “Not all the Sands and Eliots and babbling cohue of ‘celebrated scribbling Women’ that have strutted over the world, in my time, could, it seems to me, if all boiled down and distilled to essence, make one such woman”)? Or Butler’s witticism, “It was very good of God to let Carlyle and Mrs Carlyle marry one another and so make only two people miserable instead of four”? Who knows. Rather than the first Mrs Rochester, perhaps Marguerite is more like Dickens’ mad Miss Flite, with her birds in her attic, waiting for a judgment day that never comes.

Carrion Crow, by Heather Parry, Doubleday, £16.99