Maggie O’Farrell’s “The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox”
So far I haven’t done any fiction reviews, and I can’t think of a better way to begin than with Maggie O’Farrell’s The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox. It’s told from the point of view of three characters – something I normally dislike, since I think that makes it harder to really get into the heart of any of them – but O’Farrell does it incredibly well. First we have Iris Lockhart, a young single woman who owns a shop in Edinburgh, Scotland. Iris receives a phone call that astounds her; it turns out that her grandmother, Kitty, whom Iris always believed to be an only child, has a sister. The sister has spent her entire adult life in an institution. But the institution is closing, and since Iris’ grandmother Kitty has Alzheimer’s and couldn’t be responsible for anyone, Iris is now responsible for a great-aunt, Esme, that Iris never knew existed.
Of course, everyone gives her the obvious advice. Esme has been in an institution since she was a teenager. Teenagers aren’t institutionalized for no reason, so obviously there’s something tremendously wrong with Esme. Just arrange for an alternative placement – no need to even go visit her – and forget all about it. But of course Iris can’t do that. She has to go see Esme. And the Esme she meets seems to be a surprisingly composed, lucid, intelligent woman who has simply had a very restricted life. Sort of cloistered, like a nun. And Esme desperately wants Iris to take her home.
A second voice emerges – that of Esme herself. She paints a picture of her childhood as a Scottish child in India in the early years of the twentieth century. Esme, from day one, has been willful, odd, her own person. In contrast, her older sister Kitty is graceful, poised, anxious to please. There is a little brother, too – Hugo – whom Esme loves dearly. Nonetheless, she’s put out when her parents, angry over her unpredictable behavior, leave her home with Hugo and the nanny when they take Kitty on vacation. She knows she’s being punished for something she can’t help – for just being the person she is. She takes a nap in the heat of the day – remember, this is India – and when she wakes up, she finds both Hugo and the nanny dead. Typhoid, she tells someone later on, and the person she’s speaking to replies soberly that she must have been saved for a purpose.
And suddenly a third voice emerges, and it took me a long time to realize who this third voice is. This voice is chaotic and disjointed, swinging wildly from past to present with only the most fragile grasp of time and place — more emotion than narrative. It’s Kitty, Esme’s sister and Iris’ grandmother, rambling through her Alzheimer’s. Because her thought processes are not linear, it takes us a long time to orient ourselves to who she’s talking about, when the events she describes are taking place, and where. But her fragmented, splintered recollections are so sharp, so spot-on, that once we put them together with Esme’s more orderly recollections, we’re able to get a whole other view of the events that led Esme – not Kitty – to a lifetime of confinement.
Of course Esme does wind up going home with Iris, and it’s wonderful to watch their growing bond. It’s also wonderful to see how Maggie O’Farrell uses the two sisters’ voices – Esme who really doesn’t understand what happened to her, and Kitty who used to know, but no longer really remembers — to put together a story you’ll never forget.
Oh, by the way – I love unpredictable endings. And everything I’ve told you so far may have led you to think, “Oh, I know how this story is going to go.” Trust me – you don’t. If I say any more, I’ll ruin the surprise, so just read the book. It’s great.
June 1st, 2009 at 10:37 pm
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