Her Fearful Symmetry

Her Fearful Symmetry is in essence a ghost story. Audrey Niffenegger started out writing a book about Martin, the obsessive-compulsive crossword setter for The Guardian; Martin's wife has left him and he has a neighbour Julia who has an annoying roommate. I learned that this was the original premise for the novel at the Audrey Niffenegger reading and signing earlier this week, written about here; it intrigued me to discover how far her original intent deviated into a novel about a ghost and two sets of twins and to observe that Martin -the original protagonist- remained the more engaging, sympathetic, and well-characterised of the characters. Moreover, Martin's flat was supposed to be beside a graveyard known as Graceland, in the Uptown area of Chicago, until Niffenegger decided to set it in the most memorable cemetery she had been to: Highgate Cemetery in North London. Julia's roommate became her twin, Valentina, and then Niffenegger questioned how two twenty-one year olds could afford to live in a flat overlooking Highgate Cemetery so she created an aunt, Elspeth, who died in the opening line of the novel and bequeathed them it; however Elspeth as a character took over and didn't stay dead (the way Audrey Niffenegger put it) and around sixty pages in, she returns as a ghost.

In reading about Her Fearful Symmetry, I never realised that there was an actual ghost; yes, I knew it was a ghost story but I didn't realise that there was a non-fully-fleshed, non corporeal real-life yet dead ghost. The chapter in which Elspeth Noblin (isn't that a ghostly name?) reappears is incredibly amusing; it is entitled "The History of Her Ghost" and below I have quoted the opening and closing lines, which highlights Niffenegger's dry humour and what particularly amused me abut the situation.

Elspeth Noblin had been dead for almost a year now, and she was still figuring out the rules.

She wondered if someone who was already dead could kill herself.

In beginning life as a plot-device, Elspeth propels the plot forward and in many respects it becomes about her life in death; her relationship with her grieving partner; her relationship with her twin nieces; and the mystery of why she and her twin sister -Edie, mother of Julia and Valentina- have not seen one another or spoken for twenty one years. The first chapter of Her Fearful Symmetry, in which Elspeth dies, is entitled "The End" and so too is the final chapter.

Twins intrigue me and this novel has two sets with strained relationships; although I never warmed to the characters of the twins themselves (Elspeth the ghost I enjoyed but she isn't that likable), I was engaged with their struggle for individual identity and freedom; I was also interested in the mirror twin phenomenon of Julia and Valentina (they were not identical twins but mirror images of one another and Valentina was internally reversed). I thought that their twin nature was well-evoked but a twin in the audience at the event this week said that she was somewhat sceptical going in then found it to be the most uncanny, accurate description of twins that she has yet found. Now this is where I may alienate any twin readers ... I think that identical twins -and mirror twins takes it to a new level- lend themselves to the supernatural, creepy, and mysterious genres; Audrey Niffenegger mentioned at the reading that she was somewhat influenced by The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins and the phenomenon of the "double" and mistaken identities pervades that text.

It has been several years (at least five) since I read The Time Traveler's Wife and I barely recall it, except for the overall plot, some specific scenes and my overall enjoyment of the novel; I haven't yet seen the recent film adaptation so it is far from fresh in my mind and it would be reductive of me to attempt to compare Niffenegger's runaway successful debut novel with her much-anticipated follow-up but what I will say is that I enjoyed it. It took me a couple of chapters to properly immerse myself in it and I found that the product placing jarred but that could be because this is the first novel that I've read with a modern setting for some time (shockingly so); I find that present-day product names and specific names for places date it very quickly and even cheapen it. I think that Her Fearful Symmetry was far more successful in its Highgate Cemetery setting and its ghostly plot than its up-to-the-minute overview of London; one anachronism I noticed -not historically inaccurate but something already out-of-date- shows how dangerous it is to set a book in a modern time period that is at once not timeless nor definitive. This was the one main flaw that I had with the novel but the lack of likability of the main characters was another; Martin I found truly likable and also Jessica, the figurehead for the Friends of Highgate Cemetery, whom I had the feeling was based on the real-life Jean Pateman, Audrey Niffenegger's boss at Highgate Cemetery and the person to whom she dedicated Her Fearful Symmetry.

I mentioned yesterday how well I thought Highgate Cemetery was incorporated into the book. I thought that the physicality of the cemetery was well depicted as was its essence; I wasn't bored at any point with the historical details and have the utmost respect for Audrey Niffenegger's research skills and how much detail she packed into the novel without it being, in my opinion, detrimental to the plot. The sheer magnitude of knowledge about Highgate Cemetery was the strength of the novel as was the supernatural route the plot took, especially as the author is admittedly a sceptic. Someone at the reading event aptly described Niffenegger's novels as studies of other ways of being and it is a term that she instantly liked and said she would begin to use herself; other ways of being can indeed be applied to Her Fearful Symmetry as it is very much about being and existence: how to exist as a twin; how to exist as a ghost; how to exist with a debilitating mental illness; how to exist when the person you love has left/died.

This was my 3/4 read for the R.I.P. IV Challenge.