Her Fearful Symmetry

Rather belatedly this year I caught up with Audrey Niffenegger's fabulous The Time Traveler's Wife. It had been languishing in my 'To Read' pile (actually it's more like a 'To Read Cupboard' but that's by the by) for some time, but, as the movie adaption was imminent, I thought I'd finally give it a go, then go see the movie. Well, I never got to see the movie (and it seems to have divided critics and lovers of the book alike, so I shall wait for the DVD I guess) but I devoured and adored the book. For lovers of Steven Moffat's The Silence in the Library episode of Doctor Who, there's a huge chunk of time travel mind-fudging at the start of the book that must have influenced some of that Who episode, but after a hundred pages or so of slight confusion as to just how the time travelling works, the book simply takes off and deposits you breathless and, I admit, a little teary-eyed at its end 300 pages later. It's a beautiful, elgiac bit of writing that I believe lost a huge chunk of male readership due to its Richard and Judy Bookclub tag that kind of gave it a chick-novel kind of vibe. And yes, it does play to the ladies, and yes, the movie does make it look like a shmalzt-fest, but for me it was one of the best, most fulfilling novels I'd read all year, beside the incredible The Shadow of the Wind.

I was expecting to be a little disappointed then, by Niffenegger's new book, Her Fearful Symmetry. How do you follow a book that sold by the bucket-load and has such a classic status place in a lot of people's hearts?
Well, of course, you don't. If you're writer worth your salt, you write a book that is an absolute left turn, the absolute opposite of that first book. Although what Niffenegger's new book does share with The Time Traveler's Wife is the question 'What If?' TTTW asked 'What would it be like if we could really travel in time, up and down the years of our life?' And in Her Fearful Symmetry, the question is 'What if we could come back from the dead?' They're both questions that hundreds of writers have asked down the years, but most of them are considered horror or SF writers, but Niffenegger has managed the audacious feat of being a writer who gets away with curious speculative fiction in the populist mainstream.
Admittedly, the strange, supernatural moments in Her Fearful Symmetry are couched in a novel that is at heart a leisurely paced charcter piece. The ghostly element is weaved in early on, but it takes half of the book for the reader to see where Niffenegger is heading. And it's a strange, credibility defying turn that seems to have divided the critics.
But taking into account that I loved The Time Traveler's Wife, and that although elements of Her Fearful Symmetry don't always work, I enjoyed this new book equally, if not more. I'm not entirely sure why yet (I only finished it last night), but this was one of those books that I simply couldn't put down and actively looked forward to picking up again. It was even one of those books that I started to slow down with, so as to make it last that little bit longer. That doesn't happen too often!
Here a quick blurb:
Julia and Valentina Poole, two American identical mirror-image twins in their early twenties, are bequeathed an apartment in London overlooking Highgate Cemetery by their aunt, Elspeth, who was herself the identical twin of their mother, Edie. Elspeth and Edie have not had contact for more than two decades, and as a result, the twins have never met their mysterious benefactor.
Naturally delighted, and yearning for adventure, they readily accept the bequest, even though it comes with a couple of strange conditions, the main being that their mother and father are not to set foot in the apartment. They arrive, and soon spend their time becoming accustomed to their new home, and indeed their new country and surroundings.
The apartment is on the first floor. Underneath them lives Robert, a thirtysomething writer, and guide at the cemetery who was the lover of Elspeth, and who has not yet come to terms with her death. Above them lives Martin, an obsessive compulsive crossword compiler, whose Dutch wife, Marijke, has recently returned to her home country, unable to continue living with her husband’s ever deteriorating condition. And creeping into their home comes The Little Kitten Of Death, a snow-white feline visitor from nowhere who is soon adopted by the twins as a pet albeit without it’s consent.
And into this strange brew, another companion enters. Elspeth herself, who finds herself quietly haunting the twins’ apartment, observing them for the first time as they make their new lives, and unobtrusively occupying the locked desk drawer of the desk in her old office.

What makes Her Fearful Symmetry really sing is not the speculative supernatural stuff (although that's handled with the same kind of reducing something down to its nuts-and-bolts-aplomb that Niffenegger displayed with time travel), but the quite beautifully drawn characters that inhabit the house that sits next to Highgate Cemetery.
Robert, torn between his devotion to Elspeth's memory and his attraction to Valentina, who's almost half his age; Martin, the obsessive-compulsive who can no longer leave his flat, and whose wife leaves for Amsterdam after twenty-odd years of marriage when she finds she can no longer deal with his sickness; the twins themselves, Valentina, who decides she wants to free herself of the domineering shadow of Julia; Elspeth, who discovers that although she is dead, she can exert control over all of them; and Highgate Cemetary itself - so much so that I think next time I'm in London, I shall try to visit. Niffenegger draws it with such a rich palette that it sounds irresistable.

It's a fantastic, Autumnal kind of book, brimming with atmosphere and a sense of place, and populated with flawed characters that you genuinely hope make the right decisions. Martin, in partiular with his physical rituals and emotional tics and his flat filled with boxes is an acutely observed study of OCD, and his relationship with his wife and one of the twins is worth the price of the book alone. And indeed, if the direction the book takes in its last third seems a little too audacious for some, I didn't mind too much because I was already too invested in the characters.
It's a sublime bit of writing.