What Book to Read?

These are some comments on the novel, rather than a proper review, and I am conscious of not fully doing it justice. If you don’t want to know what happens, don’t read further. I also have to declare a personal interest in this story; I have identical twin daughters.

Niffenegger has taken on two plot elements which are often difficult to handle, and has done so, in my view, with only mixed success. These elements are ghosts and twins. Too often both of these are used to prop up a weak plot, as where the truth is revealed by supernatural forces, or where a convenient twin turns up at the last moment. Niffenegger hasn’t fallen into such obvious traps, but nevertheless I find the story in part unsatisfying in relation to both twins and ghosts.

The notion of identity is something Niffenegger plays with throughout the book: twins swap identities, have difficulty separating identities and finally a twin’s identity is taken over by her mother. As a parent of identical twins, I find it challenging that Niffenegger tackles the problems twins may have in establishing separate identities. ‘When we were young we hardly differentiated between ourselves,’ writes Elspeth. I think this is true of many identical twins, and is likely to cause them problems as they grow up and seek close relationships with others. But I nevertheless think for Valentina to deny her identity by planning her own death – even with an intended resurrection – to escape from the dominant identity of her twin beggars belief. Other twin behaviour seems equally unlikely. The idea that Elspeth and Edwina could think they had fooled Jack into believing that one was the other is far fetched. That he did know, but never said anything, is plain silly. The plot requires that one identical twin gives birth to another set of identical twins. Perhaps I am being over technical here, but there is no hereditary propensity for identical twins to have identical twins – it is a random occurrence. The probability against it happening in succeeding generations is huge. But this is never acknowledged.

Certainly the ghost of Elspeth is a character in the story rather than a plot device, and I’m happy to accept a ghost as a character. I like that Niffenegger makes her a bit different from how she was when she was alive; Robert says she seems to have lost some of her humanity. This helps explain her jealousy of Valentina’s somewhat ill-defined relationship with Robert. He warns Valentina not to trust her; ‘Her ideas have other ideas hiding inside them’. But did she always intend, with an ‘indecipherable mixture of triumph and remorse’, to take over Valentina’s body? This is never really made clear, leaving her as a character not fully developed.

The mechanics of the ghost world don’t bear too much examination. Does everyone who dies become a ghost? If so, where are they all? Or is it something reserved for those buried in Highgate Cemetery? Are they all able to materialise? Or is it only ‘strong’ ones like Elspeth? I find Valentina’s realisation that she is happy as a ghost completely unconvincing. I think her ‘happiness’ is there for the sake of balancing the plot, not because it is a credible human (or ghostly) emotion.

I enjoyed the references to Highgate Cemetery; Niffenegger’s passion for the place is infectious. However I was less impressed by the pun on ‘cemetery’ in the title that links the cemetery with the so called symmetry of identical twins. ‘Her Fearful Symmetry’ is taken from Blake’s poem Tyger: ‘What immortal hand or eye/Could frame thy fearful symmetry?’ Aside from one reference to a tiger, I didn’t see an acknowledgment of this, the only epigraph being from The Beatles. Maybe this is fair enough; the book feels to me like something you might get from mixing the world of the Romantics with the world of Pop.