Helen Oyeyemi dazzled many critics with her first two novels, The Icarus Girl and The Opposite House, perhaps as much for her youth as for their merit. The Icarus Girl was written before she was 19, and Oyeyemi went on to graduate from Cambridge in 2006 at the age of 22.
With her third novel, White is for Witching, it's a little difficult to see what the fuss is about. I read it twice (unusual for a reviewer with strict deadlines), and unlike books that reveal themselves more fully on second and subsequent readings, this novel merely confused. Buried with it is the skeleton of something worthwhile, but Oyeyemi has attempted a ghost story that collapses into incoherence.
- White is for Witching, by Helen Oyeyemi, Hamish Hamilton, 227 pages, $32
Drawing on literary giants such as Henry James (in particular The Turn of the Screw) and Edgar Allan Poe ( The Fall of the House of Usher - which is mentioned in the novel), Oyeyemi creates a grief-stricken family: Luc and his twin teenagers, Miranda and Eliot, who are suffering the death of Lily, wife and mother. She has been killed while taking photographs in Haiti. Luc and his children continue to live in the house that Lily inherited, a house in Dover that Luc runs as a bed and breakfast.
Complicating Miranda's life is the affliction of pica: the eating of non-foods. Miranda consumes chalk and plastic, and the pica is killing her as she is slowly disappearing through malnutrition. Luc tries to tempt his daughter with delicious food, but nothing works. Eliot has his own conflicted relationship with his sister: He loves her, but they are also competitors, as evidenced by their applications to Cambridge and desire for high grades in school.
The story of how the family copes with their loss and with Miranda's illness is enough to develop an absorbing novel, and Oyeyemi has the technical skill to do so. But the novel goes sideways with all the ghost stuff. The house appears to be alive, and it is one of the narrators, along with Eliot, Miranda's friend Ore and a third-person narrator.
The house is clearly malevolent, and its focus is the female members of the family, going back to the twins' great-grandmother, Anna. The house comments on the line of women: "[Anna]spoke from that part of her that was older than her. The part of her that will always tie me to her, to her daughter Jennifer, to Jennifer's stubborn daughter Lily, to Lily's even more stubborn daughter Miranda. I can only be as good as they are. We are on the inside, and we have to stay together, and we absolutely cannot have anyone else. It's Luc that keeps letting people in. To keep himself company, probably, because he knows he is not welcome (if he doesn't know this he is very stupid). They shouldn't be allowed in though, those others, so eventually I make them leave."
The house does drive away employees and guests while gripping tenaciously onto the women of the family, a truly creepy aspect of the novel.
Oyeyemi has explored twins and mirrors in her previous work, and so she ought to know that Miranda and Eliot do not develop from one cell - and so should they, given their curiosity, intelligence and knowledge. Fraternal twins are siblings born at the same time, but much is made in the novel of the twins' strong bond: "no he's eliot eliot is me we were once one cell"- presumably Miranda's thoughts as she rejects an apple pie Eliot has made for her.
Apples are hugely significant, right from the first page when readers learn that Miranda is dead: "Miranda Silver is in Dover, in the ground beneath her mother's house./ Her throat is blocked with a slice of apple/ (to stop her speaking words that may betray her)."
The unusual layout of the lines surfaces several times, and Oyeyemi occasionally uses a word or two mid-line to signal a shift in perspective. She also employs variations in indentation, syntactical links from chapter titles to sentences, and the format of drama to develop the narrative and its convoluted intricacies. All in all, the style is over the top - perhaps befitting the extreme nature of the subject, but the novel comes across as being forced for effect, consequently inapt.
The powerful parts of the novel have to do with insight into British teenagers at school - teenagers with an intellectual and a literary bent -and relationships, both familial and romantic. The revelations of a first-year student's experience at Cambridge are fascinating, and they indicate that Oyeyemi should stick to reality rather than the supernatural, as she has much of value to explore in this world. A subplot about Kosovo refugees in Dover is compelling but barely developed, and a glimpse into young lesbian love across racial lines is deeply affecting.
Both Eliot and Luc are worthy of more attention, but the focus keeps being wrenched back to Miranda and her demons, and given that the opening of the novel reveals Miranda's fate, readers may find the façade of mystery somewhat contrived and tiresome.
Helen Oyeyemi has talent, of that there's little doubt. But she needs to decide to control it instead of letting it spiral off the page into self-indulgent supernatural pyrotechnics. Given her age, she has time, and I'm betting she will mature into a fine writer.
Candace Fertile teaches English at Camosun College in Victoria.