Some Kind of Fairy Tale by Graham Joyce
My rating: 4/5 cats
A fairy tale…on the other hand, demands of the reader total surrender; so long as he is in its world, there must for him be no other.
this is the epigraph which opens chapter three of joyce’s novel, and it is a good place to start. this is a deceptively immersive type of storytelling, one which compels the reader forward, accepting the magical elements willingly, but then jarringly calling attention to the novel’s very structure, questioning how much is “reality” and how much is artifice. it is magical metafiction.
graham joyce has really come a long way, as a writer. when i first started reading him, he was writing literary horror stuff, which was good, but never as good, to me, as jonathan carroll doing the same thing, and i always compared the two in my head, to joyce’s detriment. i think his first departure from that style was smoking poppy, which i remember loving and being impressed by this range that seemed to come out of nowhere. since then, i have only read the silent land, which was also an ambitious book, but i think this one is even better.
here, he stretches itself, occasionally a little too thin, but he manages to tell a multi-layered story, with several levels of unreliability that pokes holes in its own narrative and becomes a puzzle box without an answer. he wants your “total surrender” to his world, but he also wants you to doubt.
the novel opens with on christmas day, when tara arrives on the doorstep of her parent’s home. thing is, tara disappeared when she was sixteen, twenty years earlier, and yet she still appears as young as the day she left. tara claims to have been kidnapped by the fairies, and held for six months before she was able to return, having no idea how long she had actually been gone. she is baffled by modern technology, eats only fruit and nuts, and has developed an eye condition that makes bright light unbearable.
the story is told through an unknown narrator, tara’s admissions to her psychiatrist, and his patient notes. and as we are told on the first page:
Of course, everything depends on who is telling the story. It always does. I have a story, and though there are considerable parts I’ve had to imagine, the way I saw it was as follows.
tara’s claims are met with skepticism by her family. her parents want to believe her, but become increasingly frustrated with her behavior. her brother has his own family now, and wants to help tara, but he cannot believe her story, and hopes that the sessions will get to the bottom of the mystery. richie is the boyfriend she left behind, who was her brother’s best friend,but tara’s disappearance shattered that friendship, and richie has been in a holding pattern ever since; drink and drugs and rock and roll, going nowhere.
tara’s reappearance brings everyone together once more, but the relationships become strained with her insistence on her story.
the psychiatrist’s notes are what first start to break down the structure of the narrative. dr. underwood begins to analyze her story the way bettelheim analyzes traditional fairy tales in his uses of enchantment. this disruption of the narrative breaks the reader’s gaze and forces the novel itself to be analyzed: archetypes, storytelling, lies, memory, integrity. it undermines its own professed goal – to be something surrendered to.
the fairy-world, as tara describes it,is not the sweetie-pie cottingly fairy variety. it is a realm of sensuality and science, equality and wildness. but mostly sex.
Traditionally, the fairies stand in for some violation of the sexual mores of society. They are the wild force that whispers to us.
tara is mostly revolted by the enhanced sexuality, but parts of that world may have followed her out, both physically and psychologically.
i don’t want to get too plotty, here, but tara’s presence in the “real” world becomes dangerous to those she loves. and she begins to change. there is a bitterness, a “you can’t go back” nostalgia that has a feral cling to it, that starts to taint her world.
the story remains, like a fairy tale, ambiguous. do we believe tara, do we believe the psychiatrist, does our mind catch on the instances of switching in the story; one cat for another, one drunk driver for another, the larwood/larchwood scene, the multiple epigraphs to the bridget cleary case of 1895, in which a woman accused of being a changeling replaced by the fairies was killed by her husband? these burrs stick out in the reader’s mind to create doubt, the way a fairy story is meant to, but there are other instances of the permeability of worlds – is it the residual sexuality of the fairy-world that causes jack to get an erection when he stands near tara? and his later erection in the cattery – is this woman meant to be another displaced fairy? and why no erection for larwood? had it faded too much? why am i dwelling on the erections of a child?
i feel like i didn’t know what i was reading while i was reading it, in one giant sickbed sitting gulp, and this book is one which demands a second look, to better understand its playfulness and its dark underpinnings.
so, yeah – a good “next move” for joyce.
