Fiction:A truly original novel that weaves old tales, legends, psychology, neurology, and topography.
Seizure By Erica Wagner Faber, 226pp. £10.99.
In this, her first novel, Erica Wagner, an American living in London for many years, eschews all convention and writes a work that is weird in the original sense of the word.
The narrative focuses on Janet, a young woman who lives with her partner, Stephen, a concert violinist, in London. Their lifestyle is gracious and Stephen is a beloved and exemplary partner. Janet has problems, however: a strange past, in which her mother was lost when she was three; a recent miscarriage; and, pivotal to the plot and theme of the story, a neurological disorder that subjects her to regular seizures, not specified but perhaps epileptic fits, or something similar.
Janet receives a sudden phone call from a firm of solicitors, and is told she has inherited a house in an unnamed place - but clearly Scotland, or Shetland or the Orkneys - from her recently deceased mother. In one of the novel's not-quite-solved enigmas, it emerges that her mother did not, after all, die when Janet was an infant, but had been living until relatively recently.
Janet drives north to see her inheritance, "The Shieling". When she arrives there, she finds the house occupied by a wild-looking man called Tom - a garage mechanic and covert sculptor - who refuses to move out. And the story goes on from there to its conclusion, as wild and unorthodox as Tom himself.
VERY ALERT ANDlearned readers may have observed that Janet and Tom are names that occur in one of the most celebrated of all Scottish ballads, Tam Lin- a Child ballad, known in many versions, based on an international folk tale about a man who has been transformed into some sort of monster or elf and can only be redeemed by the love of a particular woman. "Hold me fast, don't let me pass," is one of its recurring lines, uttered by Tam Lin as he changes into various nasty creatures on his way to becoming fully human. All stories of human/animal/ supernatural transformation exert a powerful fascination, and this one has a particular attraction. It is, for instance, the inspiration for one of the very few stories Alice Munro has located in Scotland, Hold Me Fast, Don't Let Me Pass- a story she sets near Caterwaugh, the residence of the demon king in the Child ballad.
There is no other similarity between Wagner's novel and the Munro story - apart from this: that they are both totally original modern treatments of the old narrative, and both outstanding works of art. Wagner blends the Tam Linstory - to which she never directly refers - with other legends and folk tales, of seal maidens, selkies, mermaids, and with a very fully realised story set in the real modern world, questioning the barriers we normally place between fantasy, imagination, story, and reality. One of her points, in fact maybe the only "message" of this novel, is that the brain seizures suffered by Janet serve to break down the boundaries between the fantastic and the real world, open up the gates to fairyland, as it were, for her. The novel appears to question the validity of these barriers - if it has a conclusion, it is certainly that such divisions, into normal and abnormal, real and imagined, are irrelevant to love and literature.
LAYERING PERSONAL MEMORY, legend and folk tale, landscape, seascape, a vivid present reality, the novel has a circular narrative, which brings us back to the point where we started. Although it has a contemporary setting, it transcends time and context and is entirely focused on the story it is telling, a story of emotions which are as compelling as the vast natural world which surrounds "The Shieling":
He heard the grass tear in their teeth, he heard the wind in the wall, the sea, he listened and watched with his ears and eyes wide. His heart beat steadily. He pulled a hand from his pocket, rested it on the cold wall. Lichen yellow and grey at the edge of his vision, rough under his fingers.
ERICA WAGNER HASwritten a book that is unique, that defies categorisation. She has managed to weave familiar old tales, legends, psychology, neurology, and topography, into a fresh, poetic, tapestry, a celebration of the human imagination and the power of story. It's a project that could have gone badly wrong. But it is a triumph because she has woven her words well. The composition is subtle, the language is superb. Nothing could be as poetic, as stunning, as magical, as the original stories that inspired this book. But The Seizure comes close. It is a magnificent novel.
Éilís Ní Dhuibhne is a writer. Her latest books areHurlamaboc (Cois Life, 2006) and (with James Quin and Ciara McDonnell),WB Yeats: Works and Days (National Library, 2006).