|
|
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
"Life becomes a treacherous board game, the people within it the counters.", Jun 17 2008
Ginny lies secluded in Bulburrow Court, her ramshackle mansion tucked away in the soft folds of the West Dorset countryside, remembering her childhood, and her life with her older sister Vivien and their secrets that have been concealed for over forty years. When Vivien indicates that she will be returning to Bulburrow, Ginny is thrust into a maelstrom of confusing emotions as the two sisters originally parted on less than friendly circumstances. But Vivien adamant and has signaled to her sister in a letter that she wants some final peace - rather than dying lonely and alone, she wants them to keep each other company for the rest of their lives.
As a surge of apprehension suddenly swells in Ginny's stomach, she tries to convince herself that she does indeed love her younger sister, and that she's coming back because she needs her. After all, it is Vivien's idea to live together again, and it feels natural that she is back as they near the end of their lives as "companions and soul mates, devoted and inseparable."
Careworn by her own private demons, Ginny has always fancied herself as the levelheaded and unemotional sister, always the sensible one, and always keeping a number of wristwatches by her side so that she never loses track of time. Undoubtedly over the next few days, Ginny seems to grow more secure with Vivien's presence, the two forming a friendly standoff even as Vivien subtly begins to test Ginny's patience. Soon Ginny is snooping and ends up spending most of her time listening to Vivien's muffled movements, perpetually distracted and uncharacteristically preoccupied with a growing need to know what her sister is doing.
Soon enough this poor, lonely - and somewhat paranoid woman - becomes almost frantic, Vivien's arrival jumpstarting her memories of happenings half a century ago, and giving them the courage to crawl out of the womb of the past. Soon enough, what begins to take shape is a childhood that was once held in a perfect balance where both sisters were inseparable with their lives involving the yearly calendar that centered on the life cycle of the moth, together with the adoration of their lepidopterist father, Clive and their glamorous and charitable mother, Maude.
In this vast house of echoes, Vivien was always considered the adventurer, possessed of Maude's intelligent face, while Ginny was more reflective of Clive, neither sociable nor well groomed, and almost unnoticeable most of the time. It is Clive who constantly fights the urge to hide himself away while also spinning a little silk cocoon around his oldest daughter content to treat her like one of his cherished and brittle specimens, and it is Ginny who eventually excels under the tutelage of Clive, becoming his right hand man and a treasured expert in the study of moths in her own right. Vivien, however, has little interest in her father's chosen profession. Growing older, she constantly yearns for the excitement of London, desperately wanting to make something of her life, and neither a crumbling Dorset mansion nor an attic full of moths is enough for her.
As the twin worlds of Ginny and Vivien's past steadily unfold, Ginny's existence and her reactions to Vivien's presence in the house grow ever more bizarre. Fuelled by a furtive animosity, she finds herself moving through reality and make-believe, through the past and the present, becoming a sort of self-confessed detective, burrowing deeper and deeper into the events surrounding her family's life. In the end, perhaps it was Vivien who set off the sequence of events, the inexorable chain reaction when she stepped off the bell tower and impaled herself on an iron stake, proving herself unable to have children; or perhaps it was Maude's transformation from a near faultless mother into a women propelled along by unpredictable violence and alcoholism; or maybe it was Clive's gradual retreat into the vast attic rooms and the expansive cellarage of Bulburrow Court, reserved solely for his study of lepidoptera.
The descriptions of lepidoptera add much to the atmosphere of this novel with Ginny's cocooned life in Bulburrow Court, reflecting that of a delicate moth, her journey perhaps part of the inequality of life and also of the vast and infinite immortality of nature. The images of Bulburrow Court itself, add much to the proceedings, its walls leaching the desires and fears of those who live in it, it's castellated turrets, the observatory, the bell tower, and its mock-Elizabethan chimney stacks coming across as a kind of Gothic extravaganza, its arrogance and late-Victorian grandeur sitting in a hushed counterpoint to the menace of Ginny's seething emotions, her latent maternal feelings abruptly upended as she's finally pricked into life of fierce and violent revenge. Mike Leonard June 08.
|
by Sarah Waters
by Christos Tsiolkas
by Jodi Picoult
by Joy Fielding
