The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox

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The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox

The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox

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Esme reaches out and laces both her hands round one of Iris’s. ‘You have come to take me away,’ she says, in an urgent voice. ‘That is why you are here.’ Iris studies her face. Esme looks nothing like her grandmother. Can it really be possible that she and this woman are related? ‘Esme, I didn’t even know you existed until yesterday. I’d never even heard your name before. I would like to help you, I really would—’ ‘Is that why you are here? Tell me yes or no.’ ‘I will help you all I can—’ ‘Yes or no,’ Esme repeats. Iris swallows hard. ‘No,’ she says, ‘I can’t. I . . . I haven’t had the chance to—’ But Esme is withdrawing her hands, turning her head away from her. And something about her changes, and Iris has to hold her breath because she has seen something passing over the woman’s face, like a shadow cast on water. Iris stares, long after the impression has gone, long after Esme has got up and crossed the room and disappeared through one of the doors. Iris cannot believe it. In Esme’s face, for a moment, she saw her father’s.”

How have years of incarceration affected Esme? Has she retained any of the qualities we see in young Esme, before she is committed? Does she seem sane to you? This story is recounted through several viewpoints, through the stories of Iris, Esme, and Esme’s sister Kitty. Both Esme and Kitty are now elderly, and Kitty, grandmother of Iris, is in a care facility, an Alzheimer’s patient. Esme has just been released into the care of Iris, and Iris is still trying to piece together how this woman she never knew existed until days before has come to be her responsibility, to be in her life. But oh, dear readers, the human spirit is far more complicated and intricately designed in the tiny capsule of our infancy to the worned and weathered surface of an aged existence. We stand on the precipice of the new and never touched. We whisper secrets to others for safekeeping and desperately hope that ours find a sacred place to land. Maggie O’Farrell takes readers on a journey to the darker places of the human heart, where desires struggle with the imposition of social mores. This haunting story explores the seedy past of Victorian asylums, the oppression of family secrets, and the way truth can change everything. But Kitty is not just a passive bystander who profits from Esme’s incarceration. Kitty actively informs on her sister to ensure she is taken away. Moreover, not once in over six decades does Kitty visit her. Admittedly, Kitty is at first unaware of all the letters Esme has sent her but even after she discovers them, she still never visits or tries to arrange for Esme’s release after the demise of their parents. It is a bitter irony that as Esme fights being taken away to Cauldstone, it is Kitty’s name she screams, unaware that Kitty’s response is to put her hands over her ears.

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When Iris gets the call from the psychiatric hospital, she is put in a very difficult position. What does she stand to gain and lose from the decision she eventually makes? What would you do in her shoes? She stares and stares until they begin to lose their third dimension, until they begin to look unfamiliar, insubstantial. Like the way words said over and over become just a slurry of sound.” I hope this provides food for thought to those (let’s say ‘self-centred’) right-handers amongst us and provides insight into the difficulties us (let’s say selfless and decent) lefties must put up with, day in, day out. Ron Charles from the Houston Chronicle explains 'At the heart of this fantastic new novel is a mystery you want to solve until you start to suspect the truth, and then you read on in a panic, horrified that you may be right. The structure of the novel is a challenge, more like a dare, the kind of purposefully scrambled puzzle that makes you wonder if it's all just too much work to figure out who's talking and when this happened and what that means. But forge on: O'Farrell isn't merely showing off; she's forcing us to participate in a family's ghastly conspiracy of forgetting...In O'Farrell's fierce, engrossing novel, the crimes of the past rear up with surprising vengeance. Esme Lennox won't vanish again anytime soon.' [5] The characters are incredibly interesting and believable. There are historic family secrets, and modern dilemmas. O'Farrell has written beautifully, capturing both the emotions of the characters and the atmosphere and social mores of the time with both accuracy and occasional flashes of humor.

What I found begged the question of what would have happened to many of us had we been born into a different time. A time when a man could commit a wife or daughter to an asylum with just a signature from a GP. A time when it was considered a sign of insanity to refuse to cut your hair. Or to be found trying on your mother's clothes. Or to turn down offers of marriage. Or to show reluctance to sit on your relatives' knees. Or to not wash your kitchen floor for a week. Or to feel sad and weary after having given birth. These were all written in asylum records in the early half of the last century. Kitty was the 'good' child, the peacekeeper. Esme was enquiring, inventive, fiesty, independent. Rules were made to be broken. Iris didn't want the responsibility of her chronically insane great-aunt. She has enough on her plate with her vintage clothing business, a grandmother with Alzheimer's, a married lover, and her step-brother Alex. She doesn't have room in her life for any more complications. Why is Esme purportedly admitted to Cauldstone? Why do you think she was sent there, and never sent home? Is she really mad? Give examples from the book to support your opinion. For Esme, ‘ This girl (Iris) is remarkable to her. She is a marvel.’ No doubt in Iris, Esme recognises the woman she could have been had she been born several decades later. That may also be why Kitty seemed to grow less fond of Iris as she got older. I will not reveal the outcome. Beneath the cool Edwardian detail of this elegantly written book lie the horrors of a Gothic novel. Scottish propriety conceals rape and murder, torture, hypocrisy and violent sex. The comfort is that the lunacy laws are now reformed and the small, bewildered orphans of the raj are no more.Jane Gardam writing in The Guardian praises the novel: 'a short book about a long life has the dream-like intensity of imagination and the gift of conveying pain, fear and sometimes rapture for which O'Farrell is known. The prose is spare, yet the Edwardian world it describes crosses two continents and is rich and clear as stained glass. It moves with ease between the mimosa trees of an Indian childhood and the iron-grey seas of Fife in old age. She can make the economical style seem slow, ruminative and rather old-fashioned ("Let us begin with two girls at a dance"), yet except when the host of minor characters occasionally becomes confusing, the story never flags. And it is a story so historically important that one ceases to think of "style" and "the novel" altogether.' and she concludes that 'Beneath the cool Edwardian detail of this elegantly written book lie the horrors of a Gothic novel. Scottish propriety conceals rape and murder, torture, hypocrisy and violent sex. The comfort is that the lunacy laws are now reformed and the small, bewildered orphans of the raj are no more.' [1] MY THOUGHTS: It is many years since I first read The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox by Maggie O'Farrell. While I may have forgotten the plot, I had not forgotten how bittersweet, sad, touching, yet absolutely magnificent this book was. Alex and Luke are both married men in love with Iris. Do you think this is why they so dislike each other? Is there a difference between their situations? Do you think Iris really loves either one of them? Why or why not? We are all… just vessels through which identities pass: we are lent features, gestures, habits, then we hand them on. Nothing is our own. We begin in the world as anagrams of our antecedents.” How do you think people’s attitudes towards unmarried mothers have changed since Esme was a young girl? How different would her life have been had she been able to keep her baby?



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