Maggie O’Farrell is one of my favorite contemporary writers. She has a great talent for historical fiction (read Hamnet and The Marriage Portrait), and she excels at telling stories of women who find themselves in untenable positions. In The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox, Esme is a woman who, like Agnes in Hamnet and Lucrezia in The Marriage Portrait, is unusual in ways that make her seem dangerous to those around her. She does not conform to conventional traditional female roles and, as we know from the start of the novel, has spent 60 years locked up in an asylum. Now approaching 80, Esme is about to be released because the institution is being shut down; families of the women imprisoned there have been notified and must make plans. The problem is that Esme’s only living family are her elder sister Kitty, who has dementia, and her grandniece Iris, who has been completely unaware of Esme’s existence. What follows is the riveting story of Esme’s life as told through her recollections, the disjointed and fragmented recollections of Kitty, and the observations of Iris. As ever with O’Farrell, this is a novel that completely absorbed my attention, and as difficult as it was to read about what happened to Esme, I could not put this story down until the end.
Esme and Kitty were born and spent their childhoods in India, only moving to Scotland as teens in the wake of family tragedy. We know that their mother suffered numerous ill-fated pregnancies and that they had a brother who died young. Esme always stood out as a troublesome child, although I think most of us would see her behavior as quite normal. But her parents always seemed to find her antics too much. They also, in a “stiff upper lip” manner, never learned to deal with their own grief much less a child’s at the loss of a sibling. Kitty, the elder daughter by 6 years, always was dutiful while Esme seemed willful and wild. But Kitty and Esme were close and looked out for each other. Bigger problems arose for the girls after moving to Scotland. While Kitty did her best to fit in socially, Esme always stood out like a sore thumb and didn’t seem to care. She was smart, preferred books to dances, and invited bullying from other girls. We the reader know early on that once Esme ended up at the institution, her family never saw her again. The novel then is about piecing together the past to discover what Esme had done to be treated in such an abominable fashion. It is a tragic story but one that is based in fact. O’Farrell sites resources at the end of the novel for her depiction of life in the institution and the women who lived there.
As Esme’s story unfolds, we also get to know Iris, an independent 30-something woman who owns her own business and has a married lover. She also has a complicated relationship with her stepbrother Alex. When the institution contacts her about Esme, she at first believes they have the wrong number. No one in her family had ever mentioned Esme — not her father (deceased) or mother, not her grandmother Kitty. Iris finds this whole situation bothersome and arranges to take Esme from the institution to a different type of state-run facility, but after meeting this tall, intense woman with familiar features, she cannot leave her there and opts to take her home for the weekend until she can make other plans. It is over the course of that weekend that the truth is revealed. The end of this novel really hit me like a ton of bricks. I thought I knew what was coming, but O’Farrell has a knack for throwing the reader off balance. I found it to be stunningly good.
I am tempted to call this a horror novel because the abuses detailed in here are horrible and are things that we know actually did (and do) happen to women. Difficult, inconvenient women could be sent away and essentially erased from history with no recourse to justice. And perhaps in order to survive this type of abuse, a woman has to learn how to hide away the thoughts/facts/truths of her past, because if you dwell on them, you might go mad. This is another winner from O’Farrell.
