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The World Before Us by Aislinn Hunter (Doubleday Canada $29.95)
In 1991, when she was fifteen, jane Standen had an horrific experience. She momentarily lost sight of the little girl she was minding in the woods near the estate of Victorian plant hunter, George Farrington.
Those minutes were all it took for Lily to disappear completely and forever. A sensitive, intelligent daughter of intellectual and gifted parents, Jane, the traumatized and guilty teenager, would have needed considerable parental devotion and dedication to have emotionally survived this nightmare.
She didn't get it. Her father was a famous violinist, rarely at home; her mother was a respected academic with a busy career. Fifteen years of therapy followed, without much apparent success.
That's the set-up for The World Before Us. Although Aislinn Hunter doesn't see herself as a mystery writer, there are lots of unanswered questions in her second novel that will keep readers turning the pages besides what ever happened to the five-year-old Lily Eliot.
Where did that mysterious character known as "N"; vanish to? and who was she?
How will Jane Standen react when, after 19 years, she's confronted with the father of the child she lost?
And, for that matter, who is this voice speaking to us in the first person?
This novel of plaintive chimeras that surround and follow the central character of Jane had a ten-year gestation, partially written and researched while Hunter was studying for her Ph.D in Edinburgh. It twirls between three periods of time:
1877-at the Farrington Asylum for Convalescent Lunatics, (yes, they were called that).
1991-when Lily goes missing.
2010-the present, when thirty-four-year-old Jane is working as an archivist in a London museum that's about to close permanently.
Lily's father had been on a field trip studying and photographing the rare plants in the Farrington Estate grounds when he took his daughter and Jane with him on that ill-fated day in 1991. Now he is coming to the museum to read from his book. The research he was doing on that day has finally resulted in The Lost Gardens of England, the current winner of the museum's Chester-Wood Book Prize.
The Farrington Asylum, long in ruins, is in close proximity to the estate. In 1877, three patients, two men and a woman, managed to wander off, winding up at Farrington House. Curiously, the woman, noted only in the asylum records with the initial "N,";somehow disappeared.
Two disappearances, 114 years apart in the same area, coudn't possibly be connected. |But Jane, who did her dissertation on archival practices in rural nineteenth century asylums, becomes interested in the fate of "N,"; the woman who disappeared in the same woods where Lily slipped through her hands.
She tells herself she's doing this research because she has a possible book in mind. It's almost as if Jane's life has never really started; as if she is still stuck in those woods in 1991, but the reader may feel even more sorry for the invisible spirits-or ghosts or entities-that surround her.
For these aimless spirits, it feels like their nightmare will never end. Waking after death from an uneasy sleep they find themselves in a void without meaning or familiarity, seemingly doomed to try to find parts of what they were before. Yes, somehow Aislinn Hunter manages to make this seem, well, half-plausible.
Desperately clinging to Jane, they sense that she is the only tie to the past they are trying to reassemble. These ghosts have a spokesperson who often speaks to readers in the unusual plural first person. Their connection with Jane is a place: Whitman Asylum.
Across a different century these deceased inmates found her in the surrounding woods that day in 1991. While an alternating point of view from third person to a plural first is unusual and somewhat risky, it works here as Hunter uses the voice to create a sense of mystery, omnipotence and irony.
Unlike many detective and mystery authors who don't tie up all the ends and forget details, Hunter has not left one idea dangling, one knot untied. Everything links up with the whole. This novel's plot is cyclonic: events, details, memories, experiences twist together and then fly outward again, reappearing later to once again mesh.
There's a huge momentum at work in this fiction that remarkably never seems to let up. Themes of the need for human contact, the energy that collects in spaces we consider empty, the resonance that lies in objects.
Nothing is overlooked, every detail seems to slot itself in somewhere, like the past lives the ghosts are trying to locate and make whole again. The World Before Us is a tsunami of a read, meticulously crafted, rich in poetry, insight and heart-breakingly real characters. It's a rare novel that can ask more questions than it answers and get away with it.
978-0-385-68064-6
Cherie Thiessen regularly reviews fiction from Pender Island.
Those minutes were all it took for Lily to disappear completely and forever. A sensitive, intelligent daughter of intellectual and gifted parents, Jane, the traumatized and guilty teenager, would have needed considerable parental devotion and dedication to have emotionally survived this nightmare.
She didn't get it. Her father was a famous violinist, rarely at home; her mother was a respected academic with a busy career. Fifteen years of therapy followed, without much apparent success.
That's the set-up for The World Before Us. Although Aislinn Hunter doesn't see herself as a mystery writer, there are lots of unanswered questions in her second novel that will keep readers turning the pages besides what ever happened to the five-year-old Lily Eliot.
Where did that mysterious character known as "N"; vanish to? and who was she?
How will Jane Standen react when, after 19 years, she's confronted with the father of the child she lost?
And, for that matter, who is this voice speaking to us in the first person?
This novel of plaintive chimeras that surround and follow the central character of Jane had a ten-year gestation, partially written and researched while Hunter was studying for her Ph.D in Edinburgh. It twirls between three periods of time:
1877-at the Farrington Asylum for Convalescent Lunatics, (yes, they were called that).
1991-when Lily goes missing.
2010-the present, when thirty-four-year-old Jane is working as an archivist in a London museum that's about to close permanently.
Lily's father had been on a field trip studying and photographing the rare plants in the Farrington Estate grounds when he took his daughter and Jane with him on that ill-fated day in 1991. Now he is coming to the museum to read from his book. The research he was doing on that day has finally resulted in The Lost Gardens of England, the current winner of the museum's Chester-Wood Book Prize.
The Farrington Asylum, long in ruins, is in close proximity to the estate. In 1877, three patients, two men and a woman, managed to wander off, winding up at Farrington House. Curiously, the woman, noted only in the asylum records with the initial "N,";somehow disappeared.
Two disappearances, 114 years apart in the same area, coudn't possibly be connected. |But Jane, who did her dissertation on archival practices in rural nineteenth century asylums, becomes interested in the fate of "N,"; the woman who disappeared in the same woods where Lily slipped through her hands.
She tells herself she's doing this research because she has a possible book in mind. It's almost as if Jane's life has never really started; as if she is still stuck in those woods in 1991, but the reader may feel even more sorry for the invisible spirits-or ghosts or entities-that surround her.
For these aimless spirits, it feels like their nightmare will never end. Waking after death from an uneasy sleep they find themselves in a void without meaning or familiarity, seemingly doomed to try to find parts of what they were before. Yes, somehow Aislinn Hunter manages to make this seem, well, half-plausible.
Desperately clinging to Jane, they sense that she is the only tie to the past they are trying to reassemble. These ghosts have a spokesperson who often speaks to readers in the unusual plural first person. Their connection with Jane is a place: Whitman Asylum.
Across a different century these deceased inmates found her in the surrounding woods that day in 1991. While an alternating point of view from third person to a plural first is unusual and somewhat risky, it works here as Hunter uses the voice to create a sense of mystery, omnipotence and irony.
Unlike many detective and mystery authors who don't tie up all the ends and forget details, Hunter has not left one idea dangling, one knot untied. Everything links up with the whole. This novel's plot is cyclonic: events, details, memories, experiences twist together and then fly outward again, reappearing later to once again mesh.
There's a huge momentum at work in this fiction that remarkably never seems to let up. Themes of the need for human contact, the energy that collects in spaces we consider empty, the resonance that lies in objects.
Nothing is overlooked, every detail seems to slot itself in somewhere, like the past lives the ghosts are trying to locate and make whole again. The World Before Us is a tsunami of a read, meticulously crafted, rich in poetry, insight and heart-breakingly real characters. It's a rare novel that can ask more questions than it answers and get away with it.
978-0-385-68064-6
Cherie Thiessen regularly reviews fiction from Pender Island.
Submitted on November 10, 2014 in By David.
