Wonders never cease
Olivia Glazebrook
SEIZURE by Erica Wagner Faber, £10.99, pp. 232, ISBN 9780571227594 ✆ £8.79 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 Janet seems to have her life neatly organised. She’s hardworking, she has a nice boyfriend, she lives in a comfortable house and she drives a dark-green Golf. Recently, however, she has been receiving messages from her mind. Seizures (which also occurred in her childhood) will strike without warning and leave her humming with nervous tension — a struck tuning fork.
Janet disregards this important signal of an imminent decline; in any case, her attention is diverted by a call from a solicitor. She is told that she has inherited, from her mother, a house beside the sea. Janet is puzzled by this news. She had always believed — had been told by her father that her mother was killed in an accident when Janet was a little girl. Naturally enough, Janet doesn’t wait for the boyfriend to get time off work, but sets off alone to investigate her new property. Arriving in the house, she discovers, Famous-Five-style, that the ashes in the fireplace are still warm. On the nearby beach she is accosted by a man who tells her he lives in the house — that it’s his home, and that it belongs to him as much as it does to her.
Janet is annoyed. She argues with him. Their argument continues indoors, over a glass of whisky. They fight, and Janet cuts her hand. And then they . . . well, what would you do if you found a complete stranger (and a batty one at that) in your dead mother’s house, a young man with a key that matched yours, someone who appears to have known your mother, the mother about whom you know nothing, about whom your father lied? Might you perhaps ask him whether he was your brother? Not, according to this book, before you’d made passionate, ecstatic love.
What a marvellous development. But my delight turned to goggle-eyed wonder when, after rapturous lovemaking, Janet and Tom decide to jump in the sea and swim with the seals: ‘fur against flesh and flesh against fur, all without fear’. After this escapade, what could happen next? What else might Janet and Tom have in store for me? In the realms of such elaborate fantasy, nothing is bound by reason. If these two characters and their furry friends had linked arms and flown to the moon I wouldn’t have been in the least surprised.
Wagner seems to have aimed at the territory of The Cement Garden and The Comfort of Strangers. Something shocking happens to someone apparently normal; there’s weirdness under the duvet; the fixtures of a real life are forgotten; bizarre and unexpected behaviour goes unchecked. But curiously, despite its strange events, Seizure makes no impression. Its rather floral, overwritten text (‘Wind blown through a door. An open door. The wind makes no footstep, but still the wind must walk through the world’) and vague narrative voice create a fairytale world where nothing matters. It might all just as well be a dream as a nightmare.
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