Like most/all of Oyeyemi’s work, Peaces has the cadence and tenor of a fairytale. We are introduced to characters, certainly: Otto and Xavier Shin, who have received as a not-wedding gift this train journey; their mongoose, Arpad; the train’s proprietor, Ava, and her protectors, Laura and Allegra, and her mongoose, Chela. But the standard book questions like “why are these characters the way they are?” and “what motivates their choices?” are not questions that appear to interest Helen Oyeyemi. Instead, her stories ask fairy tale questions along the lines of “Can we ever awaken from the dream that is reality?” and “Do we even want to?”

Peaces begins with a matter-of-fact weirdness that put me in mind of Susanna Clarke, particularly her newest (!) novel, Piranesi. At first the weirdness is charming and sweet, along the lines of the fact that Otto Shin has a pet mongoose named Arpad, and Arpad is the latest descendant of a series of family mongooses, also named Arpad. Charming! Sweet! The book gives the impression that the world is just like this, and we won’t get anywhere by making a fuss about it, so we might as well get on with it. But of course, this isn’t our, the reader’s, world. But it’s all so matter-of-fact, the way Helen Oyeyemi writes it, that you start to wonder if maybe this is the world and we’ve just been mistaken about it all along.

But then! It gets so creepy! Peaces goes on a journey from “this is weird but fine” to “this is a bit creepy actually” to me curled up in my comfy armchair in my comfy library whisper-screaming AAAAAAAAAA. I admit that the closing creepiness is of a type that causes me a particular terror: When listening to The Magnus Archives, my true most terrifying of the fears was The Slaughter, but The Stranger was a close second. Peaces pings pretty close to several of the Fears/Entities, in case that is your jam.

Ever since Boy Snow Bird, I have been an anxious detective of whether Helen Oyeyemi hates trans people. (The ending of Boy Snow Bird, in case you have forgotten it, has a trans character who’s trans due to trauma, and the narrative suggests that he needs to be saved from his trans-ness.) Peaces contains a new clue!

The romantic failures are a sore spot. That’s a field in which I really ought not underwhelm. When Martha and Lieselotte had me, Martha’s legal name was still Mark, and Lieselotte was a high court judge in Bern. They’re two of the freest people I know, and somehow that seems like a by-product of the rambling conversation they’ve been in ever since they met, an exchange that draws them down by-lanes of trivia and scholarship, pettiness and poetry. When some new pact clicks into place, they meet at its corner to kiss. My professor mum made her Martha-ness official, and my Bern high court judge mum stepped down and stripped her view of justice all the way down to grass roots, serving her god (and I really do think justice is a god for Lieselotte) as a police inspector who does her paperwork whilst sipping coffee out of a mug emblazoned with a picture of her wife and son. I hate that mug. The picture on it makes us look like IKEA models who might just get thrown in as freebies if you buy enough furniture. But catalog elements aside, it’s a photo in which Martha is full-on sultry professor, and I look like a cute baby Viking. So even if her current mug gets broken, or hidden, Lieselotte just pulls out another, identical one.

Pros: Clear affirmation of the trans person’s identity. Cons: Unnecessary use of deadname. Conclusion: I don’t think she hates trans people, but this is still a clumsy and ignorant way to speak about a trans woman. So…. much better than Boy Snow Bird? But still not the best.

Note: I received this book from the publisher for review consideration. This has not impacted my review.

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And now that shocked no longer looks like a word to me, I will proceed.  The Moonflower Vine opens with an idyllic family reunion over several summer evenings in Missouri.  Matthew and Callie’s three grown daughters – Jessica and Leonie, and the much-younger Mary Jo – have come home for a vacation, and at night they come together and watch the moonflowers blossom.  It is all very loving and affectionate, and Mary Jo thinks that she will remember this time forever.

Shocking flashbacks ensue.  We learn about the family’s past from the perspective of each of the family members.  The focus of each section was – more or less – the romantic life of the viewpoint character for that section, and how it affected the rest of the family.  We see how they caused each other pain, and how they helped each other.  We see Mathy, the emotional and physical center of the book, how the family spins around her and how they manage without her.  (That’s not a spoiler – it’s clear from the beginning that Mathy’s gone.)

Okay, the flashbacks aren’t all that shocking.  I mean they aren’t Forever Amber shocking, or even The Group shocking – they’re good flashbacks because they create a solid, layered, complex family dynamic.  They’re good flashbacks because they cause the story to unfold in a way that I like: starting with the end, and gradually revealing how they got there.  The Moonflower Vine is a beautifully constructed, beautifully told story.

How do you like your plot twists?  Gentle and inevitable (as here!) or punch you in the stomach (like Fingersmith)?

Other reviews:

Books and Cooks
Killin’  Time Reading
Neglected Books Page

If I missed your review, let me know!

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I mean, I don’t know if you know this, but it’s about a kid who’s raised as a goat, and the university is the universe; so there you have the central conceits. There are a lot of things like the Second Campus Riot and then the west side of campus and the east side of campus had the Quiet Riot and like – okay, whatever, I will admit that the long segment of world history refigured for a university became a little trying (I guess if I’d thought it was funny, it might have been better), and the I-am-a-goat bits irritated me. I kept having to put the book down and have a brief silent soliloquoy about Why, why, why, why? which is how I sometimes feel about postmodern things. This book is damn weird, and I didn’t like it at all, so I set myself a goal: Read until chapter four of the second section, and then you can quit. After I decided that, I had a dream in which I was in jail for something, and they took us on a field trip to the bookshop, but they wouldn’t let me look at any of the good books. I could only look at the lame books. And inside my head I was thinking I will not let them break my spirit!

I was very, very close to abandoning the entire enterprise. But I sensibly consulted The Internet, and The Internet assured me that I was quite right. Giles Goat-Boy does get off to a weird start, and the university-history thing is dated and weird. The Internet also told me that The Sot-Weed Factor might be more my thing, and that John Barth, in spite of all his weirdness, does some damn good storytelling. And I am all about plot. I know a lot of people just rejoice in the joyous joys of writing, and I do too, but honestly, if there’s not a good plot there, and if it’s not being advanced well, it’s just no good. That was why (I know it’s not the generally-held opinion) I like The Ground Beneath Her Feet so much better than Midnight’s Children, which was a very cool idea and a beautifully written book but sort of carried the plot along in fits and starts. Whereas The Ground Beneath Her Feet goes steadily along, with things happening – love story, goats, photography, and all the rest and so forth.

I really was determined to get to my chapter-four cutoff point, and the thing is, I just didn’t do it. After a while I tipped it off my bedside table in my sleep, and then I read Ender’s Shadow and Ender’s Game, and then I obtained from another library branch The Satanic Verses and read that, and then I wanted to read Walk Two Moons which I always see all over my house so I looked and looked and I couldn’t find it so instead of that I read Chasing Redbird and then I hunted for Walk Two Moons some more and the damn book was nowhere but I did find Back Home, which I’d been frantically hunting for after I read Good Night, Mr. Tom earlier this month, so I read that, and then my mother got Understanding the Borderline Mother, which my family’s been dying to read because we love reading about BPD, on PaperbackSwap, and I was halfway through that and I realized that there is just no part of me that even remotely wants to read Giles Goat-Boy.

So I stopped trying.

Oh well.

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