Amanda
Amanda by H S Cross
I’m just guessing, but I contend that at least half of all works of fiction conform to the Shakespearean premise that the course of true love never did run smooth. The impediments to true love are what keep us watching or reading for at least the duration of a play or a novel. If the obstacles are overcome, then we have a comedy of some sort. If not, well we have Romeo and Juliet. So sad. These hindrances often involve an irrational parent, restrictive social norms, big divides of age, background, race, or class, or collective madness as in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. How much fun or angst we encounter depends on the inventiveness of the author. In this novel, Amanda, also called Marion, helps the author out by creating her own complications to a beautiful love.
In Amanda, a novel set in post-World War I England, a young Irish girl flees Ireland after suffering an abusive relationship. In England, she falls in love in with Jamie and finds a passionate loving relationship. But something happens to disrupt the course of true love. Her dog dies, and this dog seems to be more than a dog, and she suddenly refuses to talk to Jamie. These events form the backstory, revealed to us as we witness the play of memory, thought and present occurrences inside the protagonist’s mind. When we encounter her as Marion, she has gone off to London, become a governess, and has begun to hear disturbing “talkers” in her head. Nonetheless, she is able to be a very appropriate and creative governess to two children, whom she parents in ways that are vastly superior to their own parents’ techniques.
So what has happened here? Why is she shutting out her perfect match who deeply loves her? That’s the sustaining mystery of this book from beginning to end. Jamie and the reader are at a loss: “His mind tramped purgatorial circuits. Did she love someone else? Had she never loved him? Had grief for the dog damaged her psyche? Had she decided to hold him responsible for England’s crimes against her people? Was it religion?”
None of these reasons singly or collectively seems sufficient. The reader also knows about the voices. Is she worried because she thinks Jamie could never love a schizophrenic? There seems to be something darker and more hidden, and this keeps us reading. Often, always in Moliere, the father is the blocking figure, but here Marion’s father is not in the picture, and Jamie’s father, in a surprise move, becomes a more layered figure than I would have thought and functions as an agent for reconciliation.
I hope you are now a bit curious and will pick this one up. The level of originality in the writing of this book, the sentence-to-sentence originality, is astonishing. I think that Heather could not write cliché if she tried. (Well, maybe if she had a character that communicated in platitudes). She has a voice that is powerful and unique. I’ve met the characters before in her two previous novels. We are inhabiting Heatherland, or HS Crossland, where people have more stories to tell or the same stories from different angles. At the same time, we are in a historic moment in England, and I continue to be in awe of an American writer channeling convincingly a time and place that are not part of her direct experience. I hope there will be a fourth novel; I would love to see these people again.
