~ Gingerbread, by Helen Oyeyemi ~
Not an easy novel to slot into a genre, Gingerbread is a dense confection of magical realism, fairy tale (Grimm’s, definitely not the saccharine or sanitized kind), surrealism, and fantasy, with a talented, irrepressible author in charge.
Harriet Lee’s gingerbread is not comfort food. There’s no nostalgia baked into it, no hearkening back to innocent indulgences and jolly times at nursery. It is not humble, nor is it dusty in the crumb. [..]
which is a pretty good description, doubtless intentional, of Gingerbread as well. A few paragraphs later:
A gingerbread addict once told Harriet that eating her gingerbread is like eating revenge. “It’s like noshing on the actual and anatomical heart of somebody who scarred your beloved and thought they’d gotten away with it. That heart, ground to ash and shot through with darts of heat, salt, spice and sulfurous syrup.[…]”
which also describes this novel: moving from a snappy, entertaining, understandable sentence into something darker, more mysterious and complicated. The gingerbread recipe, it turns out, originated from the ‘lean years’ of the farm, and includes blighted rye and ‘mercy leaf’ (that is chewed for relief from pain), and is far from a simple sweet treat.
The plot, as best I can summarize it, follows three generations of women — Margot, Harriet, and Perdita — whose origins lie in a country called Druhástrana. In the novel, Wikipedia reports:
Druhástrana (Druhástranae) is the name of an alleged nation state of indeterminate geographic location. [..] To date, Druhástrana has been formally recognized by only three nations. (See: Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary).
Druhástrana is a land where the major landmarks include several nods to fairy tales: an enormous wooden clog, a Jack-in-the-box that always turns up in the same place regardless of where it is moved, and Gretel’s Well, deep and mysterious. The class structures of Druhástrana are rigid and central to the story. Margot Leveque grew up in wealth and luxury, but married farmer ‘Simple Simon Lee’.
She forsook her mansion for the fields he oversaw, and soon learned that the farm was his captor and hers. [..]. The wheat was weighed upon collection, and the rate they were paid was sharply cut if the grain weighed any less than the previous time. Week after week of throwing every single grain that could be scraped up onto that scale, and week after week they fell short. By the time Harriet was born, Margot hated Simon’s guts.
Harriet, at fourteen, meets Gretel, who is perhaps the least appealing character in the novel, an upscale town girl whose first action is to dump another teenager into the well. This casual self-absorbed cruelty, shared by Gretel’s corporate-CEO mother, persists through the course of the novel. Their paths cross occasionally in real life and in other indescribable ways, but Gretel’s hold on Harriet remained obscure to me.
Margot and Harriet escape from Druhástrana and eventually end up in a very modern London. Trenchant social commentary is part and parcel of Oyeyemi’s writing.
Perdita’s school has a PPA, a Parental Power Association instead of a PTA. Gioia Fischer, head of the PPA, wears no scent and no makeup apart from a touch of berry-red lipstick: her chestnut-colored hair bounces from scalp to shoulder, and she exudes well-being with an agression that’s difficult to deflect; before you know it, her health is arm-wrestling yours. […] All the other PPA members were already there in their heartbreakingly casual clothing; catwalk casual, really.
As are lovely whimsical notions expressed in throwaway sentences:
The biscuit tin fell into the void [..] and gingerbread tiles spilled out, tessellating with an air of intelligent design.
When visiting her kid and grandkid, Margot brings a book and sits down to read a little at each of her rest stops on the second, third, and sixth floors.
There are some rather grim episodes, such as Perdita growing increasingly gaunt and feeble as a child, while Harriet refuses to acknowledge that the gingerbread could be the cause. Oyeyemi brings the reader back down to modern-medicine earth with a crash. “[Margot] sought medical opinion, obtained a diagnosis, and made it clear that if Harriet ever fed Perdita gluten again, she’d do her for child abuse.”
There is a host of other characters: Aristide Kercheval, the Lees’ benefactor; his wife Tamar, possessive and openly unpleasant; Remy and Gabriel Kercheval, potential suitors for Harriet; Clio and Gretel; the members of the PPA; the Druhástranian Dráhomira Maszkeradi who sells real estate and translates literature; and more.
Very occasionally thrown in here and there are a few physical descriptions of the characters, when the reader realizes that all the major characters are black.
She saw that the girl was of similar build and skin color to her, but she didn’t wear her hair in the dreadlocks typical to black peasants in Druhástrana. [..] Must be a city girl.
The UK’s first black prime minister […]
He could be Remy Kercheval or he could be Gabriel Kercheval or some other excessively handsome black man.
Equally casual and occasional are the mentions of same-sex relationships.
Perdita says she knows the gentleman detective has his boyfriend and his pet tortoise to think of.
there was romance with a lowercase ‘r’ too, this woman would nip Harriet’s lower lip just before they kissed for the first time.
Despite the heavy layer of magical realism (which I prefer in small doses) and the allegorical story (much of which probably escaped me), I never got bored with Gingerbread, largely because of Oyeyemi’s amusing take on modern life, and her charmingly original asides. This is not an easy novel to read, and I imagine other readers could be either captivated or put off by other aspects: the unconventional characters, the multiple threads, the digressions at each plot point (which I found more fun than the main plot at times), and the subversive social and economic policy commentary.
Recent Comments