Enola Holmes + This Mournable Body + more
Fiction contains multitudes, and thank heavens for that
Dear Reader,
Some years ago, I’d randomly chanced upon a book whose heroine was one Enola Holmes, sister to Sherlock and Mycroft. Obviously, I snapped it up immediately. It turned out to be good fun and I told myself to keep an eye out for the next book in this series. Then I promptly forgot all about it, as you do.
Cut to 2020, and Enola Holmes is a film! Coming to Netflix! And egad! there are six books in the series! Which means five books I must read before the film comes out in end September. Between you and me, I was reasonably sure I’d never meet that deadline, but Nancy Springer’s Enola Holmes books are so full of cheek and fun that I raced through them within days.
The six Enola Holmes books have to be read in the order that they were published because in addition to the individual mysteries that Enola solves, each book is like a chapter in the Holmes family tale.
When we meet Enola in The Case of the Missing Marquess, her life has been turned upside down. On Enola’s birthday, her mother vanishes and Enola finds herself a ward of her estranged brother, Mycroft. Mycroft intends to send Enola to a boarding school and make a lady out of her, but Enola knows that’s not the life she wants for herself. Armed with secret messages from her mother, an ingeniously modified corset and a bicycle, Enola runs away from from home and heads to London. Her plan is to find her mother, but along the way, she gets distracted by a missing person case, which she solves before Sherlock. Thus begins the career of Enola Holmes — mistress of disguises, cracker of codes, finder of lost things and people, and runaway from Sherlock and Mycroft.
Over the next five books — The Case of the Left-Handed Lady, The Case of the Bizarre Bouquets, The Case of the Peculiar Pink Fan, The Case of the Cryptic Crinoline and The Case of the Gypsy Goodbye — Enola solves missing persons cases and works on the mystery of her mother’s sudden departure. Her paths keep crossing with Sherlock and he keeps getting bamboozled by her. Occasionally, she bumps into Mycroft, who is intent upon that boarding school idea and extremely annoyed that this slip of a girl is outwitting his and Sherlock’s superior male intellect.
Obviously, this is not exactly fiction in the realistic tradition, but there’s a lot of research that Springer has done into the times in which she sets her stories so they feel real. Technically, I suspect the Enola Holmes books are considered fiction for young adults. I can confirm that they are most entertaining for not-so-young adults too.
Springer’s series fun is because she pays attention to details and dynamics that are ignored by the overwhelmingly masculine adventures of Sherlock Holmes. In a time when men and women lived segregated lives, there was literally a whole world that women inhabited which men dismissed and to which they had limited or no access. Through Enola, Springer explores all the things that were considered feminine and trivial by Victorian men, and laces them with high drama.
In all fairness, the mysteries aren’t that great and neither are they particularly cleverly-solved. There’s a whole lot of coincidence and good fortune helping Enola out, but the books are full of drama, humour and action (including a sequence that involves climbing pipes and bounding around roofs in London’s East End). I’m quite looking forward to the film adaptations, even though it’s evident from just the trailer of the first one that director Harry Bradbeer — whose credits include The Hour, Fleabag and Killing Eve — and writer Jack Thorne have taken liberties with the original book. Thorne did an excellent adaptation of His Dark Materials for HBO so I’m quite hopeful for Enola Holmes.
There’s an alternate world in which Enola goes to university and meets Lady Trent, and they sit down at the Professional Women’s Club to exchange stories of their adventures and plot world domination, over tea and sandwiches. And I’m here for it.
What I’m not as wholeheartedly here for is This Mournable Body by Tsitsi Dangarembga, longlisted for this year’s Man Booker Prize. There’s a part of me that wants to blame my response to the novel on the general feeling of doom and gloom that’s in the air. I have to admit that these days, my brain tends to twang like a rubber band snapping back when faced with fictional sadness. (There’s more than enough non-fictional misery right now, thank you very much.) But I don’t think it’s just the friction between what’s in my head and what’s in Dangarembga’s book that made me struggle as a reader. This Mournable Body is a book that feels important because of the ideas in it; not because of the storytelling.
Set mostly in Harare, the novel is about a young country finding its feet after a civil war. It’s a sequel to Nervous Conditions, but given the first book came out in 1988, I suspect This Mournable Body is expected to work as a standalone. Dangarembga tells the story of Zimbabwe through Tambudzai, who was once a gifted student and a talented advertising professional, but is now unemployed, bitter and desperate. In the old Zimbabwe, Tambudzai knew where she stood and what she could aim for, armed with her few privileges (like a convent education). In this new, postcolonial Zimbabwe, she can’t find a place for herself.
The novel is written in the second person and present tense. So rather than writing a variation of “Tambudzai recognised the woman getting on the bus”, Dangarembga writes, “Your breath stops in your throat as you finally identify the newcomer. It is your hostelmate Gertrude.” The point of this device is obvious: Dangarembga wants us as readers to feel not just connected to Tambudzai, but she also wants us to feel implicated and even complicit in the events that unfold in the novel.
All this sounds great on paper, but while reading, the device doesn’t work as well. It takes more than the present tense to make prose feel immersive and the second person narrator soon felt gimmicky to me. Tambudzai is a difficult character to relate to because not only does she do some terrible things, she’s also in denial about her past. There’s a flat, calm to her voice as a narrator that actually dulls the impact of events as they unfold. It makes sense that Tambudzai would downplay trauma or moments that are triggers for her, but from a reader’s perspective, that’s hardly helpful.
However, there are some terrific moments of tension that Dangarembga crafts in This Mournable Body, and one of the most powerful sections is early on, when a woman is sexually assaulted on a bus. Tambudzai isn’t just a witness to this crime, she knows the victim (they live in the same hostel) and she’s part of the crowd that’s greedily consuming the spectacle of a woman being stripped and threatened with rape.
“The crowd guffaws. You do too. As you do, you grow and grow until you believe you are much bigger than yourself and this is wonderful. … It is like the relief of vomiting when what is pent up rushes out. The crowd pushes forward in its unexpected new freedom.
‘Someone open those thighs for her,’ a man says. ‘Do it for her if she won’t!’
The crowd picks up the new refrain. You fling it at Gertrude and out over the market: ‘Open! Open!’ … Tension spurts out of you and out of the crowd. Your laughter hangs above you. Up there where it is no one’s, it snaps and crackles like arcs of lightning.”
This terrifying episode is supposed to be a taster, but ends up being one of the most brutal moments in the novel. Which is not to suggest the violence wanes in This Mournable Body. The novel is riddled with callous cruelty (which steadily loses its impact because of how the incidents are described). Sons slash their mother with broken bottles; women are raped by their neighbours; students are brutally beaten by teachers; wives are thrashed by angry husbands — but there is no redressal or even expectation of redressal. Violence is the norm and in these circumstances, survival is enough. A few try to heal the wounded and mend the broken, but the reader — seeing these efforts through Tambudzai’s cynical eyes — can’t help but feel it’s all hopeless.
This is an ambitious novel that tries to encapsulate colonial history, capitalist greed as well as anxieties and insecurities of a newly-decolonised people. It’s one of those books that I could talk about for hours because it is rich with complex ideas, but it’s not an enjoyable or even engrossing read.
For instance, thematically, Tambudzai’s own acts of violence seem to suggest she’s punishing herself by attacking others in whom she sees fragments of her old self. Sounds interesting, right? Here’s how Tambudzai’s most violent action is described in the novel:
“Moving slowly, you approach Elizabeth. … this pupil Elizabeth is Rhodes scholar material. However she is a meek girl. … You have seen how they do not want a qualification in biology, you say; in which case your pupils will receive a qualification in violence. Two or three young women pull at you. This has no effect. Instead, you escape yourself into an unbearable radiance.”
What’s actually happening in this moment is that a young girl is being beaten to pulp in a classroom by Tambudzai, who is the teacher. Tambudzai knows what she’s done and why she’s attacked her student, but since she’d rather hide behind euphemisms like “unbearable radiance”, we as readers get a plot point that is ripe for analysis but underdone in terms of storytelling. But do note the irony of Rhodes scholar being a mark of distinction for a Zimbabwean, given the scholarship was founded by diamond magnate Cecil Rhodes (modern-day Zimbabwe was known as Rhodesia after Rhodes, who arguably paved the way for apartheid). Given her politics, Dangarembga would expect us to notice these details.
At the end of This Mournable Body, Tambudzai literally returns to her roots. She goes back to the village where her parents live — not as a prodigal daughter, but a representative of a travel agency. The plan is to spruce up the village and then bring European tourists to it, as part of a tour that shows them the ‘real’ Zimbabwe. You know, that exotic Africa-is-a-country vibe, with women wearing beads and dancing etc. These sections of the book made me think of the way we market India to foreigners and how much those fictions influence our own sense of self. In touristy parts of the country, you can see how locals know the stereotypes and play to them, in the hope of making a quick buck. Similarly, Tambudzai is an active and conscious participant in the process of selling her village and presenting an image of Africa that matches the expectations of tourists.
Once again, this is more fun to analyse that it is to read. I struggled to finish This Mournable Body and despite the many fragments that are powerful, I didn’t really care about anyone in the novel. Instead, I felt exhausted by Tambudzai’s negativity and frustrated by the narrowness of her perspective.
Incidentally, Dangarembga got the title of her novel from this incandescent essay by Teju Cole, which you should absolutely read if you haven’t already. One sentence in particular feels painfully true and worth remembering, especially as so many in India behave like lemmings:
“We may not be able to attend to each outrage in every corner of the world, but we should at least pause to consider how it is that mainstream opinion so quickly decides that certain violent deaths are more meaningful, and more worthy of commemoration, than others.”
Definitely worthy of commemoration are two excellent books that came out recently, both written by good friends. Nisha Susan’s The Women Who Forgot to Invent Facebook is a collection of short stories with one of the loveliest covers I’ve seen in a while. Some of you know Nisha as a journalist and editor, and I hope everyone will know of her as a wonderful storyteller because The Women Who Forgot… has some absolute gems.
One of the hardest parts of writing a short story is making the reader feel like they know the subject even though all you’re giving the reader is a fragment from a subject’s life. Nisha manages this beautifully. I’m particularly fond of “No Filter”, “How Andrew Wylie Broke My Heart”, “Teresa” and the title story. Reading the stories in this volume reminded me of putting my eye to a kaleidoscope and watching brilliant pieces of glass form exquisite, delicate patterns.
Someone recently asked me if men would enjoy The Women Who Forgot … — “you know, because she’s such a women’s writer” — which to me is actually a good question, even if it is awfully worded. Nisha’s well known for being a feminist and the stories in this volume are about women. Even the ones that are ostensibly about male characters are talking about feminine experiences and men’s attitudes towards women. If you’re the sort of reader who generally likes ‘manly’ fiction — I’m not sure what that is, but I’m guessing thrillers? Maybe the works of Chetan Bhagat and/ or Amish? Or books with only male characters who don’t sweat as much as drip testosterone — I’d really urge you to pick up The Women Who Forgot to Invent Facebook. It may be unlike what you usually read, but you might just recognise the men and women she writes about. You might also find yourself crushing on some of her sharp-tongued ladies (I know I did).
On to the next one: P.S. What’s Up With the Climate? is yet another gem by Bijal Vachharajani, this time illustrated by Archana Sreenivasan. It’s a set of letters exchanged between animals who are alarmed by the changes that are being wrought to their habitats by the climate catastrophe. The illustrations are all exquisitely done, but the hermit crab in particular has my heart. That said, these days, I feel like the bee in this book could be my spirit animal.
Bijal has a gift for being able to distil complicated ideas to simple nuggets and this book is yet another charming example of that. While you’re on Storyweaver, look up That Night, What’s Neema Eating Today? and The Seed Savers.
Oh, and exciting book news from the lands beyond our borders: Susanna Clarke, who wrote the amazing Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, has a new book coming out! Piranesi will be out next week and no, I haven’t read it or reviews of it (there are many reviews out already), but for the first time in AGES, I’m genuinely at the edge of my seat, waiting for a book.
And with that, I’m going to sign off. Take care and stay well. Dear Reader will be back soon.