If you thought Audrey Niffenegger’s Time Traveler’s Wife was amusing enough but you regretted the hours you spent on it, do not bother reading Niffenegger’s next book, Her Fearful Symmetry, which will require vaster amounts of suspension of disbelief. If you considered Time Traveler’s Wife was an excellently spun tale of love which literally endured the difficulties of time and told in a skillful style the way the story jumped from one time zone to another, do not read Her Fearful Symmetry. You will be disappointed and start thinking whether you rated Time Traveler’s Wife more highly than you should have.
Her Fearful Symmetry is a story of twins, cemetery lore, and ghosts hovering between this-life and after-life. The novel opens with Elspeth Noblin’s death in a scene to punctuate the devotion of her younger partner/lover Robert Fanshaw: a tall youngish man curled around a slight, dead, middle-aged woman.
Elspeth was buried a few days later and Robert starts descending from a devastated significant other to a man totally out of control (towards the end of the book, he agreed to a macabre, if not foolhardy, plan wherein he carts away a dead woman’s body to a dead woman’s flat). A friend of Robert kindly described him as “unhinged”. Part of Elspeth’s will was that her nieces who lived in America would come to live in her flat in London for a year. Interestingly (or predictably?), the nieces Julia and Valentina Poole, turn out be mirror-image twins whose mother, Edie, is the identical twin of Elspeth.
Julia and Valentina agreed to come to London and once the twins are ensconced in Elspeth’s flat, all sorts of things happen which are supposed to make the book interesting but only succeeds in parading an array of underdeveloped characters whose purpose in putting them in the story are not made clear even after the conclusion of the novel. Even the twins admit to themselves that they were bored.
There are several untidy details in the book. What was really Elspeth’s motive in bringing the twins to London? What was upsetting Edie? Why had Jack, Edie's husband, never taken any action in all the years he knew of the twins’ trickery? Why was it that Valentina could see Elspeth but not Julia nor Robert? Did Valentina think Elspeth tricked her or did she believe that there only had been a grievous mistake? If Robert was aware he was a fool, why did he persist in frustratingly remaining foolish? Why did Niffenegger think that her readers would even find it remotely believable that a twin who wanted to disengage herself from her twin-hood state can achieve the same by plotting to fake her death, have a dead woman remove her soul temporarily, have a confused/besotted/lover arrange that her corpse be not embalmed but preserved with ice, slide her soul back to her body at a convenient time, and walk away happily ever after? In Elspeth’s words, “what a bloody daft idea.”
There is one thing clear though in Niffeneger’s story-telling. She sharply delineates the strong characters from the weak of hearts. No grey areas here. Julia is strong, Valentina is not. Elspeth is strong, Edie is not. Marijke is strong, Martin is not. Jessica is strong, James is not. And Robert is a fool.
If there is one thing which saved the book, it is the little lessons imparted imperceptibly in the middle of all the absurdities: One, no matter how weak a creature we have been made and have become, it is within ourselves to chart our life’s course. Martin, who had severe obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), would have had it easy if he just allowed Julia to take care of him and forget about his wife who went away. But Martin, OCD notwithstanding, managed to extricate himself from his London flat and travel all the way to Amsterdam to show Marijke, his wife of many years, that he still wanted to make his marriage work. Juxtapose this with Robert, who went dippy with Valentina, massaging her feet in public, while at the same time could not deny Elspeth, whose feet he also massaged when she was still of this life.
Secondly, we need to be careful when we wish for things. In this case, Robert wanted his Elspeth to come back to him after she passed away from this life. And in a horrible way, she did.
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