A GIRL MADE OF AIR / AUTHOR: NYDIA HETHERINGTON / PUBLISHER: QUERCUS / RELEASE DATE: SEPTEMBER 3RD
Known to the world as ‘the greatest funambulist who ever lived’ and as ‘Mouse’ to her circus mentor and idol Serendipity Wilson, A Girl Made of Air tells a story about stories in rich, lyrical magic realism. It shows how we are forever running both in search of and escape from the adults who made us what we are, but with a tendency to tell more than to show. Heavy reference to reader, journalist and diary sometimes weighs down the story it frames, entirely consistent with the message about the destructive power of the stories we tell ourselves but still clipping the wings of narrative voice.
The combination of circus magic and magic realism provides a resplendent psychological canvas for the physical thrashing out of trauma, dependency and jealousy in elegant and elaborate imagery. Mouse, our otherwise nameless heroine, is both fascinated by Serendipity’s life and jealous of those who get to share the mysterious adult world with her, while Marina, the alcoholic mermaid mother’s own story – and the lack of love it engendered for her daughter – holds deeper mysteries the closer Mouse gets to the story she has most right to call her own.
Our lives being ‘the thread of narrative we travel along like high wire artists’ (the quote from Angela Carter which opens the story) will only hold as true as the apparent danger, drama and consequence of our actions in the world outside our heads. Yet, when Mouse journeys from England to New York to make peace with herself by making good on the damage done by her childhood jealousy, the characters she meets in her new world are abandoned and moved beyond when it suits her, not suggesting a great change from the self-involved choices of her youth. It’s a lesson we’re told by the heroine she has learned but, in the real world as with a performance onstage, the illusion only fully convinces with action: we believe what we feel we’ve been shown. That said, as a diary-based internal-monologue path towards self-forgiveness, the language is elegant and beautiful and an atmospheric success in itself.
