Before writing a single word, Ann-Marie MacDonald begins every novel with a drawing. In the case of Fayne, her new and impeccably atmospheric Gothic masterpiece, which clocks in at more than 700 pages, it was a line. A simple, undulating line. She wasn’t sure whether it was ocean or land at first; then she realised she was drawing a moor. “Because it’s transitional, and it’s on the move and has a message. Then I drew this figure in profile looking outward. A young person with flowing hair and masculine but Byronic clothing; I didn’t know if they were male or female. And up in the right-hand corner on the horizon was the outline of a semi-crumbling stately home. I wrote a caption: I had heard something out on the fens,” she says, pausing before adding, “dot, dot, dot.”
That MacDonald says “dot, dot, dot” with such cheerfully theatrical emphasis seems to speak to her very essence: in both her novels and in person she is as thoughtful and considered as she is playful and spirited. Fayne might be an unusually long novel by today’s publishing standards, but nothing is wasted or excessive. It is deeply perceptive, a story of sharp turns and blurred boundaries which negotiates Victorian fears about the loss of power and meaning while also illustrating MacDonald’s contemporary concerns about nature. Fayne uses language to slither and slide, elide and escape, but never to evade meaning or shy away from its purpose.
MacDonald’s initial uncertainty as to whether the figure in the drawing was masculine or feminine became integral to the development of this historical gender thriller. The novel opens in the late 19th century, where the 11-year-old Honourable Charlotte Bell of the DC de Fayne lives with a select group of servants and her adoring father, Lord Henry Bell, in their decaying ancestral home. A lonely estate ambiguously straddling the border between England and Scotland, Fayne is simultaneously of both territories and neither. Charlotte’s family once owned vast tracts of the surrounding land but now retain only the village church, churchyard and vicarage. Charlotte has a mysterious, unnamed condition which necessitates her living quietly. She has grown up weighed down by the knowledge that her mother, a beautiful Irish-American heiress, died giving birth to her and that her brother, Charles, also died as a young child.
Charlotte is happy having only her father for company, entertaining herself with reveries, “wherein I was myself his boyhood friend: the two of us stoical in the face of canings by masters and bulling by older boys”. Fiercely intelligent, witty, and tirelessly curious, Charlotte is desperate to outgrow her unnamed condition and become an “intrepid female traveller”. When her appetite for learning threatens to exceed the bounds of the estate, her father reluctantly decides to hire a tutor, Mr Margalo. To Charlotte, this young man whose name “felt like boiled sweets in the mouth” is a cabinet of wonders, “packed with planets, stars, insects, oceans”. While exploring the bog – “smooth from a distance but with its tufts and tussocks and heathery hummocks, it is convolute as brain” – Charlotte and Margalo make a starting discovery. Suddenly, Charlotte’s father announces a move to Edinburgh in order to cure her condition. Life as she knows it is over. But was it ever hers to begin with? What is real and what is (as the novel’s homophonic title suggests) feigned?
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The dramatic irony for the reader is that we know more about Charlotte’s history and identity than she does, and are willing her to catch up. MacDonald considers her readers constantly, determined that we enjoy the journey: “As a reader myself, I think, where do you need a little breath? Where do you want the refreshment of some lyricism?” When she’s writing, she has the image of a little ghost reader, at once tender, inquisitive and hopeful, hovering just over her left shoulder.
A number-one bestseller in MacDonald’s native Canada last year, Fayne is published in Ireland and Britain by Tramp Press. Based on its length and Victorian heritage, I expected a Dickensian cast list, endlessly busying themselves with subplots, but the story is enticingly tight, which makes its hairpin twists and turns even more impressive. The novel has many revelations, but MacDonald was determined that Charlotte’s being born with an intersex characteristic was not written to be one of them. Charlotte was neither a novelty to be examined nor a mystery to be solved. It is a normal human variation, MacDonald explains. “This anatomical characteristic is not a flaw, and it’s not exoticised. I’m not exoticising this.”
Born in the same year as Barbie, MacDonald describes her own cultural formation as courtesy of the three Bs: the Brontës, Bugs Bunny and The Beatles. She worked in theatre for years before writing fiction. Her first play, Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet), was a huge success, winning the Canadian Authors’ Association Award, among others. But when she began to write the next, her stage directions became increasingly long and unwieldy. She confronted the realisation that she was writing prose with equal parts joy and chagrin. “Joy because I thought, No, I’m not writing a lousy play, I’m writing a novel. Chagrin because I didn’t know how to write a novel.”
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MacDonald had previously confided to Maureen White, her Dublin-based “bestest, oldest friend”, that she had always dreamed of writing a novel but thought she should wait until she was older. “She said, ‘well, you’ll probably be quite old by the time you finish it, so you should start now’, and she was right.” From inception to publication was a seven-year journey for her 1996 debut Fall on Your Knees, which went on to sell three million copies, scoop a pile of prizes and become an Oprah Winfrey Book Club title. In a postscript MacDonald clearly relishes, Fall on Your Knees has gone full circle, recently becoming a two-part, six-hour theatrical experience adapted by MacDonald’s director wife, Alisa Palmer, and the playwright Hannah Moscovitch.
MacDonald’s heritage has given her an abiding interest in “the subjugation of peoples within peoples”.
Her parents met in Cape Breton Island, at the eastern end of Nova Scotia, and she travelled a lot as a child while her father was in the Canadian air force. Her father has Irish and Scottish ancestry (“courtesy of the highland clearances”, as she wryly puts it). Her mother, one of 12 children born to Lebanese immigrants, was the first in her family to have a post-secondary-school education. MacDonald exists thanks to what she calls “a trick of racism”: her mother wasn’t considered white enough to train as a nurse in her hometown. She went 15km down the road to a hospital in New Waterford where the head nursing sister accepted her gladly, and she met MacDonald’s father. MacDonald’s parents were always ready to celebrate someone else’s culture and to share their own, and such openness is evident in Fayne, a novel which champions inclusivity.
MacDonald believes literature has an important role to play in reminding us of what we are and where we come from. “We are diverse. Nature is queer. Nature burgeons at the margins. Nature is in constant transition. These reductive categories that we have are fine insofar as they are useful; they are brutal insofar as they are exclusionary.” She describes Fayne as “my queerest book, which I think is why it lends itself so very well to the Victorian setting, and the secrets and identity, all of which was just starting to emerge then.”
Earth is essentially its central character, “and everything else is plot, plot, plot!” It was a hugely challenging book to craft. “At least three times I had to write on separate recipe cards what happened; what so-and-so thinks happened; what so-and-so says happened; and what the other so-and-so believes happened. I found myself writing on the basis of having fallen for the lie myself, and would have to go back. And because writers have to clutch at any silver lining and positive all the time to keep ourselves going, I thought, if I believe it, there’s every chance that the reader will as well, so that’s good.”
Fayne took six years to write, so I know not to hope for MacDonald’s next novel soon. Yet it’s impossible not to wonder where in the world the next drawing will lead her dot, dot, dot.
Fayne is published by Tramp Press on August 17th
