Fayne is a novel that sprawls extravagantly but is everywhere concerned with borders, and how their ability to define and protect may easily blur into cruel imposition and indescribable damage visited on those who flout them. It is a historical fiction, set principally in the final decades of the 19th century, but its concerns are unmistakably contemporary, and its patchwork of language – Victorianisms verging on pastiche combined with a vibrantly modern tone – alerts the reader to MacDonald’s penchant for playfulness amid the seriousness of her subject matter. That playfulness is evident the minute she introduces us to her protagonist, the 12-year-old aristocrat Charlotte Bell, immured in her ancestral home with her ornithologist father Henry, the 17th baron of the DC de Fayne, her joyful expeditions outside severel limited by adult anxiety that she will either fall prey to the treacherous bog or to a relapse of her mysterious “Condition”.
Charlotte is a prodigy, able to memorise vast chunks of classical texts and converse spiritedly with Lord Henry, but she is also troubled: by the portrait of her beautiful mother, who died giving birth to her, and who is pictured holding Charlotte’s infant brother Charles, also dead; by the prospect of her continuing isolation and the obstacles in the way of her achieving her ambition of becoming a physician; and by her own body, with its unruly “prickle” that requires regular “quelling”. Many of the elements of 19th-century Gothic melodrama are duly assembled. Charlotte’s world is sparsely populated, but she is not entirely alone: there is the faithful nurse, Knox, who soothes her worries about her changing body in a way that temporarily satisfies her charge, but not the reader, who becomes increasingly suspicious of what the “Condition” might involve; the semi-grotesque countryman Bryn, alive to the world of faery and magyk that yet persists in the age of rationalism; and, latterly, a handsome young tutor, who introduces Charlotte to the wonders of science before being abruptly dismissed when the pair take an unauthorised nocturnal walk in Fayne’s hinterland. Also present in the narrative are the chatty, witty letters of Charlotte’s late mother, Lady Marie, a Bostonian heiress with roots in Co Leitrim, to her best friend Taffy – a one-sided correspondence that turns from the comic to the hideously tragic.
If Fayne swarms with period detail, from Lady Marie’s accounts of her attempts to drag her new Scottish husband and his dour sister Clarissa into the modern era to impressively precise glosses on developments in medical and technical theory and practice, its most significant themes emerge clearly. Key among them is the blight of primogeniture – the rigid adherence to the continuation of power and property through the male line that reduces women to breeding machines and their female offspring to ornamental redundancies until they, too, are ready to produce heirs. Even worse a fate awaits those who decline to align themselves with apparently immutable categories, and Fayne’s unflinching description of the psychological and physical punishment meted out to them is harrowing and salutary. Embedded in that structure is the importance of land-owning, and here Fayne itself’s future is muddied. The “DC” in Lord Henry’s title stands for disputed county, because Fayne lies on the border between England and Scotland; MacDonald’s cleverly Dickensian touch here is to conjure a sort of judgment of Solomon, by which should the dispute ever be resolved, the title and all that goes with it will be abolished. As with Jarndyce v Jarndyce, the battle for supremacy can lead only to the immiseration of all involved. Even the baddies suffer.
Clarissa, Henry’s sister, has focused all her energies into marrying him off and securing Fayne’s future, but is herself loveless and tortured by rheumatism, allowing a highly qualified sympathy to mitigate her vicious attempts to conceal her machinations from first Marie and then Charlotte. But throughout all the intricacies of plot – we are in the world of codicils, hidden documents and secret pacts – it is Charlotte’s pain that consistently galvanises the narrative. Steadfastly loyal to her father, even as he least deserves it, yet aware of far deeper impulses that she must somehow find a way to confront, she is a tremendously affecting narrator: honourable by temperament, and tested by vicissitude and prejudice, forging ahead even when her family forces her into the corsets and whalebones that barely allow her to put one foot in front of the other.
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Fayne is a lengthy novel that requires committed immersion and a willingness to scamper along as it switches between sprite-filled moorland and both the genteel crescents and grimly violent slums of Edinburgh, through diversions and blind alleys. It is also a novel about how the struggle to come into one’s own rarely plays out on a level field, and allies may be found in unlikely places.
