Former Bowdoin Writer-in-Residence Margot Livesey's seventh and newest novel is an homage to Charlotte Brontë's 1847 classic, "Jane Eyre."
Having never successfully finished any work by a Brontë sister, however, my experience reading Livesey's "The Flight of Gemma Hardy" felt highly akin to reading Harry Potter.
From the get-go, the parallels between "Gemma Hardy" and "Harry Potter" are overwhelming. Four hundred one of the 443 pages of Livesey's work are set in Scotland, just across the way from the country that Harry calls home. And, like Harry, Livesey's narrator and protagonist—Gemma—lives in a room under the stairs of her aunt's home bemoaning the death of both her parents years after the fact. Things hit the fan when Harry Potter himself makes a guest appearance in Livesey's novel—"a man smelling of onions, his glasses...mended with black tape and his jacket...worn and patched"—to steal the titular character's wallet.
"Harry Potter" may be a cultural touchstone, but I was never the biggest fan. I read each of Rowling's books at least once, but consider myself a spectator to the series' popularity more than anything else. I don't know why I bothered reading "Harry Potter" but did so all the same.
Reading "The Flight of Gemma Hardy," I found myself feeling like a spectator once more. The narrative didn't strike me as believable enough for any other kind of reading; like many readers, I'm still puzzling over one event that takes place two-thirds of the way in.
And for a story supposedly set in the '50s and '60s, there are few descriptions of technology (two "aeroplanes," one phone and no TVs are described), lots of birdwatching, and an incredible amount of time spent keeping house. On this last point, it's as if Livesey couldn't come up with an occupation for her protagonist that didn't involve either babysitting of doing the dishes in a major way. "Gemma Hardy" might have made more sense had it taken place in the 19th century like "Jane Eyre."
And although there aren't any expecto patronums or wingardium leviosas in Livesey's seventh novel, her story does flirt with the supernatural. Primarily a realist work, "Gemma Hardy" nonetheless describes encounters with shadowy figures, ghosts and disembodied voices. But when it comes to the writing, there's little magic to be had, despite the fact that both Amazon users and the New York Times Book Review have praised Livesey's figurative language.
In one passage, Gemma describes a friend she makes at her boarding school by saying, "She was afraid of numbers the way some people are of spiders. The sight of them made her want to hide. What I loved about them, their clarity, was for her duplicity. Behind an innocent 2, or 5, or 9, she spied a mass of traps and pitfalls."
More often, however, the language is excessively florid. Consider a phrase Livesey uses on multiple occasions: "Quickly I ran..." Twenty bucks to the first person who can show me how to run any other way.
All the same, a few of the characters with whom Livesey's protagonist comes into contact are well-fleshed out. At one point, Gemma serves as an au pair to a young boy named Robin, whose fear of abandonment serves as an interesting parallel to her own preoccupation with losing those who love her.
As sad as that sounds, Gemma constantly feels herself deserving of more than she's given. So much so that it's refreshing when she's flummoxed by other characters who point out how entitled she can act. Although I found Harry Potter equally bratty (he struck me more as a lucky wizard than a skilled one), at least Livesey is aware of the same flaw in her protagonist. Although the epiphanies Gemma has about her selfishness, naïveté, and how running away from one problem sometimes only breeds others recur on a relatively regular basis, the fact that she has them at all are deft moves on Livesey's part.
Less deft is her handling of the philosophical questions her story raises: Is all love conditional? Is it possible to happily lead a double life? The efforts "Gemma Hardy" devotes to grappling with these inquiries are packaged about as cleanly as a Philly cheese steak. She writes these questions off about as quickly as she writes off my favorite character, an intellectual named Archie whose motives seem to elude him as much as they do to the reader.
I expect that it's for reasons like these that the novel only made a one-week appearance on the New York Times best-sellers list at the last—No. 35—spot.