Her Fearful Symmetry
By Audrey Niffenegger
Jonathan Cape, $38.99
Reviewed by Nicky Pellegrino

The first thing people are going want to know about this book is if it’s good as Niffenegger’s best-selling debut novel The Time Traveler’s Wife. Seven years in the writing and with the author scoring an estimated $US8 million advance it’s no wonder her legions of fans have high expectations. So can Her Fearful Symmetry possibly live up to the hype?

Well certainly it’s a very different book, not as tricksy structurally as Time Traveler, not as grabby and original, not as immediate. And yet it’s rather brilliant all the same.
Essentially this is a modern ghost story. Niffenegger takes us down the overgrown paths of London’s Highgate Cemetery and steeps us in glorious gothic spookiness.

The story begins with the death of Elspeth Noblin who bequeaths her book-filled flat beside the historic cemetery to her nieces, Julia and Valentina, although she has never had anything to do with them. Her will has strict conditions: they must live in it for a year and their parents must never enter.
And so the pretty, young American twins are transplanted into this eccentric new world. Gradually they meet the other characters who inhabit their building: Martin an obsessive compulsive so crippled by his mental illness that he cannot leave his apartment and Robert who is paralysed by grief for his dead lover Elspeth and spends his days volunteering as a guide for cemetery tours. For a long time none of them realise there is another presence in their frigidly cold rooms but when they do it changes everything.

The story has things in common with Niffenegger’s smash hit debut - the idea of a love that transcends time and thwarts convention, the fascination with the offbeat. She has a talent for exploiting aspects of the paranormal that we’ve long been fascinated with – last time it was time travel, this the strangeness of twins. But Her Fearful Symmetry is a more linear story, rich in detail and unfolded at a gentler pace. The ghost at the centre of it is a triumph, very human, almost believable and the ending is not one you’ll see coming.
This is a novel that’s going to divide opinions. Those who found The Time Traveler’s Wife with its lurches back and forth in time confusing will have no trouble with this one. But there will be some among Niffenegger’s devoted fans disappointed that she hasn’t stuck to the same, winning formula. Personally I loved it. When I finished the last page I could have happily turned back to the beginning and read it again. This is an original, engrossing story and I very much hope we won’t have to wait another seven years for the next one.

FOOTNOTE:

Nicky Pellegrino, in addition to being a succcesful author of popular fiction, (her latest The Italian Wedding was published in May this year), is also the Books Editor of the Herald on Sunday where the above review was first published on 4 October