Her Fearful Symmetry - A Moral Matter of Death & Life

Her Fearful Symmetry

Author: Audrey Niffenegger

The thing that made the twins peculiar was hard to define. People were uneasy when they saw them together without knowing exactly why. –Narrator

One may do many things in a long life. I also played a great deal of tennis and brought up three children. There's time for all sorts of adventures. –Jessica Bates

Elspeth? […] I won't forgive you.
–Robert Fanshaw

Julia had never thought of death as something that would happen to her, or to people she knew. All those people in the cemetery were just stones, names, dates. –Narrator

She would sacrifice everything. All this sadness for nothing. –Narrator

Book description from Amazon.com:

Julia and Valentina Poole are twenty-year-old sisters with an intense attachment to each other. One morning the mailman delivers a thick envelope to their house in the suburbs of Chicago. Their English aunt Elspeth Noblin has died of cancer and left them her London apartment. There are two conditions for this inheritance: that they live in the flat for a year before they sell it and that their parents not enter it. Julia and Valentina are twins. So were the girls' aunt Elspeth and their mother, Edie.

The girls move to Elspeth's flat, which borders the vast Highgate Cemetery, where Christina Rossetti, George Eliot, Stella Gibbons, and other luminaries are buried. Julia and Valentina become involved with their living neighbors: Martin, a composer of crossword puzzles who suffers from crippling OCD, and Robert, Elspeth's elusive lover, a scholar of the cemetery. They also discover that much is still alive in Highgate, including—perhaps—their aunt. 

While this book started out fairly plausible, it didn't really surprise me when it took a turn for the supernatural. Audrey Niffenegger's previous book is, after all, The Time Traveler's Wife, which focuses on a man who jumps time and space. The turn that Her Fearful Symmetry makes is one toward ghost stories and resurrections.

But more than just a supernatural leap, the storyline veers into the moral grey area within the ghostly realm. There's no way to approach the discussion of the moral dilemma without revealing one of the story's major conflicts. So, if you have the desire to read this book and don't want to learn of the ending beforehand, you should probably stop reading now.

The deceased Elspeth assists in the premature death of her "niece" Valentina and then attaches her own soul to the body. This is in opposition to the original plan agreed upon by the women, wherein the soul of Valentina was to be returned to her body following her funeral. It is Elspeth's argument that the soul, freshly removed from the body, would not have been strong enough to return only a few days later; and she took over the body herself so that it would not go to waste.

Elspeth's participation in the plot that Valentina hatches is questionable from the start. Being a ghost herself, and having experienced the first few months where she was barely more than a ball of mist and jumbled emotions, unable to do much of anything at all, she would have known from the start that the goal of reuniting body and soul would not be possible in the short time they had before the body began to decay. Yet she kept her knowledge and experience to herself and agreed to assist. In the end, all Elspeth's greed got her was an unfamiliar body, alienation from her lover and a load of guilt.

I'm not reserving all my judgment for Elspeth, however, as Valentina was the one who felt it would be better to appear dead to her family than to confront Julia about no longer wanting to mirror her twin sister's whims and life choices. And in the end all that Valentina's cowardice rewarded her with was a bodiless soul unable to live the life she so desperately wanted to be her own and not her twin's. Fools, all of them.

My takeaway: Confrontation, though rarely my first choice in any situation, is pretty much always preferable to a death-to-life scheme hatched with a greedy and resentful ghost. And being a twin is as much creepy hotel hallway as it is Doublemint commercial.