A gingerbread addict once told Harriet that eating her gingerbread is like eating revenge. “It's like noshing on the actual and anatomical heart of somebody who scarred your beloved and thought they'd got away with it,” the gingerbread addict said. “That heart, ground to ash and shot through with darts of heat, salt, spice, and sulfurous syrup, as if honey was measured out, set ablaze, and trickled through the dough along with the liquefied spoon. You are phenomenal. You've ruined my life forever. Thank you.”
Helen Oyeyemi is such an inventive and original writer – Gingerbread is the second novel I've read of hers, after Boy, Snow, Bird a few years ago – and while, once again, I was dazzled by her turns of phrase, enchanted by her fable-like ethos, I was, once again, underwhelmed by the overall story and reading experience. What began as absolutely bewitching became, frankly, dull and pointless; I could forgive a story for no deeper meaning if only it had more story to it. (Note: I read an ARC and passages quoted may not be in their final form.)
Harriet and Margot have the kind of past that makes the present dubious. Talking or thinking about “there” lends “here” a hallucinatory quality that she could frankly do without. Pull the thread too hard and both skeins unravel simultaneously. Still. Each time Harriet raises her hand, she sees the two rings on her middle finger. The unaltered fact of Gretel is promising.As Gingerbread begins, we meet three generations of the Lee family; two (soon to be three) prematurely grey-haired women who share a family gingerbread recipe and roots in the far-off country of Druhástrana (which doesn't exist on official maps, to the women's consternation). It seems to be a story about the overwhelmed mother (Harriet) of a semi-difficult teenager (Perdita) living in London, and Harriet's efforts to fit in (and make friends through gingerbread) are by turns funny and touching. As weirdly magical and unsettling events are taken as routine in the Lee household, there's a feeling that anything could happen; and I liked that feeling. A major event prompts Harriet to finally tell her daughter the story of how she and her mother, Margot, left Druhástrana, and everything set in that country was weird and imaginative and thoroughly entertaining. When the story moved to Harriet and Margot's early days in England, however, I found the whole thing convoluted with interchangeable characters that I couldn't keep straight (and that I didn't care about), and as the timeline catches up to the present and carries on to what happens next, I was thoroughly bored; the ending doing nothing to make the overall experience more worthwhile in retrospect.
Perdita's been giving it a lot of thought, and she thinks they mistook her for Harriet. She is, after all, about the age that Harriet was when they last saw her, and they are as much alike in build and facial features as one would expect a mother and daughter to be. One wouldn't call them twins, but seeing Perdita for the first time must have been like seeing Harriet after an interval, after a few details had been forgotten. The gray-haired seventeen-year-old comes in and she's like a gingerbread ghost, her chronological age bearing very little relation to her exterior. Then Perdita spoke, and Halloween was canceled.Still, even in the dull bits, there are these engaging passages that I admired. I liked that, while it's never stated straight out that Druhástrana is a nation of Black people, references to dreadlocks and dark skin make you realise that it must be – and it was interesting to me to consider that when no mention is made of race, I must be defaulting to white in my mind if such hints are telling me that I'm imagining it wrong. Also interesting to read about characters of no fixed sexuality – more than one dabbles in a relationship with the opposite sex, and then in same sex, without commentary or surprise to those around them. Despite changelings and curses and talking dolls, Oyeyemi writes a world where people just are what they are, without labels or society dragging them down. The scenes set in Druhástrana (a name which Wikipedia tells me was also the name of a Slovakian rap group that translates into English as “over there”) were just interesting enough to make me not regret reading Gingerbread, but I can't say this was really to my taste.
