The new silhouette was mature and stately. It was more beautiful than the previous one. Sadie wanted the silhouette to turn her head and explain herself. She leaned forward and pulled the bag to her. It was as though she were holding Marie’s head in her hands, but Marie refused to look her in the eye.
When you read a book entitled When We Lost Our Heads — featuring a decadently wealthy main character named Marie Antoine, heiress to a sugar fortune and whose likeness is featured on every bag sold (“Everyone knew Marie from her profile on the sugar bags. It represented sweetness. It represented being able to eat cake instead of bread.”) — you might think you know where this book is going. But this is from the mind of Heather O’Neill. Virtuoso of the clever metaphor, doyen of dazzling wordplay whose humour sweetens the political punch, O’Neill never fails to surprise, delight, and provoke. With other characters named Mary Robespierre, Jeanne-Pauline Marat, and Georgina Danton, revolution is certainly on the horizon, but the enemy is not simply, or solely, L'Ancien Régime. Focussing on an extraordinary friendship set against the backdrop of Industrial Age Montreal, this is class warfare, sex warfare, gender warfare; referencing Dickens by way of Christina Rossetti and the two Marys, Wollstonecraft and Shelley, with the Marquis de Sade thrown in as well. This is literary, gritty, socially astute, and I loved every page of it; I will boldly declare it’s my favourite O’Neill novel so far. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
Every mother engages in an act of parenting they know isn’t a great idea. They allow something to slide. And this is the thing that causes the child to develop a personality and also all their worst inclinations and predispositions and habits. The mother’s neglect seals the child’s doom. Thus, we can safely blame all crimes on mothers.
The initiating tone is amusingly wry, right up until it becomes deadly serious. In the beginning we meet young, motherless Marie Antoine — envy of all the girls on Montreal’s Golden Mile for her superior wealth, beauty, and charm — and she might have drifted through life forever in her bubble of self-satisfaction if, when she was twelve, she hadn’t come across another young girl whose mysterious aura of artistic self-composure hadn’t pierced Marie like a lightning strike. The profound and inexplicable attraction is mutual for this Sadie Arnett — the unloved daughter of social climbers, Sadie will be forced into Marie’s orbit before she has a chance to dissect her own desires — and the friends are so well-matched, like “two dolls that were being marketed to girls, one fair, one dark”, that their friendship seems both destined and doomed from the start. In the style of a Victorian novel, there will be tragedy, separations, coincidence and dramatic revelations, and as the narrative descends the hill from the mansion that sugar bought on the Golden Mile to a character-rich brothel in the lower reaches of Montreal’s Squalid Mile, we are given a soapbox-side view from which to watch the fomenting of La Révolution.
Every decent friendship comes with a drop of hatred. But that hatred is like honey in the tea. It makes it addictive.
At its heart, this is the story of Marie and Sadie’s fraught friendship, but more precisely, this is the story of women; the restricted lives of women from all classes (but especially the working poor); the impotence of most and the inflamed actions of the bold and desperate. I appreciated that O’Neill flipped the genders of the architects of the French Revolution (Robespierre, Marat, Danton; even the Marquis de Sade), for if the history of women’s revolt had been “written in invisible ink”, this is a truly satisfying effort to “put the page up against the window and let a light shine through it”. I don’t want to reveal any more about the plot, but as always, I can’t help sampling some of O’Neill’s metaphorical exuberance.
There was much intriguing imagery this time around involving puppets:
• A group of bats flew past the window of the brothel, as though they were shadow puppets who had escaped a child’s wall.
• Madame was an older woman who wore a burgundy dress with an enormous skirt and a tight bonnet on her head. It was a mystery what might be found underneath her large skirt. One might imagine if she lifted it, there would be a small puppet theater underneath, where all the puppets were having delirious sex.
• They danced like they had no feet but were swinging around as though they were two swirling puppets in the hands of a careless puppeteer.
And as seems to be her routine imagery, there was much involving roses and cats and the moon:
• The mansion was surrounded by a thick bed of beautifully kept pink roses. They were like ballerinas taking a break and sitting down in their tutus.
• She found the violin, took it out of the case, and tried playing a note on it. It sounded like a black cat who was on the gallows confessing to all the bad luck it had caused.
• The moon was full. It looked like a breast engorged with milk because of all the babies crying in the night.
And, as always, paragraphs bursting with analogy and anthropomorphism (to my delight):
The clouds were puffy and large like the foam at the top of a glass of beer. Marie had never seen the sea before. She stretched her arms out toward it. There was a large brass band playing as she ran about collecting seashells. A musician held a French horn to his head that looked like the ear of an elephant pricking up to hear a sound. Marie stood in the sea. She ran after the waves in her bare feet. The sea changed its mind about retreating. It turned around and came after her. The sand on the beach tried to hold on to the impression of her footprints for as long as possible after she left. She screamed when the water hit her ankles. It was colder than the snow in Canada. It had the feel of bottles striking up against her ankles. She kept looking down to see if there were bottle messages from Sadie. But there was nothing there but the pain the ocean caused. Then seaweed grabbed at her ankles as though mermaids were casting their nets to catch her.
Yet, although I did delight in the language, I was always aware that this was a serious work of political and feminist fiction:
Humorous books were often the most subversive ones. People became free in literature first. It was through books that new ideas entered the general population.
I loved every bit of this; entertained and provoked, I couldn’t ask for more.
