PARIS, AUGUST
I had left my winter coat in the Express dry-cleaners on Rue des Carmes nine months ago. At that time, I was pale and blue, now I was tanned and the blue was fading. It was a hot day to be wearing the trilby hat.
With time slips, doppelgängers, doublings, and identity crises, there’s an air of unsettled reality to Deborah Levy’s August Blue; and being set in the post-lockdown Covid days of first vaccines and voluntary mask use, there’s certainly something relatable about this questioning of who we are; questioning how we live. With a stream of artists evoked — from Rachmaninoff and Isadora Duncan to Proust and French film director Agnès Varda — who are presented as having used art to explore their own realities, Levy seems to be asking the reader to search for meaning beyond the printed page (and with some [widely noted in other reviews] odd parallels to the movie Frozen and what appear to be mistakes in the timeline, I really don’t think the author wants us to take her at her literal words here). As straightforward storytelling, this is an odd little tale of a young woman trying to figure out who she is (and why she is and why she continues to be), but as an artistic rendering of our (more or less) collective post-Covid experience, Levy captures something very true about the unreality of the time; it feels essential that artists like Levy try to capture what, beyond the base details, most of us have trouble putting into words about the pandemic experience — even if the reader needs to peek behind the words to see it. I loved this. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
She seemed to be about my age, thirty-four, and like me she was wearing a tightly belted green raincoat. It was almost identical to mine, except hers had three gold buttons sewn on to the cuffs. We obviously wanted the same things. My startling thought at that moment was that she and I were the same person. She was me and I was her. Perhaps she was a little more than I was. I sensed she had known I was standing nearby and that she was taunting me.
As the story begins, we meet Elsa M. Anderson: a world-famous classical pianist who, after embarrassing herself at a recent concert, has decided to take a break from performing; tutoring some over-privileged children while she decides what comes next. Walking through an Athens flea market, Elsa sees a woman buying some mechanical horse toys and she gets the uncanny feeling that this woman is her double, even if they don’t quite look the same. As Elsa travels from Greece to Paris to London and Sardinia, she’ll cross paths with this woman a few more times (always not quite seeing her face behind a blue medical mask). And as her adoptive father (and piano teacher) lays dying of a lung tumour, Elsa will finally seek some answers about who she is, discover who he really is, and make some decisions about how to live the rest of her life. But that’s just the plot.
I was a natural blue
I am a natural blue
I was, I am.
Perhaps anticipating her encroaching identity crisis, Elsa had recently dyed her trademark waist-length chestnut hair a deep shade of blue (and I say “trademark” because apparently Elsa is so famous that she’s recognised on the street: Of course I bloody know who you are.) But beyond the literally blue hair, coupled with the name “Elsa” (last name Anderson), it would seem that we’re supposed to be put in mind of the movie Frozen (which I have not seen as I have no littles around), and looking deeper than the literal, you might be put in mind of the movie’s source material — Hans Christian Anderson’s The Snow Queen — and looking a little deeper than that, you might learn that he had based the ice-hearted main character of that story on the opera singer Jenny Lind, who had not returned Anderson’s affections — Jenny Lind being, like Elsa, a world famous performer who walked away from the stage at a young age. (And then you might learn that Anderson may have been gay, or perhaps bisexual, and different characters from August Blue might click into place.)
Elsa dying her hair blue seems to inspire this novel’s title, but looking deeper, one discovers a nineteenth century painting of that name by British artist Henry Scott Tuke which depicts four boys (three of them naked) swimming in Falmouth harbour — and not only do characters in the novel go skinny dipping, but the painting is noted for evoking both innocence and homoeroticism (again hearkening back to characters in the book). Looking even deeper, we learn that the title of the painting is taken from the poem “The Sundew” by Algernon Swinburne, which includes the lines:
Thou wert not worth green midsummer
Nor fit to live to August blue
These lines, taken as inspiration for Tuke’s “idyllic” painting, might seem to stress making the most of the time we’re given (a worthwhile lesson in pandemic times), but variously googled analyses of the poem assure me that the point Swinburne was trying to make (in his first collection of poems, which was considered scandalous at the time for its many taboo topics) was that one must look beyond the surface (in this case, of what appears on the surface to be a poem about unrequited love) for the deeper truths disguised in art. And if I discovered all of this, there’s no doubt that Levy intentionally hid her kernel of common truths within the Frozen —> Snow Queen —> HC Anderson —> Jenny Lind puzzle, wrapped in the dyed-in-August blue hair —> Tuke —> Swinburne —> sundew enigma. But even if the reader isn’t inclined to drill down on the sources, August Blue truly captures the sense of unreality — the time warpy disconnection to “real life” that I know I went through — and this tone and mood are rewarding in their own right. On and off the page, I enjoyed every bit of this.
It felt as if everything had changed and everything was the same. The roots of the trees under the tarmac of Boulevard Saint-Germain would keep growing. The roots of my hair would keep growing out the blue. The sea levels would keep rising. Two young people standing by the bus stop were kissing. Frantic kissing. As if this devouring of each other was an existential duty. The obligation to keep the life drive going strong when death is our ultimate destiny.
