Mind Picker: Study for Obedience

I wanted to be good in the terrible world. I thought of the birds. I accumulated fidelities in this space of diminishing returns. On the one hand, I felt that my obedience had been rewarded at last. On the other, in this cold and beautiful countryside, I feared I was living a life which I had done nothing to earn and I felt sure of some swift and terrible retribution. As I bit into the last strawberry, I began to weep because language, I felt, was no longer at our disposal, because there was nothing in the word that we could use. Nothing settled in place.

The title of Study for Obedience hearkens to the world of painting, and as it has been widely noted that author Sarah Bernstein had been inspired by a retrospective of feminist painter Paula Rego’s work (even using Rego’s words as an epigraph: I can turn the tables and do as I want. I can make women stronger. I can make them obedient and murderous at the same time.), it should come as no surprise that Bernstein’s novel comes across as painterly. Impressionistic and pointillist, showcasing tone and technique over overt subject matter, Bernstein nonetheless masterfully explores notions of guilt and innocence, language and belonging, history and destiny, and the complicity of those who claim to have been simply following orders. A Gothic rural horror that reads like a mashup of Max Porter and Shirley Jackson, I experienced this viscerally — not really knowing if Bernstein was giving us a modern fairytale until late references to reality recall horror beyond anything the Brothers Grimm imagined. I loved every bit of this experience — even if, perhaps especially if, I had to work to make meaning — and I will absolutely read the author again. (And speaking of paintings: Why does this cover look like someone killed Donna Tartt’s Goldfinch?) Slightly spoilery from here (I knew nothing going in and would recommend the same to other readers). The novel opens:

It was the year the sow eradicated her piglets. It was a swift and menacing time. One of the local dogs was having a phantom pregnancy. Things were leaving one place and showing up in another. It was springtime when I arrived in the country, an east wind blowing, an uncanny wind as it turned out. Certain things began to arise. The pigs came later though not much, and even if I had only recently arrived, had no livestock-caretaking responsibilities, had only been in to look, safely on one side of the electric fence, I knew they were right to hold me responsible. But all that as I said came later.

An unnamed woman relocates to an unnamed “northern country” — the place from whence her ancestors hailed — in order to act as housekeeper for her eldest brother: a very wealthy businessman, recently divorced, who has bought and renovated an impressive manor house on the edge of a small village. The entire novel is an interior monologue from this woman’s POV, and while it might not be quite correct to call her an unreliable narrator, it’s clear that we are getting only her version of events. She tells us early that she is the youngest child in her family, that she has more siblings than she would care to count, and while they had all trained her in servitude and obedience, this eldest brother, in particular, has made it his mission throughout her life to stamp out the woman’s personal thoughts and desires.

As she cheerfully does chores for her brother — chopping wood (for ambience in the centrally-heated home), the daily shopping, the cooking and cleaning — she realises that she’s being shunned by the locals (whose language, not incidentally, she’s unable to pick up): as she walks through town, parents shield their children; diners at the local cafe hook their fingers in the sign of the cross at the sight of her; and when she volunteers at the local farm, she is sent a message to muck out the stalls and avoid all contact with people and animals. Strange events begin to occur — and the woman finds herself under suspicion — and it’s hard to tell if they distrust her because she’s woman, or if they suspect that she’s a witch, or if there is some other, more insidious, prejudice at play (it doesn’t help things that the woman likes to twist reeds into human shapes and leave them on folks’ doorsteps in the middle of the night).

This is a short book with long paragraphs (running into pages), and while I savoured the language, it’s hard to excerpt passages that give the full flavour. I was often amused, as when we learn the the woman bathes and dresses her brother in the course of her duties — soaping his back and “executing Indian head massages” — and when he becomes listless, and after watching a documentary on horses, the woman decides to purchase some appropriate curry combs in order to restore her brother:

I walked around the shop perusing the impressively thorough selection of brushes on offer, ranging in size from the infinitesimal — designed, I reasoned, to brush the teeth of a cat — this perhaps to smooth the skating rink erected on the town's lake each winter. Somewhere in the middle of these two (for the tools were arranged by size) I found three brushes roughly adequate to the dimensions of my brother, that could provide coverage and relief to his longest flank as well to his littlest fingers.

(I hope that comes across as absurdly funny as I found it to be.) This next point is the slight spoiler of which I warned: There is also a real sense of dread and horror in the storyline. I would not have been surprised if it turned out that the woman was a ghost or a vampire (because of the way the townsfolk reacted and because she mentions that she’s always been repulsed by the idea of entering a church), but through hints and feints, we eventually learn that she is Jewish and that her family had escaped the area in the last century. Which, to the townspeople, makes her a kind of zombie: They thought she and her people were dead and gone, and here she is, risen from the ashes of history to confront them with their past:

He could easily understand the people of the town, he told me one golden summer evening, as we sat looking out on to the garden, their attitudes then, their attitudes now, how they felt they had got a raw deal, had been cut off from fortune by some accident of fate, merely because what at a certain point they and their forebears had called efficiency the rest of the world had, in stages, and one by one, rather like dominoes falling against one another in a tidy sequence until they found themselves all together in a heap, until everything came to an end, determined to be acts of barbarism. And how many of those claiming to be upright had agreed that none was too many? And how many of them in truth, in their heart of hearts, could say they were not guilty? What after all was the difference between thought and deed? Was it a question of scale, or systemisation? What about the pit parties? What about the dogs?

So, back to the title: There’s the idea of obedient soldiers simply “following orders” as they committed atrocities, but there’s also the idea of women like our main character subdued into obedience, made monstrous in response. What was the purpose of the reed figures that scared everyone so? Why did the brother’s health start to decline under her care? The unnamed country could easily have contained a dense forest with a witch living in a candy house at its heart, and who could blame folks for shunning her? This was unsettling, and this was art; just to my tastes.