Thursday, September 6, 2018

SciFi/Fantasy Review: The Mere Wife by Maria Dahvana Headley




  The Mere Wife is a retelling of the classic old English story of "Beowulf," updated to a more modern setting (a wealthy U.S. suburb) and told from a very different perspective - the story is mainly told from the perspective of the modern version of Grendel's mother - a veteran with PTSD who went AWOL to raise her son in secret named Dana Mills - and the young mother/wife Willa of Herot Hall (this story's version of the poem's character of Wealhtheow) as she tries to avoid being miserable in the rigid societal rules of wealthy suburban culture and tries to raise her child.  The result is a book that is very ambitious - dealing with two lead characters with emotional traumas (Mills has PTSD, Willa has been emotionally abused by her mother and suffers from depression amongst other conditions), dealing with the societal constraints of wealthy suburban life, dealing with the difficulty of love between people of different social classes, dealing with the stress and challenges of motherhood, and more.

 Unfortunately, I found The Mere Wife to be perhaps too ambitious, both in form and content, and in trying to accomplish so many things wound up watering down its impact.  The book's experiments with form - such as chapters narrated by a location or by a greek chorus of other characters - are more distracting than anything and muddle things a bit.  Furthermore the reader is quite clearly aware that the book is destined to end in tragedy if they are familiar with the original fate of the old story's version of the book's protagonists, and the adaptation doesn't add enough or change enough to not make me disappointed in how it wound up playing out.  The result is still interesting and thought provoking and worth experiencing, but in my opinion it could've used a bit of editing to become a more strong final product.

------------------------------------------------Plot Summary-----------------------------------------------
Dana Mills' military service overseas ended with her being captured and her being taped giving a message from her captors back to the U.S. before being beheaded....only to turn up alive months later straggling into an American camp, pregnant. Taken back to the US and suspected of collaboration, she flees from U.S. military forces and returns to her family's ancestral land, which has been paved over and made into a wealthy suburb.  Hiding inside the local mountain in a now forgotten train station, Mills gives birth to her son Gren, who she vows to protect.

Willa is the wife of Roger Herot, a wealthy man, who lives in the suburb that has taken over the land once belonging to Mills' ancestors.  Willa finds her life miserable - managing the household and caring for her son Dylan as per the rules of this rich suburban society, set down by the mothers of suburbia, and feels hopelessly constrained by these rules.  Once she had done married a young rock star on impulse and she still dreams of those days, where she was not so constrained by society and her beloved son.

But Gren is not so satisfied to be cooped up in the Mountain with his mother, and Dylan is not so afraid of the strange boy from the mountain.  And when they meet, their two mothers, as well as their two societies will head into a collision course that will cause great havoc on this world.
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The Mere Wife attempts to do some interesting things with how it tells its story.  Most chapters are told from the perspective of its two main characters - Willa and Dana, with Willa's perspective being told in 3rd person and Dana's being in first person, but both perspectives show their respective characters' inner thoughts and perspectives as the story unfolds.  The latter is especially important, as neither of these two characters is what would normally be considered totally "sane" and the events that each "see" at any given time may not actually be what is happening - indeed, on two separate major occasions, both from Willa's perspective, the events that occur are incredibly confused and rambling and weird, with what really happened only being revealed afterwards.  This is disorienting the first time it happens, but by the second time it has become clear what the book is trying to do and it works rather well at showing Willa's mental state as things go to hell.

Still, those aren't the only two perspectives shown in the book, and its these others where I think the book kind of overreaches.  Some chapters are told from the perspective of an omniscient narrator, seeming to be the locale itself telling the story.  Other chapters are told from the perspective of the mothers of the suburb (including Willa's mother) who form a Greek chorus essentially commenting on the events and Willa's actions.  And then there are other chapters from the perspective of Ben Woolf (gee I wonder what character he's supposed to be from the original....), the police officer called to investigate the incidents arising from the protagonist's actions.  These work substantially less well, with them sometimes being disorienting (the omniscient chapters) and the mothers just being kind of annoying, and Ben Woolf just is the least interesting and original character in the story.  I can see what the book was trying to do with these, but it does not work.

Again our two major characters - Willa and Dana - do work and present interesting stories - I'll repeat here that Willa's perspective being disorienting is a very effective way of showing her own disorientation - by the mid point to ending of the book her love for various characters has become incredibly fickle, and the clearly unreliable narration helps emphasize how much of this is due to her fragile and torn apart mental state, so it works.  Dana is also very effective as a character broken by the war and who came home to a home that was no longer in existence, with nothing but her son and no idea how to really care for him in a way that wasn't characterized by her extreme fear and that can adapt to his changing and growing mind.

Still, while our protagonists work, and the result poses some interesting questions - about the tragedy of wealthy (and I continue to emphasize wealthy, because most suburban life from my perspective is nothing like this, this is more like life in The Hamptons than life in the immediate City suburbs) town life for a woman who wants more and is expected by society to be satisfied, or about a woman who suffered extreme trauma in a war and is refused any help upon escaping it, or about motherhood of children when one is suffering from such extreme trauma - the plot wound up progressing in a way that I found unsatisfying.  The reader should be aware quite quickly that this is going to result in a tragic ending if they are familiar in any way with the original Beowulf, and the result here follows that path completely in a way that doesn't make it all feel worth it (especially in how it treats the protagonist's children Gren and Dylan, whose endings are just bad).  I critiqued similarly the tragic ending of The Queens of Innis Lear, a similar type of book (an alternate adaptation of King Lear, instead of Beowulf), but at least that book's dark ending was interesting, even if it was too dark for me, and generally wasn't offensive at times.

The Mere Wife is probably worth a read, but it just overreached for me, and the result is a book that just isn't as successful as I wanted.

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