Published in the Sunday Times (02/02/2020)
My Dark Vanessa ****
Kate Elizabeth Russell
4th Estate, R305
Published simultaneously in 25 countries last week, My Dark Vanessa is being touted as "a novel to define our era" - meaning, presumably, the #metoo era - but whether it lives up to this hype remains to be seen. There is certainly no shortage of meaningful insight in the book. You can hardly turn a page without being punched in the gut by a telling phrase, and there are 368 pages, so that's a lot of punching.
For example, on page 81 narrator Vanessa Wye, in response to her teacher's declaration that he is "pathetically in love" with her, makes this telling observation: "As soon as he says this, I become someone somebody else is in love with, and not just some dumb boy my own age but a man who has already lived an entire life, who has done and seen so much and still thinks I'm worthy of his love. I feel forced over a threshold, thrust out of my ordinary life into a place where it's possible for grown men to be so pathetically in love with me they fall at my feet."
In similar vein, on page 157 Vanessa says: "Someday when people ask me, 'Who was your first lover?' the truth will set me apart. Not some ordinary boy, but an older man: my teacher."
To appreciate the telling power of these excerpts you need to know that Vanessa at this point is 15 and her teacher, Jacob Strane, is 42. A man who has already lived an entire life, who has done and seen so much and taught so many adolescents cannot but understand what he is doing to this young girl. Yet Vanessa will continue to insist that she was the powerful party in this unbalanced coalition. She will not call herself a victim, not even years later when #metoo is in full flower and other recipients of Strane's insidious affections are calling for his head.
On page 258, when she is 32 but emotionally still stuck at 15, Vanessa tells her therapist that she "feels backed into a corner" by the pressure to go public with her story. She holds on to the delusion that sustains her, the belief that she was the one in charge: "I shouldn't be part of this conversation at all! I wasn't abused, not like other women are claiming to have been."
She tells another woman who tries to convince her to speak out that what Strane did was not paedophilia. The correct term, she says, is "ephebophile".
"Grooming" is what we now call it when an adult sets out to seduce a child, regardless of whether that child is five or 15. It is a pathetically inadequate word for the conscious and deliberate shattering of innocence. It fails utterly to capture what all the Stranes have done to all the Vanessas. Having sex with supposedly willing minors is almost the least of it - the twisting of their perceptions and the erosion of their selfhood leave far deeper scars.
This is the insight that gives Kate Elizabeth Russell's novel its tragic impact. Strane was not just Vanessa's first lover. Nor was he simply a Svengali trying to direct the course of a young woman's development. He knowingly steered his victim into moulding her vivid teenage imagination, her fledgling febrile longings and her poetic fantasies around him. He became the centre of her universe, the core of her consciousness, leaving her with an unshakeable load of guilt and grief. In short, he destroyed her life.
Many reviewers will note that My Dark Vanessa is Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, written for the 21st century from Lolita's point of view. Russell makes no secret of this: the book is dedicated to "the real-life Dolores Hazes and Vanessa Wyes whose stories have not yet been heard, believed or understood". And early on in his grooming crusade Strane gives Vanessa his copy of Lolita, which, naturally, becomes her favourite book and a template for her life.
She shocks and angers another teacher by describing it as "a love story". Part of her knows it is not but to acknowledge that part would be to shatter the illusions that shore up the ruins of her life.
Whether or not it defines an era, this is a timely and painfully perceptive tale. It exposes the extent of damage done to young women who feel they cannot claim to have been raped by older men but from whom perhaps even more has been taken.
In the careful reeling-in of an impressionable adolescent, the older man who understands young desires and imaginations commits a criminal act of pathologically callous dimensions.
Those who mock the #metoo movement, dismissing it as an hysterical bandwagon, would do well to read this book.
The hordes of women who have been brave enough to overcome their internalised shame and change their damaging misperceptions of the past might not be magically healed by acknowledging themselves as victims, but the alternative is to live Vanessa Wye's half-life- and that is not a state anyone would wish on someone else. @deGrootS1
