The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox

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The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox held me spellbound as I traced the life of Esme Lennox, a supposedly batty, elderly woman let loose from an asylum after sixty years. If you’ve read the description of the book, you know that Esme has been in a mental institution for 60 years. This reminded me so much of a book I recently read , "What She Left Behind" also about a woman committed because her father said so , not because she was insane.” Esme and Kitty grew up in a big house in a beautiful part of India. After a tragedy, the family “return” to the parents’ native Scotland. They move into their imperious grandmother’s Edinburgh home. Esme is intelligent, and a good pianist, but outspoken and unconventional. She resists the preparation for society and a good marriage that Kitty, six years older, accepts. Esme reaches out and laces both her hands round one of Iris’s. ‘You have come to take me away,’ she says, in an urgent voice. ‘That is why you are here.’ Iris studies her face. Esme looks nothing like her grandmother. Can it really be possible that she and this woman are related? ‘Esme, I didn’t even know you existed until yesterday. I’d never even heard your name before. I would like to help you, I really would—’ ‘Is that why you are here? Tell me yes or no.’ ‘I will help you all I can—’ ‘Yes or no,’ Esme repeats. Iris swallows hard. ‘No,’ she says, ‘I can’t. I . . . I haven’t had the chance to—’ But Esme is withdrawing her hands, turning her head away from her. And something about her changes, and Iris has to hold her breath because she has seen something passing over the woman’s face, like a shadow cast on water. Iris stares, long after the impression has gone, long after Esme has got up and crossed the room and disappeared through one of the doors. Iris cannot believe it. In Esme’s face, for a moment, she saw her father’s.” Jane Gardam writing in The Guardian praises the novel: 'a short book about a long life has the dream-like intensity of imagination and the gift of conveying pain, fear and sometimes rapture for which O'Farrell is known. The prose is spare, yet the Edwardian world it describes crosses two continents and is rich and clear as stained glass. It moves with ease between the mimosa trees of an Indian childhood and the iron-grey seas of Fife in old age. She can make the economical style seem slow, ruminative and rather old-fashioned ("Let us begin with two girls at a dance"), yet except when the host of minor characters occasionally becomes confusing, the story never flags. And it is a story so historically important that one ceases to think of "style" and "the novel" altogether.' and she concludes that 'Beneath the cool Edwardian detail of this elegantly written book lie the horrors of a Gothic novel. Scottish propriety conceals rape and murder, torture, hypocrisy and violent sex. The comfort is that the lunacy laws are now reformed and the small, bewildered orphans of the raj are no more.' [1]

As a kid, Esme is quirky, feisty, independent. She’s engaged in the world with such zest and intensity it’s hard not to love her. It’s her misfortune to be raised in 1930s Scotland, where life is full of rules. Esme doesn’t fit the mold of what a girl should act like, and this can get her in trouble. I shook my head. The former nurse had to swallow at this point and I almost felt tearful myself because I could sense what was coming.

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The relationship between Iris and Alex is a complex one. How does it seem to have influenced their relationships with others? By the end of the novel, do you think they had reached any kind of resolution? O’Farrell’s novel is steeped in secrets. As the story of Esme and Kitty unfolds simultaneously with the story of Iris and Alex, O’Farrell offers clues about the true nature of the relationships between these characters. What effect does this have on your compassion for them? How do these two stories relate to each other? How have years of incarceration affected Esme? Has she retained any of the qualities we see in young Esme, before she is committed? Does she seem sane to you?

Euphemia Esme Lennox was brought up as a child in India with her elder sister Kathleen (Kitty), but following the death of her baby brother Hugo the family moved to Edinburgh. The plot then shifts to the present day: Iris discovers that she has a great aunt in a psychiatric unit, who has been there for some sixty years. Iris never knew about her great aunt, as her grandmother Kathleen suffering from Alzheimer's, has never revealed that she had a sister. The narrative shifts between Esme's childhood in the 1930s and the present day as Iris tries to discover the truth about what happened to Esme. It is eventually revealed that Esme is in fact Iris's grandmother, becoming pregnant as a result of rape, and due to her incarceration in the asylum the baby was adopted by Kitty. We are introduced to Esme and her older sister Kitty who have spent their childhood days in India. Whereas Kitty is always immaculately attired, timid, and obedient to a fault, Esme often loses a glove or ribbon, is restless, free-spirited, out-spoken, and rebellious. Esme is considered a difficult child, disliked by her parents, and often punished. At sixteen, an unfortunate encounter at a party precipitated Esme’s confinement in Cauldstone Asylum. Her pleas to be spared were ignored.While the story that unfolds is a relatively fast read, it does skip from one narrator to another without much to mark the difference except breaks from one paragraph to a new one, an extra line or two in space, and someone else is relaying their views – still, I was always aware of the change in narrator when it happened, so I didn’t find it to be confusing, and I felt it gave a broader view of the overall story. This story is recounted through several viewpoints, through the stories of Iris, Esme, and Esme’s sister Kitty. Both Esme and Kitty are now elderly, and Kitty, grandmother of Iris, is in a care facility, an Alzheimer’s patient. Esme has just been released into the care of Iris, and Iris is still trying to piece together how this woman she never knew existed until days before has come to be her responsibility, to be in her life. There are books that stay with us for a long time. The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox is one such book for me. This is a novel with a very complex time scheme. What techniques does the author use to handle this?