Emotionally Weird

Title: Emotionally Weird
Author: Kate Atkinson
ISBN: 0 312 20324 1
Published: Picador USA
Date: 2000

Book quote:

“You hadn’t kissed him?” (How hard is seems to be to get a kiss off the man of one’s dreams. Has Nora ever been kissed?)



- No, she says regretfully – as you would if you were thirty-eight and had never been kissed, but then I am nearly twenty-one and have been kissed many times and all of them put together aren’t worth an imaginary kiss with Ferdinand.

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Not so much emotionally weird, as metatextually weird. Oh, enjoyable, without a doubt. One can’t help feeling as one reads, however, that the author is slightly off her rocker. If you want to read something and come away with an aching hairline (due to permanently raised eyebrows) and aching sides (due to intermittent convulsive laughter), this is the one for you.
Story. Hm, let’s see. Effie is a 21-year old, living with her mother in a weather-battered deserted holiday home off the coast of Scotland. Her mother’s inscrutable, busy turning into a geological feature, as Effie puts it, and has seemingly been on the run for decades: what from, Effie has no idea. On their island, they tell each other their stories. Effie tells of her life at Dundee University in the early 1970s, amid the expected shambles and drug-induced students and teachers all steeped in their own scandals and obsessions. Her mother (very unwillingly) contributes some short and unembellished accounts of the falling fortunes and exceptionally strange family life of her ancestors, the Stuart-Murrays.

But that’s not the only way the narrative is broken up. The bulk of the text is Effie’s account, in standard print (Times New Roman). Nora (her mother) and text from their conversations while on the island, is in something like a small, cramped Arial Narrow. Effie’s English Literature colleagues at Dundee all write pieces of something, and they all likewise have their fonts. Kevin (a fat geek obsessed with writing a Dungeons and Dragons type epic) writes in something like Matura MT Script. Effie herself writes mysteries and her eternal essay on George Elliot in a small Courier. One of the teachers’ slovenly wives writes a romance novel in a precise and flowing script. You get the drift. (Unfortunately Blogger doesn't t so fonts, I've just realized.)

The scripts and stories are not necessarily distinguished from the ‘real’ story (if such a thing exists): au contraire. In fact, for the first page or so of the book we’re plunged straight into the detective mystery which Effie is writing: which, if moderately intriguing, is deliberately amateurishly written. I did wonder at this choice of style for the very opening paragraph: it takes a confidence bordering on the suicidal.

After that a seeming solidity sets in for a while, with Effie’s account of her life at university. There’s plenty of humour, in all forms. I was reading the opening chapters in a public place and had to close the book and leave due to eruptions of irrepressible, embarrassing laughter. Then we start getting more of the metatextual element raising its head and slapping up around in a disorientating (but not entirely unpleasant) way.

The ‘plot’ is changed, re-written and re-shaped by the desires and suggestions of the characters themselves. Phrases and situations tumble about impossibly, translated from future narrations into later versions of past events, echoes and mirrors and ghosts of textual allusions jump from behind bushes. Supremely unnervingly, even (or perhaps especially) the readers’ own experiences whilst reading, and their anticipated objections and desires, are woven consciously into the crazy fabric. The readers swim in and out, referred to as the ‘poor confused narratees’ through the waves of text.

Amongst this anarchy, what is the ‘real’ story? Ostensibly the whole narrative swings round the fulcrum of Effie trying to find out who her father was, and the story of her family. The conclusions are reached by such an ambiguous route that although she seems satisfied with final revelations (if ‘satisfied’ is the right word) one hardly knows what to believe. It’s no coincidence that the never-ending and seemingly impossible battle to get her George Elliot essay written is concluded ambiguously when she attempts to hand it in but had no idea how it became the mangled mess she pulls out of her bag. The essay is on ‘Middlemarch’, but George Elliot’s ‘Silas Marner’ looms through the pages as another unspoken ghost: another mirror of dubious parentage and unsuspected treasures lost and found, along with its own semi-orphaned wild-haired child, Eppie.


In short, this was a vastly entertaining and pleasing book, but make sure you’re sober when you read it. Otherwise you’ll just put the trippy factor down to whatever substances you’ve been indulging in. Come here for a bona-fide text-induced buzz.