When the Wallpaper is Alive
I read Freya Marske’s A Marvellous Light (Tordotcom, 2021) mostly because I saw someone post on social media about the second book in the series, A Restless Truth (Tordotcom, 2022), and wanted to read it immediately (murder, mystery, romance aboard a ship? Sign me up!). However, I soon discovered that A Restless Truth is the second in a planned trilogy from Marske, and A Marvellous Light is the first book in the series.
The book features Sir Robert Blyth (who prefers to be called Robin), and Mr. Edwin Courcey as the main protagonists, brought together by circumstances that turn out to be magical in more than one sense of the word (insert knowing wink here).
From their first scene together in the book, Marske draws them as delightful opposites in the tradition of Elizabeth and Darcy or Anne and Gilbert (ahem… Blythe…), which leads to an even more delightful queering of the prickly-beginnings-of-romance trope in literature.
I’m not as well-versed in fantasy literature, but I do know my historical romance and murder mystery tradition fairly well, and I can say without reserve that Marske is melding those with fantasy in what I see as a unique way.
The melding is also pretty seamless, so readers of historical romance or murder mystery will probably (like I did) accept the magical contexts alongside the historical ones. The layering of these techniques is also expertly woven into the fabric of the setting, which I’d like to focus on in this review.
I think Marske’s choice of time period is relevant to why this melding of genres works so well. The depth of setting is extremely satisfying in the novel, with references to interior design, clothing choices, and sex and gender expectations that reflect a believable early twentieth-century context. Robin and Edwin both have a realistic amount of anxiety about to whom they reveal their sexuality, and the recent Oscar Wilde case is referenced as a kind of historical proof for that anxiety: “Yet one had to be careful. It was over a decade since Wilde’s trial, but one still had to face the possibility of being pulled up before a jury, and considering oneself lucky if the charge was merely gross indecency and not buggery” (151). In many ways, the idea of magical families just beneath the surface of polite society also works as a metaphor for Robin and Edwin’s anxiety about being openly gay: “And all of it hidden. There must be scores, perhaps hundreds, of country houses and townhouses where the magic was like this, kept inside walls or within the bounds of the estate, just another secret moving like a minnow beneath the surface of society and flashing a fin only when necessary” (89).
In addition, you are either born with magic or you aren’t in the world of A Marvellous Light, and it is more often the masculine members of the family who inherit powerful magic, leaving the women on the sidelines; this at first suggests that magic mirrors the larger British social norm of primogeniture, but the suggestion is complicated later in the novel when Robin and Edwin discover that there is, in fact, more than one way to practice magic and that women (and others left out of a powerful inheritance) might have much more ability than it at first seems. At this point, the novel’s attention to the distinction between inheriting vs. adopting magic become much more complex and fluid. I am looking forward to learning more in book two!
One of the ways that Marske develops the theme of just-barely-hidden identity is with attention to the interior design elements of both Edwin Courcey’s family country estate, Penhallick House, and the other estate that figures largely in the novel, Sutton Cottage. In particular, wallpaper becomes a symbol for the subversive power of those who live at the borders of accepted gender norms: a queering of the wallpaper if you will.
When Robin arrives at Edwin’s family’s estate, he learns that he and Edwin will be staying in the “willow rooms” which are “a pair of matched bedrooms tucked down the end of a corridor. The furniture was modern and thin-limbed, the walls painted a pale green from waist height down and papered above that in a pattern of willow boughs” (72). Robin notices immediately that the wallpaper is William Morris, and is informed that “Most of the rooms are done up with it” because Edwin’s mother “wouldn’t hear of anything else” (73). Later, after a clandestine encounter with Edwin, Robin sneaks back to his own room and thinks about their relationship: “It wasn’t until he was lying in his own bed, beneath the identical wallpaper, that he wondered if Edwin had simply wanted him out of the room. Edwin Courcey seemed to grow more layers as Robin unpeeled them” (245). Both the intertwined boughs and the layered depth William Morris achieved in his wallpaper thus mirror the ways in which Robin’s and Edwin’s lives become intertwined and the way that their selves are layered and initially as inaccessible as the magic Edwin thinks he lacks.
The complexity and layers of the magical system, though, come to the surface when the two men travel to Sutton Cottage only to discover that the owner of that estate (a Mrs. Greengage) has imbued magic into the gardens of her estate, aligning it with the growth of the trees and rose bushes and ivy that make the estate famous to the non-magical tourists who visit it. She tells Edwin, “there are more kinds of power than the men of this country have bothered to know” (163); and as Edwin becomes connected to the estate in multiple ways, he thinks at one point that “if he slept at Sutton Cottage he’d wake up woven into the wallpaper” (191).
At Sutton Cottage, Edwin faces an enemy (no spoilers here) who is backed up against a wooden panel carved with ivy, “But the ivy was no longer a carving: the ivy was moving, was solid, had formed writhing loops of dark woody vines that held … [the enemy’s] legs in place and pinned [their] arms wide on either side of [their] body” (347). This is reminiscent of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” in its use of the image of wallpaper coming alive in order to weave the observer into its texture and pattern. Except here, instead of symbolizing the oppression of women under the patriarchal institution of marriage and traditional medicine, the wallpaper has become the tool of a woman (and her house) in order to promote a new lineage that favours liminality: “Beginnings and endings are powerful. Liminal states. You can create profound change if you slip in through the gaps” (163), Mrs. Greengage tells Edwin.
The gaps in Morris’s wallpaper create a depth and texture that I would say Marske has been able to replicate in her novel, which appears on the surface to be another historical romance (or murder mystery, or fantasy novel), but which is much more than that when one attends to the layers she has papered into it. I can’t wait to read the next one.
