Dark art
In The Artist Vanishes by SA novelist Terry Westby-Nunn, experimental artist Sophie Tugiers has been missing for years, possibly murdered — or is she in hiding? What she did to earn her fate is unravelled through two different lenses: her own, in the past, and the current-day narration of alcoholic documentary filmmaker James Dempster. A strange coincidence causes Dempster to occupy Sophie’s previous flat, and he feels compelled to investigate the circumstances of her disappearance as a means to regaining professional and family respect.
The ominous presence of a global pharmaceutical company, Blue Vista, ties Sophie to both her success and her apparent demise. When she wins a competition sponsored by Blue Vista she is co-opted into a Hobson’s choice. The corporate funding will allow her to escape near-destitution and to work full time as an artist, provided she accepts Blue Vista’s control of the scope and methods of her experimental art.
Men seem to be the puppeteers controlling her ideas, her work — and her private life, as even her boyfriend betrays her.
Ultimately, though Sophie forfeited her artistic vision and her life, the novel ends with a sense that she has somehow outsmarted them, that she may yet be alive, biding her time to return and to exact her revenge. Meanwhile, James finds redemption. His documentary is well received as a supposed posthumous tribute to Sophie and “a commentary on how capitalism co-opts artists, and how the artist — as a concept — is vanishing”.
Westby-Nunn has structured a taut, slow-burn thriller that probes the psychology of fear and deprivation, overstimulation and the chemistry of emotions from a female perspective. There are red herrings aplenty, enough pace to keep the pulse racing and adequate natural pauses to provoke reflection, pick at convention — and prick at male conscience. Does artistic freedom come with responsibilities? How and why does society constrain female artists, especially in examining themes of sexuality and power? Could it be correct — as ecofeminism postulates — that male dominance is responsible for capitalism’s excesses and humanity’s toxic relationship to the natural world?
Furious avenger
If Westby-Nunn scratches at the dark side of human nature, Lisa Taddeo’s Animal tears into the flesh. The title is infused with connotations: primal forces, survival instincts, the predator and the prey.
“If someone asked me to describe myself in a single word, depraved is the one I would use,” narrates the 30-year-old protagonist, Joan, in early foreshadowing of the disorder, chaos and vengeance that unfolds in this psychological thriller.
When Joan’s estranged lover shoots himself in front of her and her new lover in a restaurant, she is spurred to straighten the misalignments in her life, to right some of the many wrongs perpetrated on her. These become clearer through a running series of flashbacks to her childhood, her dysfunctional adolescent upbringing and the traumas inflicted by all the men in her life.
Written in the first person, the mystery deepens fairly late into the book when it becomes apparent that Joan is speaking to her child, having fallen pregnant due to one of her sexual misadventures. But she suffers an early miscarriage, described in gory and graphic detail. “My next emotion was rage. At what? Everything. Everyone. I wanted to kill the world. I knew at the very least that I would kill someone. It was more than a premonition. It was a promise I could control.”
She moves to Los Angeles to trace a woman, Alice, who is mysteriously connected to her, and whom we come to realise is her half-sister. In LA there are predators all around: coyotes, rattlesnakes — and men, some intent on rape, others on manipulation for sex. But Joan is hunting for something, too: a suitable target for her own form of retribution. If it is not Alice, which man will she select? Is she madwoman, or just a very mad woman?
Part of Animal’s thrilling intensity lies in its intimacy. The reader is an accomplice to Joan’s vengeful quest without quite understanding why until the shock unveiled very late in the story. Taddeo penetrates and unsheathes our own innermost thoughts by hyperbolising aspects of Joan’s character we can recognise in ourselves: appetites and apathies, fears and furies.
Ultimately, Joan’s revenge is unfulfilling, a crime of rage rather than passion, misogyny mirrored in a form of misandry. Which might be one of Taddeo’s points: that all of us — women as well as men — are equally reducible to our basest instincts.
Virgin birth
Girl One by Sara Flannery Murphy explores an unusual idea: parthenogenesis.
Nine women undertake the experimental quest in the early 1970s in an isolated rural clinic, The Homestead, supervised by a renegade male scientist, Joseph Bellanger. Miraculously, all nine give birth. But when The Homestead is razed in a deliberately set fire, Bellanger’s death and the loss of all his documentation apparently means the end of a new dawn in human reproduction.
Twenty years later the firstborn, Girl One, is a research scientist determined to rediscover the secrets and to resurrect the concept. Josephine Morrow’s world has always been strange — isolated and overprotected by her pioneering mother, tolerated rather than accepted, seen by society as both a miracle and a monster — but when her mother disappears after another suspicious fire, Josephine seeks answers to long-buried questions.
So begins a road trip across America to find the other scattered parthenogenetic Girls and their mothers, in turn pursued by sinister, shadowy men. The novel takes a number of surprising twists and morphs into a hybrid of supernatural gothic noir, a Marvel movie — Wonder Woman, or X-Men without the men — and conventional whodunnit.
In her postscript acknowledgments Flannery Murphy provides clues for the inspiration of her idea. Bellanger is partly modelled on Dr Gregory Pincus, who tested theories of mammalian parthenogenesis in the 1930s by means of in vitro rabbit experiments, even successfully creating what was termed a “frankenbunny”. Later, he co-invented the contraceptive pill using questionable ethics, including human testing on mentally ill patients.
These new frontiers of medical science are portrayed in The Artist Vanishes as unwarranted evils; in Girl One Flannery Murphy sees them as valid explorations. Indeed, the apparent miracle of test-tube babies is now an accepted technology, but, as she points out, the reproductive landscape only started shifting in the 1970s, and throughout history, “women’s bodies have been treated as afterthoughts in the whole process”.
Girl One postulates a world where men are neither wanted nor necessary. The premise of women with utter self-belief — and even extraordinary abilities — would turn the tables on men, and represent the ultimate in feminist power.
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