The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Fairy Ring, by Martine Desjardins, translated by Fred A. Reed and David Homel
reviewed by Rhonda M. Nicol

Martine Desjardins. Fairy Ring. Trans. Fred A. Reed and David Homel. Talon, 2001. 223 pp. Paper: $14.95.

In Fairy Ring, an epistolary novel set in 1895 Nova Scotia, Clara Weiss, the beleaguered wife of botanist Edmond, suffers from a malaise necessitating a “sleep cure,” while the man who pines for her, Captain Ian Ryder, languishes amid frozen waters, trapped and abandoned by his crew during an abortive journey to the North Pole. Not coincidentally, Freud’s Studies in Hysteria was published in 1895 and, although never explicitly referenced, provides a backdrop for Clara’s woes and a disconcerting justification for Edmond’s actions. While Ian is at sea, Edmond and Clara take up residence on Ian’s isolated coastal estate, leaving Clara vulnerable to her husband’s chilling ministrations. Edmond’s attempts to penetrate Clara, both psychically and physically, precipitate some of the novel’s most startling and grotesque images. While Edmond wields a veterinary speculum, Clara bitterly observes, “In the most isolated houses, the cruelest and vilest acts can be committed in secrecy and with impunity.” The indignities Clara suffers at her husband’s hands and with the cooperation of the medical establishment reveal some of the intrinsic sadism of the Victorian age and the capriciousness inherent in definitions of normalcy. Unfortunately, Clara’s observation that “human beings always risk becoming attached to that which enchains them” proves prescient, and the novel effectively conveys the inescapable power of the ideologies permeating a particular place and time.