Book review: The Forger’s Ink by Jo Mazelis

Niall Griffiths

Who was Fanny Imlay? Unless you’re a connoisseur of Gothic and/or Romantic literature and history, her name will probably be unfamiliar to you (as it was to me).

Hers is a fascinating and desperately sad story: daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft and an American diplomat, half-sister of Mary Shelley, she grew up with the anarchist philosopher William Godwin (who was the widower of her mother) and his second wife and their several children.

She became estranged from this somewhat unusual (for the time) family unit, was bullied by her stepmother, was illegitimately conceived in France, and died by an overdose of laudanum in Swansea in 1816 at the age of 22.

A tempestuous and torn life which prompted these words from Percy Shelley: ‘Misery, O Misery/This world is all too wide for thee’. For more information, Fanny’s Wikipedia entry is a good and informative one, and there’s also this, the latest novel by Jo Mazelis.

Was Fanny’s painfully early death really suicide? Mazelis takes us between Fanny’s domestic circumstances in the early 1800s and the end of the Flower Period in the late 60s, early 70s, where one Judith Hopkins – timid, withdrawn – has inherited a house in south Wales.

Something of an anchorite, she is a baffled and detached observer of a rapidly and drastically changing world. She forages for food, she writes ‘as if…taking dication from another wiser being’, she becomes close to a Swedish couple who kind of adopt her for a short stretch of time.

In a bookshop, she unearths old documents relating to the life of Fanny Imlay and is sort-of mentored by the shop owner’s wife, Helena (whose motivations may not be of the snowiest white, of course).

These are times of darkness: literal, in 1816, the Year Without a Summer, due to the eruptions of Krakatoa and Tambora, and figurative in 1970, with the abominations of the Manson Gang and the Vietnam War etc (‘a parade of the monstrous’).

The use of ink as a conceit is a linking thread; ink from oak galls, ink from fungal growths, ink/blood: ‘a rope, a chain, a strand of embroidery silk’. Ink is passed down through the generations. Writing is an inherited trait. Ink stains the skin like coal. It stigmatises.

There are misnomers, pseudonyms, an intriguing and intelligent re-examination of Frankenstein through the battered and bartered figure of Fanny: ‘life destroys life in order to live’. There is much ambition here.

Confusing

And yet I found it confusing, and I found it, at times, flabby: I could see no real need to include the Swedish couple, and Helena’s motivations remained a bafflement.

And the dialogue, oh Jeez: yes there is a duty to verisimilitude but there’s also a duty to avoid windbaggery and not to frustrate the reader; there is, for example, a conversation about red shoes that goes on for several pages.

On more than one occasion did I gaze at the ceiling, sigh and whiffle, and plead for the writer to get on with it. My attention frequently wandered (which, I freely admit, perhaps says more about myself than Jo Mazelis, as might my perplexity at certain expressed social mores and conventions: there’s often a kind of politesse, an acceptance of the protocol of performative politeness that speaks of social awkwardness and repression and which is alien to this reviewer). Well, so it goes.

At base, this is a book that takes as it’s mission the reanimation and empathic disinternment of a neglected and forgotten and dismayingly ruined life. That’s not a small thing.

The Forger’s Ink by Jo Mazelis is published by Seren and is available here and at all good bookshops.