(1976)
Blown Figures is the fifth book by this already accomplished writer of fictions, and to date her most ambitious. In it Audrey Thomas approaches the height of her powers as a spinner of prose, a teller of surprising and engaging tales. With each of her books, the reader feels that the next will be not only better but different in some unimaginable way, and Blown Figures is unlike any of its predecessors, in technique at any rate.
The book returns to territory familiar to readers of Mrs Blood and Songs My Mother Taught Me, and like these it is a self-contained unit. The heroine again is Isobel, who lost her unborn child in Africa in Mrs Blood and whose hideous childhood is described in Songs My Mother Taught Me. In Blown Figures, Isobel returns to Africa alone, leaving her husband Jason and her two children behind, searching for the child she has lost—she’s obsessed with her failure to find out what was done with the body—but searching also for expiation. She feels the death of the child was her fault, an absurd guilt left over from an earlier affair which ended in a traumatic abortion.
Such a synopsis barely indicates what Blown Figures is like, for the book’s approach is not linear. The title is evocative. “Blown” suggests blown glass, explosions, the winds of Dante’s Inferno with its wandering souls, inflation, or exhaustion, and as Thomas is a lover of puns and Isobel worries about the hidden meanings of words, all connotations are probably intended. Blown Figures is composed of fragments and contrasting textures: passages of narrative, flashbacks, fantasies, scraps from what may or may not be Isobel’s notebook or the narrator’s (bits of comic strips, quotations, pensées, dreams, African myths, ads from African newspapers; there are, perhaps, a few too many of these). AFRICA, Thomas informs us, was originally “MAFROKA, the broken, the divided land.” The central character is multiple —“This curious child was very fond of pretending to be two people,” the notebook quotes from Alice —and Isobel roams through Africa in the third person, interrupted, interpreted and possibly created by a voice calling itself “I”, who in turn addresses a shadowy woman called “Miss Miller” (governess, teacher, keeper, superego?). The “I” feels sorry for Isobel at times; she also hates her, is contemptuous of her and threatens to destroy her.
In hands less skilful than Thomas’, such devices could spell tedious experimentation for its own sake, self-indulgence or chaos. But Thomas is enormously skilful, and instead of being a defeating pile of confusions Blown Figures is amazingly easy to read. It leads the reader from clue to clue like a detective story, though it lacks a comforting resolution; and it fascinates, like Africa itself, by its richness and mystery. Thomas has a faultless ear for dialogue, for how people sound, even Dutchmen speaking English or Africans speaking French. And she has a camera eye for physical detail, so that the lands through which Isobel wanders on her quest shimmer on the page like mirages, sharp and charged with nameless fear, like hallucinations. Which perhaps they are, for Isobel is haunted: she sees visions of people with no backs, hears voices and dreams of witches and the Devil and of her vengeful dead child. A haunted person is one for whom the past is more real than the present, and this is certainly true of Isobel. Her husband and her living children are mannequins, and it is her false lover and her dead child who obsess her. Her muted Western culture has never allowed her to grieve, to mourn, to expiate, but Africa is different: “These people, with their elaborate rituals for birth and death, their singing and dancing…their belief in the power of another person’s hatred as well as the power of a vulture’s foot, how right they were….” Africa supplies in abundance the myths, ceremonies and magic which Isobel needs to give a meaning to her experience of loss and death. In ancient cultures and in modern Africa, women are seen as those who give birth and also as those who mourn the dead. But for Isobel, these functions have been thwarted and confused. Birth has become death, and she sees herself as a witch, a killer. “I ate the child in my womb,” she says. “Since then I have never been happy.”
On one level, Blown Figures is about Isobel’s attempts at exorcism. On another it is about the exorcism of Isobel herself. Isobel must be taken to the end of her journey, her nightmare, so that the narrator can finally somehow get rid of her, return to the present, stop creating her. Isobel is haunted but she is also a pathetic and irritating ghost, fixed in time and repeating herself endlessly. “ ’Isobel doesn’t live’ said Jason to a friend, ’she exits.’ He had meant to say ’exists.’ ” “How to rescue Isobel… without becoming oneself an Isobel,” muses the narrator. Perhaps Blown Figures is her answer.