I'll try to mostly avoid that urge, as much as I can. Maybe I should just say, up front, that Ivory Apples is an interesting, compelling contemporary fantasy novel from Lisa Goldstein, but that its main action takes place over about a decade, with the passage of time not always clearly signposted (or important in the ways I wanted it to be). I wished for a book with a bit more structure - maybe three parts for Before, During, and After; maybe something different - and a bit more clarity and attention paid to the passage of time. Ivory Apples instead just rolls on, chapter after chapter in sequence, one day or scene after the last. There's nothing wrong with any of that: it just felt like there was a more precise, pointed book lurking just underneath, that almost came to be.
The first-person narrator is Ivy Quinn, oldest of the four daughters of engineering professor Philip, in Eugene, Oregon. Her sisters - each two years apart - are Beatriz, Amaranth, and Semiramis; their mother Jane died when Semiramis was born. It starts in 1999, when Ivy is eleven.
The family has a big secret: their "Great Aunt Maeve," who lives in a house far out in the countryside a couple of hours away and who they see about once a month, is actually the famous and reclusive author Adela Madden, who wrote a book called Ivory Apples. Think a fantasy analog of Catcher in the Rye, for the cultural importance and continuing sales, and that's about right - with the caveat that Madden is much more comprehensively hidden than Salinger ever was, even with a dedicated fanbase continuously researching the book and making theories and searching for any proof that Madden is still alive, somewhere.
Madden's Ivory Apples was published sometime in the late 1950s, about forty years ago as Goldstein's Ivory Apples begins. Maeve herself is old, Ivy thinks, but the narrative doesn't make it clear how old. She's got to be at the very least mid-sixties, but she's slow and muddled in her thinking, which makes her seem substantially older than that.
Philip handles Maeve's correspondence and finances, all of her communications with the outside world, and the girls are sworn to secrecy about their Great-Aunt - it's possibly the most important thing in their lives, keeping this secret.
On one trip to visit Maeve, Ivy wanders off, into a strange grove, and meets a group of odd beings cavorting there. One of them "slams into her," somehow going into her body and taking up residence there. She can't get him to leave, and the quick conversation she can have with Maeve is unhelpful. (This bit is closer to horror than the book's tone for these creatures later; there are multiple odd tone shifts like this throughout.)
Ivy eventually names the entity Piper, after Maeve gives her a bunch of mostly-folklore books to read and continues mostly being unhelpful about what happened to her. Substantially later, Ivy learns that Piper is a muse - like the ancient Greek ones, and in fact descended from them - who live in groves scattered about the globe and sometimes bond with humans who come to seek them, giving creative insights to their chosen ones. Adela Madden was the host of a muse, for example, and - tediously; I always hate when books do "here's the secret magical explanation for human creativity" bullshit like this - so were probably every famous creative person you've ever heard of.
That's one of the two main elements driving the plot; the other is much darker.
Later that year, when they're all back in Eugene, a woman named Kate Burden - that name is just a little too on-the-nose, I'm afraid - "serendipitously" meets the four girls in a local park and befriends them. She is low-key obsessed with Adela Madden and Ivory Apples, Ivy realizes. Over time, she gets invited to their house and meets Philip. (This is one of the sections where time passing is a bit vague - again, the book covers nine or ten years, not always cleanly.)
Ivy is suspicious of Kate from the beginning, but the plot wouldn't work if Kate's plots didn't move forward, so they do: Kate lures Philip to her house on a pretext, and Philip tragically dies in a fall down the basement stairs. And the girls are surprised to learn that Philip has a brand-new will, making Kate the girls' guardian and giving her control of all Philip's assets.
Kate at this point suspects a connection between Philip's family and Adela Madden - in retrospect, it's not quite clear how her "kill Philip, something to do with underpants, profit!" plan was supposed to work - but the secret is still secret. None of the girls talk about Great-Aunt Maeve, apparently Philip had no records of the post-office box that he used for her correspondence or anything else in his actual house, and Kate is frustrated.
For a few years the girls live with an increasingly nasty and vindictive Kate: she seems to know Ivy is the key to finding Adela Madden but - despite some clearly supernatural powers mostly manifesting as creepy noises from the basement - isn't able to bend a twelve-year-old to her will.
Oh, and the clearly-incapable-of-handling-her-own-affairs Maeve somehow muddles through for two or three years in the background. There's a whole lot of "somehow" in the timeline of Ivory Apples.
Anyway, Ivy can resist Kate because she has a muse, and, at about the age of fourteen, runs away, to spend the next two years living on the streets.
Kate becomes even more monstrous in Ivy's absence, but the other three girls never give up Madden, which seems really unlikely. Eventually, Ivy feels guilty and tries to find her sisters, first finding their old house empty and abandoned. More time passes, Ivy meets a sidebar character who also has a muse and provides some background, and eventually saves her sisters from a horrible supernatural warehouse/prison where Kate had them penned up, living entirely within illusions generated by the hordes of muses Kate has captured and controls.
OK, wait: Kate already has what seem to be dozens of muses under her total control, and evil-wizard levels of reality manipulation. The fact that she's still looking for a muse to bond with her, and somehow need to find this particular grove, doesn't actually make sense. I don't think the book ever explains how Kate got all of these muses or the power to control them: she's just evil and monomaniacal and our villain, so of course she has massive powers, and all the magic here comes from muses, so therefore she has a mass of captive muses. But how muses are said to work - and do work for Adela and Ivy and others - is completely different to how Kate uses them, for no stated reason, and no one in the novel seem to even notice.
Anyway, Kate has now achieved the full Evil Wizard package, and is still searching for the girls.
The girls - the younger three fairly traumatized - move in with Great-Aunt Maeve, who is dehydrated and medically shaky, and who they have not seen for...three? four? years at this point, and who somehow took back control of her literary and financial affairs along the way, which she's still completely incapable of doing. Another couple of years passes, with conflict among the girls, until, after a I-want-a-muse-too tantrum, Amaranth runs away.
Ivy hires a private detective to find Amaranth, who went back to Eugene (and got in touch with Kate, of course). Eventually - though I think this is at least six more months later; Ivy is now about nineteen - Kate finds her way to Maeve's secluded house, captures all of them with her evil magic, and sets everything on fire before dragging them all to the grove.
(We're supposed to have some sympathy for Kate, as someone obsessed with her favorite book and with wanting to be creative - in a world where creativity is de facto locked by ancient Greek spirits who choose what humans will be able to create anything worthwhile - but she's so cartoonishly evil, vindictive, and destructive by this point that it would be a rare reader who doesn't just want her to die in some horribly suitable way.)
Kate destroys nearly everything this family ever had: killed their father, trashed their house, ruined their relationships with each other, stole their childhoods, supernaturally tortured them for years, stole their inheritances, and even burns down about half of Maeve's house and does some fire damage to the grove as well. She is finally stopped, and in a state where she won't hurt anyone anymore...but it's not particularly satisfying.
In the end, Ivy is writing poetry - remember, she has a muse, so she's able to be creative, unlike the vast majority of humanity - and the four girls have settled into adult lives that aren't completely horrible. The muses are saved, more or less, but still seem like selfish, arbitrary flittery things that are only worthwhile because, again, there's no creativity without them.
And I might need to revise my earlier note: maybe this is a horror novel. The muses are practically horror even in the best light - they take over people, do whatever the hell they want, and it's hinted they can burn out their hosts. Ivory Apples has a horror-novel ending: a few survivors try to rebuild their lives after everything they cared about was trashed by a malevolent supernatural force.
Ivory Apples has interesting things to say about creativity and obsession, about that One Book that changes your life - but I'm not sure if I can buy the things it says about any of them. And I do think its timeline is too extended, too attenuated: there's a version of this book in some other world, told from the point of view of all four girls (to get the different ages and perspectives) that takes place all within maybe one year. The version we got, though, is gnarly and quirky - for me, more a book to argue with and work through than to love, though I see other readers have loved it.
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