A Study in Drowning by Ava Reid
(Del Rey, 2023)
Reviewed by Ksenia Shcherbino
A Study in Drowning, Ava Reid’s new book has a certain air of neo-Victorian feminist gothic along the lines of Elizabeth Bronfen’s argument in Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (1992) about the Victorian fascination with dead (or not so dead) female bodies captured by the male gaze. It reminded me of A.S. Byatt’s Possession: A Romance (1990): both novels are poised between a detective story and a textual analysis exercise and infused with mythology and gender studies written in a stunning poetic prose.
Effy Sayre, a first-year architecture student, wins the competition to design Hiraeth Manor for the estate of late Emrys Myrddin, one of the most famous poets of Llyr. The only problem is, she is not particularly interested in architecture. She has always wanted to study literature, in particular, Myrddin’s Angharad, a romance about a young woman who is kidnapped by the Fairy King but manages to destroy him. Effy herself has been haunted by visions of the Fairy King. On coming to Hiraeth Manor, isolated and battered by storms, she meets Preston, a literature student set to challenge the authorship of Angharad. Is Effy ready to face her nightmares and find out the truth?
It is a book about the power of myths to express our experience and help us to survive it. While I enjoyed Reid’s myth-weaving and masterful use of wider Celtic mythology (Llyr, sleeping kings, changelings, even the names—Myrrdin Emrys is none other than Merlin in Welsh), I was equally impressed by how she uses these myths to tell a very modern story. It is a book about reversing power patterns and using myths to fight against the society they seem to embody. Is Angharad, real or imaginary, trying to keep the Fairy King out? Or is the Fairy King captured to be restrained, pinned down by the gaze—and the cleverness of his human lover? Reid challenges the traditional demon lover structure and suggests that a woman, transfixed in art or immobilized by social expectations, can reverse her captivity in her favour through reconfiguring conventional power relations between the subject and the object of the gaze.
The Fairy King is afraid of his own reflection because he is afraid to see himself for what he is. But isn’t he also afraid that the captured girl will see her reflection and recognise her own power. In this sense, Effy is a reflection of real Angharad in the same way as the literary Angarad is the reflection of Effy. “A beacon of hope” for all the girls who suffered and suffocated in the world that doesn’t allow women a will of their own. It is possession of a weak female lover by the male demon, but it is also a re-possession of the demon by the woman he perceived as weak, and it is also Merlin captured by his female lover.
In a patriarchal society a female artist occupies an awkward position on the margins of the male-dominated artistic world, and is often either ousted into seclusion or forced to yield the control over their creative power to men, seen as inferior by the latter. Yet these women had a voice of their own. It is the world of Christina Rossetti and Elisabeth Siddal, Evelyn de Morgan and Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale, pre-Raphaelite women whose works Reid’s prose is so reminiscent of. And it is also the story of Zelda Fitzgerald (nee Sayre), whose maiden name might have inspired Effy’s surname. There is scholarly speculation about F.S. Fitzgerald’s more than liberal use of Zelda’s diaries and writing in his own work, and a far more troubling history of sexual abuse, raising complex questions of visibility and power, self- and text ownership. Reductionist patriarchal academia in Reid’s Llyr (or Victorian/ Edwardian society on both sides of the Atlantic) would not recognize women’s rights to material ownership (as a funny side remark in the UK up to the seventies women could not open a bank account without their male relative’s permission).
Without revealing too much of the plot, it is the reclamation of female body, female ownership and female act that A Study in Drowning celebrates with its very line. In this light, the ending of the story is a rehabilitation of “the mad woman in the attic” from the 1979 book of the same name by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar; it is an unequivocal reestablishment of a female writer in her own right.
At the same time despite its gloomy gothic backgrounds and heavy topics, the novel is both witty—and almost playful. It is a sophisticated riff on scholarship and textual analysis veiled in layers of folkloric references. Reid masterfully presents a text within a text within a text (another similarity with Possession): she incorporates not just the texts of the authors in question, their diaries and letters, but also all the scholarship around it, the folklore it is based on, and even the forgeries. This intertextuality is extremely gratifying to read and a work of its own—I would really like to read Angharad, the key book A Study in Drowning is constructed around, and some of the poetic texts would make a lovely collection on their own.
Reid’s signature poetic visuality, almost pre-Raphaelite in its sumptuous details, its dark moods and gothic landscapes, immersion in nature and almost overwhelming descriptiveness, is a study in the drowning of senses—so deeply atmospheric and emotional are her passages. A Study in Drowning is deeply satisfying on both intellectual and sensual level, and a book that requires a thoughtful and meditative reading.
Review from BSFA Review 23 - Download your copy here.