How many people have watched Shakespeare's tragedy 'King Lear' and wondered 'But... what happened to Lear's wife?' This is a question author JR Thorp embraced as the subject of her debut novel which follows the perspective of Lear's exiled queen in the time immediately following the end of the play when the insane king and all three of their daughters have died. She's resided in a remote abbey for the past fifteen years where she explains “The abbey is the prison Lear made for me, the bridle so carefully constructed for my face. Forcing down my tongue.” Here she finally gets her say as she desires to depart to finally re-enter the world and the kingdom she's been banished from. We gradually understand the story of her life through fragmented memories and interactions with the nuns, but her thought-process is never straightforward as “in me the past and future are eliding, coiling together, thicker than umbilical cord, made of the selfsame substance”. Her perspective contains both poetic ambiguity and searing precision as her intense and justified bitterness is palpable. The author has created a brilliantly-calibrated voice that gives many insights and keeps the reader wondering whether she herself is mad or if circumstances have driven her to insanity or if she is carefully scheming as she cannily asserts “I have always been the kind to turn brutal luck to a better chance. I lie, and plan.”
This is a narrative worth taking time with as the reader gradually becomes tangled in her thorny meditations. There's a delicious tension to the mental sparring she conducts with the nuns surrounding her who she is cooped up with because the abbey is under quarantine amidst a plague. She gets little compassion from these physical figures as she hilariously explains: “Who would speak to nuns of emotions? Better argue a point on politics with a piece of wood.” However, the nuns are also competing for her favour as a new abbess must be chosen and the narrator has been endowed with the duty of making this decision. Here we see on a more micro level the power at play within any organization and the politics involved which the queen formerly experienced on a grander scale when she lived at court. Through her memories we understand the way she's learned to wield power and rule, but also the way women were constrained by the sexist attitudes of this medieval time. I especially appreciated the way she wryly comments upon biblical stories such as the tale of Lazarus where his wife was forced to readjust to having her raised-from-the-dead husband there again: “perhaps she had become used to sleeping in the thin bed alone... Have you ever shared a bed with a man? It is sweet perhaps for a while but they sweat and stink out all their sins in their sleep.”
We also see the way the past intrudes upon her present. Perhaps it's her new responsibility and the knowledge of her family's passing which instigate the feverish psychological battles she wages with the ghosts of the past. This is compelling but a difficulty with this novel's plot is that there isn't a great deal of action in the story. The physical drama has already unfolded in Shakespeare's play so that what we're mostly left with is her ruminations. Figuring out the mystery of what happened in her life and the key to her identity (her true name is teasingly withheld throughout the narrative) is highly intriguing however there's not a tremendous amount which actually happens in the story. This novel is more about her melancholy, barely-suppressed anger and the way her intelligence has been underestimated by patriarchal incompetence. Her assertive voice is mesmerising especially when she casts out sinister statements such as “Lear, I will die better than you. My God can do what yours cannot.” There's a dour satisfaction in following this survivor's voice and her steely determination to dominate over the spectres of her past – even if it precipitates her own destruction.
