One for sorrow, two for mirth.

Eva Moves the Furniture
Margot Livesy

On the day that Eva McEwen is born, in Scotland, in 1920, six magpies gather in the tree outside the birth-room window; a Scotch tradition says six magpies herald a death. Within hours of Eva's birth, her mother, Barbara, is dead, and so begins Eva's story, which is hauntingly spare and peppered with similar strange occurrences.

You see, from the time of her birth, Eva is accompanied by "companions"--a girl and an old woman--that only she can see. The companions occasionally help Eva, and sometimes hurt her, and sometimes simply benevolently make the furniture fly around the room, giving forth the book's whimsical title.

Eva grows up a lonely child, with her elderly father and aunt, and the companions, whose continual presence (and sometimes jealousy) makes it hard for her to have friends her own age, and even, later, loses her lovers in a similar fashion. Eva goes to great lengths to try to get rid of these spectres and live a normal life, by taking a job in the city as a receptionist, and then a nurse, and finally by fleeing to the rural valley where her mother was born and grew up. There, as she learns more about Barbara, she begins to learn more about the companions, and whether they wish her good or ill.

Livesy makes her reader into a third companion, as we follow Eva through her life. This book is quiet--not much happens, just the small little happenings of any ordinary life, but set within the context of Eva's extraordinary predicament. I didn't realize how much I liked this book until it was over, and then I decided that it was to be one of my perennial favorites. It is literally unlike anything I've ever read before. Before I read it, the blurb on the back made me think I was in for some Allende-like magical realism, but besides the presence of the companions, Eva's life is supremely ordinary and unremarkable, and I liked that. No blue skin, or green hair, or other such outlandish happenings. Livesy's magical realism is eminently easier to digest, and the presence of the companions is as easily accepted as the fact that the book is set in Scotland. It doesn't strain credulity at all. You swallow the premise without having to wonder whether Eva is a nutjob.

And I appreciate that Livesy gives a life and a personality to the old woman and the girl. They are not simply flat little guardian angels(?) who follow Eva around. If the companions used to be human, they have retained human characteristics, and don't always know the best thing to do. Their good intentions, like anyone's, sometimes cause the person they care about great harm. And they are often jealous, or angry, or petty. But as Eva learns to live with them, so do her unseen companions learn to live with her, so that by the end of the novel, they have worked out a sort of peace amongst themselves. Towards the end of the book, Eva is faced with the opportunity to send her companions away, forever. But will she? Does she take advantage of the chance to be a normal girl, for once, or have Eva and the woman and girl become so much a part of each other that they will wither and die if they are separated?

The story stands on its own, as just a good, creepy-type ghost story, but can also be seen as a sort of allegory for life in a broad sense. We are all more than one person, most of the time, even to ourselves, and Livesy gives life to that idea by having the three woman--child, young woman, and old woman--be so inextricably linked with one another. By the time Eva's story reaches its stunning, beautiful, sad, happy conclusion, you begin to think that the strange thing is not that Eva has the companions in the first place, but the fact that we all so often persist in thinking of ourself alone in the world, when we are linked to so many, by so many bonds.

Rating: 4.5 of 5 stars.