Needs salt.

Afterimage

Helen Humphreys

So, my Kindle broke. Again. This time it is refusing to charge. "Empty Battery," I am told, is the problem. Last time the screen broke it was legitimately my fault, as I dropped him on the bathroom tile. But since I got the replacement? I have been treating this thing like GOLD. Like an ailing parent. I double-wrap it in freezer bags when I take it in the bath. I shelled out for a padded case. I sing it lullabies every night. And then I breathed on it, and it broke. RIP, Constance's Second Kindle. Feb-Mar 2010. Never forget.

So I had to turn to actual books again, and Afterimage has been on my to-read list ever since I read Humphreys's Coventry, which was one of my best books of 2009. I'd forgotten about this one, and when I found it I almost didn't mind that my Kindle keeps committing seppuku. This is nice, I thought, as I settled down with tea and a blanket. A real book. This is great.

And it was for a while. The premise of Afterimage is really cool. Elinor Dashell is a photographer in the 1860s, right at the birth of photography. Her husband is vaguely disapproving but Elinor is stubborn, and snappy, and doesn't care. The Dashells have a new chambermaid, Annie Phelan, and Elinor starts taking pictures of her, and Annie becomes Elinor's muse. She takes photos of Annie dressed as Guenevere, as Ophelia, as Sappho. There's this vibe that their relationship is becoming sort of inappropriate for its time, you know? And there's a secret room filled with baby toys, but the Dashells don't have children and then...

Then I don't know, because I stopped reading. Because though the premise of this book is fairly awesome, something about just didn't work for me. Maybe it's that this story is so relentless. From the first page, I felt like Humphreys was straining toward the denouement. There's no B- or C-plots. It's all A. And it's intense, offering very little in the way of humor, or levity. If Humphreys wanted to do this, she needed to make it a short story. That sort of singlemindedness would be fine, in seven pages. As a 240 page novel? We need a little breathing room.

And there's the fact that this book is based on a real woman, Julia Margaret Cameron, who pioneered the field of photography and took portraits of her own maid, and I have to admit, once I knew about her, I kind of lost interest in Elinor's story. Because Julia's is real, and it's more interesting. She lived in colonial India, and she knew Alfred, Lord Tennyson. She took photographs to illustrate his Idylls of the King!

Julia Margaret Cameron was the OG Anne Geddes.

I can't help but feel that Cameron's life and career would have made a better story. But Humphreys's version is so close to it that it can never be done, now. And there's the fact that I'm a little sick of reading books about Victorian women's complicated relationships with the help. Too much Sarah Waters in too short a time, I think. But that's not Humphreys's fault, so I can't hold it against her. If I hadn't read the 18,000-page Fingersmith less than a year ago I might have done better with Afterimage, is what I'm saying.

This is not a bad book. I'm also saying that, because I want to make that clear. It is a very fine, carefully-considered book. Humphreys' prose is thoughtful. Her characters are convincing, and they do what they need to to advance the story. The subject matter was interesting. The plot (I think) was working its way toward an obliging twist. But taken together? It's the cake made with all the best ingredients--but with that special something, sea salt, or battery acid, left out. It all feels a little too perfect, a little too created, and managed. You get the idea that Humphreys outlined every single detail before she started writing and that nothing--not one thing--the characters did deviated in any way from her plans for them. The the story never surprised her. The characters never took on personalities of their own.

You can do everything else perfectly but if you don't have that streak of wildness, that feeling that anything could happen? It's hard too care too much about what does.

Rating: abandoned.