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“My Dark Vanessa”: A Forbidden Love Story?
No or yes. But no
While I, as a reader, am drawn to a dark cave of longing, eroticism, lies and manipulation, I still have doubts at times. Where does the border between abuse and destructive love really go? What is the definition of abuse of power and when and how does the principle of consent apply? No less important: Who are the judges who define?
Newcomer Kate Elizabeth Russell is not afraid to get us into an amazing drum of such problems. And this is precisely what makes it great.
The image of reality is shaken
The book throws us headlong into the subject from the beginning. The year is 2017, Vanessa Wye is 32 years old. It goes by all standards pretty badly.
In the middle of a downward spiral of meaninglessness, something has happened that shakes the story of Vanessa’s life: Jacob Strane, the English teacher with whom he started a relationship at boarding school, has been accused of abusing a group of students. Storm Metoo is raging. Strane, who has more or less dominated his life for 17 excruciating years, is in crisis. This forces Vanessa to get into his, because he was different with her.
The novel comes and goes between two timelines, between two VanessaeN: The present and the 15 years. Through the latter, we can participate in the fateful meeting with the 42-year-old teacher (and yes, it looks exactly the way you think it does: glasses, beards, and brown clothing).
We must follow the trend with a shaky and unpleasant expectation of what we know is coming.
It works brilliantly to get the story from two different angles: a forward arrow marked by passion and naivete, and a back arrow marked by consequences. Both are necessary to understand and sympathize with the protagonist Vanessa.
But it’s clearly the retrospective narrative that grabs me the most. That is what is alive and vibrant. That is what creeps under the skin.
The perfect sacrifice
We quickly perceive who Vanessa is, what polarities reside in her: both passion and nihilism, injustice and stubbornness, sharp blows and thin skin, alertness and blindness, narcissism and self-contempt, strength and destructiveness. She goes against the current, but she is deeply alone. She is sharp like few others, but does not feel seen.
All of this makes her the perfect victim for Strane. A victim who hovers in no man’s land for 17 years, suppresses and distorts. She does not identify with other victims of abuse, but does not move on with her life.
The illusion of love
The relationship between Vanessa and Strane is so intricately interwoven. So romantically misleading, so wrapped up in Lolita’s literary references and conceptualization, that it’s sometimes hard to break the illusion and see the vile.
But it is there.
In all of Strane’s replicas, which are almost imperceptible, Vanessa forms like a group of clay, controlling her with an invisible hand, and in all the sex scenes where Vanessa stiffens and flies mentally. The contrast between your child’s overgrown body and his heavy masculine body, the contrast between his experience base and his, lies and trembles in every line.
Sometimes Strane distresses me directly, and it should be well done so as not to be deeply provoked by his behavior. At the same time, I am also attracted to his worldview, his logic, his ethics.
Much of its power lies in its ability to rationalize what it does and arouse empathy with its vulnerability. It is never entirely clear if he is cunning in his position of power, or if he simply lost control completely, if he is fundamentally good, or if he is a monster.
This, in turn, makes it easier to understand how Vanessa, who is by no means naive or stupid, could be allowed down to the degrees caught in her web.
No way finished
I think about how many of those stories there really are. How many fuzzy lines, how much grumbling, how much error sealing, how much veiled manipulation, and how unreliable victims can be in relation to recognition, saying, and asking for help.
These are things I’ve thought about before, but not like this, not from many sides at once.
Because by no means have we finished talking about abuse of power and abuse. Of course we are not. Literature like this is a brilliant way to relive the metoo debate, both in society and in your own head.
I applaud Russell for writing something so inspiring with such finesse, and I hope he opens up a crude literary space that publishes even more novels of this kind.
NRK reports
“My dark Vanessa”
Author: Kate Elizabeth Russell
Translate Kirsti Vogt
novel
Publisher: Achehoug
Released 2020
