Illyria by Elizabeth Hand

Elizabeth Hand is the twice-Nebula Award-winning author of Last Summer at Mars Hill, Mortal Love, and other novels. Her latest novella, another fine piece from PS Publishing is—at 36,000 words—almost so long that it is a full-length novel, and therefore excluded from review by The Fix. That it slips in is a pleasure.

Those familiar with Hand’s work will know that her stories are set so firmly in the everyday world that to some casual readers they would not appear speculative at all. This is certainly true of Illyria, which is the country of William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. Acting, love, magic, and the demands of ambition are the central themes of the story.

Rogan and Maddy Tierney are cousins, born on the same North Yonkers day in the 1950s to a theatrical family that has turned its back on the arts but still live in a stage-haunted street that, in its own way, is quietly magical.

Both are bullied, Rogan because he is artistic and beautiful—at least to Maddy—and his brothers’ unspoken homophobia makes them suspicious of anything theatrical, and Maddy, because she defends him. So the pattern is set early; Rogan is the demanding one, the centre of attention; Maddy the nurturer, putting her own needs and demands to one side. Until.

As they reach adolescence, Rogan and Maddy grow ever closer, arousing anxious comments from brothers and sisters ignorant of genetics and steeped in Catholic Guilt (Hand expertly sketches the bigotry rampant in suburbia even—or especially—in the so-called Swinging Sixties, which were anything but outside of a few small, select enclaves) and in defiance, they become literally “kissing cousins,” and in time, more.

One day, while exploring the small attic next to his bedroom, they find;

“From inside the wall, light glimmered. Neither cold blue candle-flame nor an electric bulb; more like starlight, fractured and wavering yet also warm, as though embers had rained from the rafters….

…Inside the wall was a toy theatre, made of folded paper and gilt cardboard and scraps of brocade and lace. Curtains of scarlet tissue shrouded the proscenium. The stage floor was mottled yellow and green, as though to suggest a field starred with flowers. Thumbnail-sized masks of Comedy and Tragedy hung from the proscenium arch, and a frieze of Muses that looked as though it had been painted with a single hair. Columns no bigger than a pencil rose to either side, and a dizzyingly intricate arrangement of trompe l’oeil cut-outs and folded paper walls and arches that made it seem as though the stage receded endlessly, into topiary gardens and ruined statuary, a fallen tower and snow-peaked mountains and, most distant of all, a beach of golden sand with a ruined ship silhouetted against a wintry sun.”

That autumn they attend high school for the first time; Maddy blossoms butterfly-like, and Rogan gives up his choir-singing in favour of a rock-and-roll band. The heady whiff of revolution is in the air. The aged nun who teaches drama is replaced by a friend of the cousins’, Aunt Kate, the black sheep of her generation and the story’s catalyst. The new drama teacher is a bit-part actor and decides to stage a school play for the first time.

As the end of the year approaches, it becomes clear that each of the performers, from the humblest stagehand to the play’s stars, is imbued with glamour—the art of projecting an illusion, built on hard work and stagecraft, but also something indefinable—something magical, in other words. At the same time, Maddy and Rogan’s supposedly incestuous relationship is driving their families to a crisis point.

Until the January night when Aunt Fate, as Rogan has dubbed her, tells Maddy that she has got a place at RADA in London but that there is only room for one; Rogan, who is so possessed of natural glamour that, as Aunt Kate says, “the tail wags the dog,” is to make his own way. It’s a way of splitting them up, of course, and at this point, the novella changes markedly, for Maddy’s inner drive (or as the narrator implies, her lack of fight) allows her to go along with the scheme, abandoning Rogan.

It’s also the point at which, five-sixths of the way through, when day-by-day detail gives way to a summary. While Illyria is a great story, it’s by no means perfect. Maddy is essentially passive, and the sudden jolt of dislocation, while plausible given her age, renders her less sympathetic than if Hand at least allowed her the luxury of a few more sentences to rage against the dying of the light of her love affair with Rogan. Nor is the sudden immersing of herself in her work sufficiently foreshadowed.

More significantly, most of the opening twenty-nine thousand words of the novella are spent on a few brief months, giving the majority of the novella a wonderfully intimate feel. But the seismic changes rendering the Tierney clan which so mirror the times are dismissed in a few sentences, with the whole of the seventies dismissed in just over five hundred words. This distances the story from the reader in a way from which it never really recovers.

Only when Maddy meets Rogan for lunch in the mid-1980s does the intimacy return, and by now it is bittersweet. And after another thousand words, the reader returns to the Coles Notes of Maddy’s life, twenty-two years dispatched in less time than Maddy’s lunch with Rogan. Admittedly, there are still the hints of magic, the way that Madeline always rises above the more mediocre of her material, especially if the leading men are weaker:

“it seemed as if my own presence animated the air between us; as if someone else, something else, moved there unseen.”

Of course, Hand is deliberately skirting over the parts of Maddy’s life only semi-relevant to Illyria, but it seems to me that in charting them at all, she has fallen between two stools. Either ignore them completely and skip to the meetings with Rogan, or at least give her the four thousand words that would flesh them out a little more (this deconstruction by word count may seem mechanical, but the suspension of disbelief is as much about the craft of fiction as about the art of word-weaving, and it is the most logical way to highlight the uneven nature of the last—and therefore arguably the most important —part of the story). The latter would keep the novella as a novella, while giving some superficial meaning—which is all that most people are allowed—to the essential meaninglessness of most of Maddy’s life.

In the end, Maddy and Rogan are reunited, and it is the magical stage set that brings them back together, in another moment of shimmering magic:

“The eddies rose and fell with my cousin’s voice, sweeping over all of us in waves, matchstick trees and painted moon and cardboard figures in a toy theatre, snow and shipwreck and stage all whorled together into one great bright storm with Rogan and I at its centre, motionless in our embrace, long after his voice fell silent.”

Hand’s supporters can argue that the “flaws” are not flaws at all, that in so reflecting the messiness and uneven nature of real life, she brings greater reality to a fantastical tale. But fiction is distinct and deliberately structured much more tidily than reality, and while Illyria is without doubt the best novella of 2007, it isn’t quite as good as it could have been. It isn’t a great novella—which is a shame—although it’s still worth hunting down if it doesn’t appear in any of the Year’s Best, which I strongly suspect it will.

Publisher: PS Publishing (Jan. 2007)
Paperback price: £10.00/$20.00
Hardcover price: £25.00/$50.00
ISBN: 978-1905834631