A girl in a tower. The words trigger instant curiosity. Who is she? Who locked her away, and why? Was it punishment, or sequestration to keep her safe? Thea Lenarduzzi’s The Tower is a literary Russian doll, one story concealed within another, blurring identities, blocking memory. A far from reliable narrator – ‘let’s call her T’ – steers us between fiction and real life while the author herself occasionally amends the telling. Clues are offered as we turn the pages, but we may have misread some of them, or been misled, and the conclusion upends expectations. If this is all beginning to sound rather too Fernando Pessoa, breathe easy. Lenarduzzi’s book is a compelling read, elegant and artful, intertwining myth, fairy tale and reality. Is it a novel or a memoir? Ultimately, perhaps both.
The narrator first hears the tower described in an anecdote about a folly, a little octagonal tower surrounded by woodland, part of a grand estate built in the late 19th century by a wealthy man. When his younger daughter, Annie, contracted tuberculosis at the age of 21, he moved her to the tower to keep the family safe from infection. She remained there until she died, three years later.
There were stories about the family: fabulously wealthy, then ruined, the great mansion demolished, with only the tower remaining. One detail intrigues T: there’s no record of Annie’s death. When did she die? And where? Online searches offer only conjecture: ‘It is commonly thought… locals believe…’ T finds herself probing deeper into the story, like a detective investigating a cold case. She doesn’t mention crime ‘because there was no body yet’.
Over the years the story begins to dominate T’s life. She pictures Annie at the tower window, listening to the sound of the nearby river, or writing a diary, head tilted ‘as if listening for each word before it rose to the nib of her pen like sap, liquid potential’. Her tuberculosis was badly timed, ‘in a hinterland, between the ancient and obscure cares of folklore and the radiant advances of medical science – between ass milk and antibiotics’. Evocative black-and-white illustrations punctuate the pages: Gwen John’s pale convalescent; Red Riding Hood in peril; Carl Jung’s sanctuary tower in Zurich…
In T’s world, life goes on: she puts her toddler daughter to bed; her husband cooks dinner. We get hints of her own lung problems and pain. Finally she takes the train, heading north to see the tower for herself, telling locals she’s there to research a book about storytelling, which in a way is true. She talks to an archivist, a historian, funeral directors. As the search deepens into obsession, we get to know T better than her quarry. She is consumed by her quest, mistrusting what she’s told. The closer she gets to Annie, the further away she seems to be, lost in Looking Glass country. Until she gets a call, a revelation that, hiding in plain sight, the answer has been there all the time. But we’re not at the final page.
Lenarduzzi’s first, prize-winning book, Dandelions, was a memoir about her grandmother’s family in Italy. The Tower is closer to home. There’s a sense of the author taking a deep breath to confront a trauma. T as narrator is abandoned, and Lenarduzzi takes up the story, anatomising a painful, long-buried experience. Memory is terra incognita and early cartographers warned of dragons. This is a book of many parts, about power and control and identity – about story-telling itself – not perhaps the one the author set out to write. Cathartic, yes, but she finds that ‘truth is a broken mirror’, not a resolution.
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