Patrick Skene-Catling

Putting the ha back in Ithaca

issue 26 October 2002

‘Yes,’ writes the eponymous narrator of this exceptionally clever, vivacious account of sibling rivalry, ‘there are many wax dolls on the shelves of my memory and I make sure I still twist the pins now and again, in passing.’

The dolls most vindictively pierced are those representing her twin sister and her mother. There are intimations of grandfatherly child abuse and a hint of Electra complex. The family’s exotic and rancorous family history is recorded, not altogether veritably, on her laptop by Cassandra at the age of 39, a cosmopolitan, embittered Englishwoman dying of cancer in a mental asylum on Ithaca. Sounds a bit grim? Strangely, it isn’t. Shrewd psychological insights, vivid, sensuous observations and verbal felicity make this first novel, sentence by sentence and in its overall effect, an unusual pleasure to savour.

The twins were born in a hospital in Hampstead on an ominously stormy night.

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