Shady tale demands much of the living

Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger. Photo / Supplied

It's no surprise that a book that asks us to believe in ghosts and the afterlife snags on the delicate matter of implausibility.

Funnily enough, though, it's not the spooks that challenge our powers to suspend disbelief: it's the highly improbable and inauthentic choices that the author has her characters make to get the plot to go where she wants.

Audrey Niffenegger is best known for her hugely successful debut novel, The Time Traveller's Wife, where she managed to persuade us to accept there might be a human genetic disorder that compels its sufferers to travel backward and forward in time, mostly inadvertently.

In Her Fearful Symmetry, her second novel, Niffenegger makes a demand of similar proportions on her readers, and for much of the journey, it's easy enough to go along. Elspeth dies in the first line of the book, while her lover, Robert, is off making himself a cup of tea. He returns to resume his deathbed vigil in time to find he's too late.

But that doesn't spell the end of Elspeth. She gradually becomes aware of herself again as a more or less formless presence imprisoned in her flat overlooking London's Highgate Cemetery. She is powerless to do much other than to watch Robert failing to get over her and doing icky things with her shoes, and for her dying wish that her twin nieces, Julia and Valentina, inherit the flat. The terms of her bequest require them to occupy it for a year before they can sell it, and that the twins' mum - Edie, Elspeth's own twin - never be allowed to set foot in it.

For the nieces in Chicago, the opportunity seems heaven-sent. The will has provided for them generously, and with nothing better to do, they "do" London and its sights. Julia becomes involved with the tenant of the flat upstairs, a full-blown, obsessive-compulsive named Martin. Valentina is attracted to Robert. And all the while, Elspeth's shade watches and gathers strength.

So far okay, even if the various elements of the novel - setting, prose style, characterisation - seem a little self-conscious in places. But it's when Elspeth finds a way to announce her presence to Robert and the twins, and Valentina hatches a plot to engineer her escape from her domineering older (by six minutes) sister, that things begin to unravel. From that point on, never mind the ghosts, you just can't quite manage to believe in the characters.

Niffenegger evokes London well enough, and something of the spirit of Highgate Cemetery, but even a few dozen electrifying lines and passages can't quite reanimate it once it has choked.

Her Fearful Symmetry
by Audrey Niffenegger (Jonathan Cape $38.99)
Reviewed by John McCrystal

* John McCrystal is a Wellington writer.