In 1912, Marie Curie – the first female professor at the University of Paris, first woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize, and first person to be awarded two Nobels – decided to disappear for a while. She was one of the most famous women in the world; her public image was of someone selflessly devoted to science, her students, her daughters and the work of her late husband and scientific collaborator Pierre, who was run over on a wet Paris street in 1906.
But she also had detractors, including a right-wing press that lobbied against her election to the French Academy of Sciences – she was Jewish, they lied, and therefore not really French – and, late in 1911, broke the salacious news of Curie’s sexual relationship with physicist Paul Langevin. Langevin had been one of Pierre Curie’s PhD students; he was separated from his wife but not yet divorced.
Curie was also unwell, suffering from a kidney ailment that needed surgery and months of recuperation. The historical record tells us she spent most of 1912 lying low, first in France, then in England, before she was well enough to return to her lab.
Wonderland, Tracy Farr’s lyrical, imaginative new novel, conjures up an alternative history. Madame Curie’s friend Ernest Rutherford (“the Great Man of Science”) suggests recovery in his distant homeland, in the home of an old school friend, Dr Matilda (Matti) Loverock. So the famous lady escapes to another hemisphere, another world. By ferry she arrives in Miramar, a quiet peninsula southeast of Wellington, near the road to Worser Bay. “In the autumn sun,” we’re told, “she almost seems to glow.”
The observers here are three seven-year-old girls, Loverock’s daughters. (Oddly, they will not be the only triplets in an alternative history published by a New Zealand writer this year.) They are intelligent, musical and sensitive, “skinny scraps, with faces too sharp to ever be pretty”. The girls – Ada, Oona, Johanna – share point-of-view chapters, fitting for babies who grow up with “the space between us blurred”. Curie sees them as “one organism, with three magnificent parts … each forever stabilising each other”.
Like the Liddell sisters, inspiration for Lewis Carroll, the triplets are entranced by a Wonderland – this one an Edwardian amusement park, “Miramar’s Mecca of Merry Souls”. It’s run by their boisterous father, Carnival Charlie Loverock – “large as life and twice as marvellous” – in charge of the girls’ beach calisthenics programme every morning and training them for a star turn as the Three Miramar Maidens in Wonderland’s Winter Gala. Charlie is devoted to his family, bad at business and intolerant of “the whims and commands” of Rutherford that have brought “Lady bloody Radium” into their modest house.
As well as the girls, the novel splits narrative duties between “The Lady” and the woman she describes as “mother-doctor-wife”, Matti, who tells her daughters that their special guest is “a magician of chemistry”. Matti nurses Curie with morphia, chlorodyne and kindness, as well as working long nights as an obstetrician at the hospital. She spends much of the story exhausted by work and by her husband’s failing business, buoyed by her “Cronies”, a feminist gang of friends who gather to smoke, drink and rip up offending pamphlets: they include real-life medical trailblazer Agnes Bennett (and her campaign against the misogyny of Plunket founder Truby King).
Farr is adept at sensory detail, particularly of what lies beneath – “every nub of hessian scrim” beneath the wallpaper and above the timber sarking of the house; the sound when someone sits on the bed and Matti can hear “the horsehair in the mattress rustle and shift and slush”; the beach with its “cut-glass squeak of wet sand, the feather of fine tidecast seaweed”. Walking in thin slippers down the house’s path of shell and stones, Curie feels “the prick of tiny edges, little glittering sharpnesses in the night”. To her, the sand is something else to categorise and understand: “Silicon, calcium carbonate, the bones and shells of tiny sea creatures, the crumblings of great cliffs, and of the Earth, and of islands”. The true wonders of the novel are, indeed, found in science and nature, in the beached whale with its “deep dead smell”, shaped like Halley’s comet.
Curie is associated with the colour of the “wondrous light” of radium (“blue, beautiful, terrible”). The girls are entranced by “her milk-white, blue-light skin” and she spins stories for them about a fairy-sized phial containing “a grain that glows like moonlight’s palest silvered blue”. This is her “own wonderland”, discovered and explored with her husband. She longs for the “old laboratory shed” shared with her late husband, with its “rich chemical stink” and the “smoke-dirtied glass” of its windows, “imagining our work and lives held in memory there, lit blue, worshipped, astonishing”. Through her eyes we see the limits of the fading Wonderland amusement park, with its shabby Japanese kiosk selling cheese and pickle sandwiches. The highlight of the Winter Gala for Curie is not its fake Eiffel Tower or the Helter Skelter but the fireworks and the way their “chemistry of colours” is radiant in the night sky.
The novel includes a tragic turn, not hard to anticipate, but this is not a book that prioritises plot twists over characters or language. Every page is artful. Wonderland’s narrative voices are distinct and its central lie – Curie’s incognito visit – is utterly persuasive. The triplets tell us they “remember a time to come” when Miramar will be called “the Hollywood of the South Pacific … [though] the name’ll never really catch on”, as well as a “time more forward still, when the seas have risen, and Miramar is an island once more”. Farr makes the fantastical seem plausible and everyday objects – a stick, a bottle, faded shreds of ribbon – conveyors of magic.
Wonderland, by Tracy Farr (The Cuba Press, $38), is out now. A longer version of this review will appear at nzreviewofbooks.com
