Tags
Book Review, Frances Hardinge, Gothic Fiction, The Lie Tree, Victorian set fiction, Young Adult Fiction
“Faith had always told herself that she was not like other ladies. But neither, it seemed, were other ladies”
Frances Hardinge’s YA book, The Lie Tree, with its angry, highly intelligent, discounted central character, fourteen year old Faith Sunderly, is set in 1868, with a central theme involving scientific enquiry, fossil hunting, Darwin’s theories, their impact on faith, and the deepening realisation for the central character, that her life is unlikely to be what her character and abilities should fit her for, due to the unfair opportunities closed to her gender.
There was a hunger in her, and girls were not supposed to be hungry. They were supposed to nibble sparingly when at table, and their minds were supposed to be satisfied with a slim diet too
Hardinge won the Costa Children’s Book Category Prize with this – and, in fact, the Costa Judges also awarded it the Costa Book of The Year, the outright winner over the other category winners. And it is easy to see why
Firstly, she is a wonderfully rich literary writer, taking pleasure in rich language, gorgeous imagery – and giving huge pleasure to the reader. She has created a brilliant central character – awkward, fierce, resentful, loving, frustrated, and far more intelligent than most of the other inhabitants of her world, male and female, her contemporaries and the adults.
Faith is absolutely believable as an educated, intelligent, individual middle class girl on the edge of womanhood in Victorian England and she also stands for what it might have been like for many young girls of similar intelligence and independent thinking, rammed into the corseted embrace of narrow opportunities and confined expectations
For most of his six years, Howard had looked to Faith to be his oracle, his almanac, his source of all truth. He had believed everything she told him. This tide was changing though. Girls don’t know about sailing, he would say suddenly. Girls don’t know about the moon……Each time he said such a thing it was a shock, and Faith felt her domain of expertise breaking apart like an ice floe
So Hardinge’s book inhabits a real society at a certain time, but is also very much a fantasy historical novel, and a kind of detective story. It’s a mash-up which for the most part works very well indeed, and has much to absorb and fascinate the adult reader as well.
Faith, her winsome, eyelash batting, flirtatious mother, her far less intelligent younger brother, Howard, and her austere, secretive clergyman fossil hunting father leave their Kent home under some sort of secret cloud of impending disgrace. The Reverend Sunderly has achieved fame (and in fact, notoriety) around the discovery of a fossil which appears to verify the existence of the biblical Nephilim. Sunderly and family decamp to Vane, one of the Channel Islands (an invention which seems as if it must in fact exist!) which is a hub of archaeological interest.
Her emotions were so large and strange that they seemed to be something outside her, vast cloud patterns rolling and colliding above while she watched
There are darker matters afoot, and this is much more than a working out of Victorian reality – Hardinge injects dark Gothic fantasy into the mix, including a search, by several interested and fanatical parties, for a fabled and curious tree, The Mendacity Tree, which grows in complete darkness, has frightening hallucinogenic fruit and may even possibly be The Tree Of Knowledge of Good and Evil. There is even a beloved pet snake.
Along the way, murder, suicide, good old fashioned lust for riches, thwarted passions, revenge and a small society turning on those who flout its conventions flicker in and out of view. Hardinge also skilfully exploits that favourite crime-fiction trope, the country house murder – in this case, as the shenanigans which are going on happen against the background of a small island, the list of suspects, and the motives for the various mysteries which will need unravelling, are dizzyingly busy.
My only reservations about this glitteringly absorbing book came in the last 40 or 50 
pages, where the pace of plot, ravelling up and being unravelled, became a bit too much for me, and the sense of galloping towards the tie up, the reveals, the explanations for the first time made me realise that I was reading a book for a younger market, perhaps one more desirous of fast, dynamic, dramatic action
I don’t read much YA fiction but this does sound excellent. I would have adored it when I was an actual YA, I’m sure!
Yes I think I would have too , though to be honest I was such a little sophisticate in my reading that I was seriously reading adult stuff at my own ‘YA’ time of life. I’ve made up for it in adulthood by really enjoying well-written, more literary YA. Like this.
I saw her interviewed about the book when she won the Costa and thought she sounded interesting. The book sounds as if it veers too far towards fantasy (and YA) for my tastes, but her writing style seems excellent from the quotes.
Mmm. I think you would enjoy the early part of the book but could see you getting a bit tsk tsk ish as it becomes more fantasy and not quite so sciency
Her writing style is indeed really good. I think it is perhaps only the over exuberance of plotting at the end which reveals its YA orientation
I’m with the others – don’t read YA, but I loved the premise of this book!
It really is a good ‘un
Sounds interesting, and yes, I do think that the race to tie things up may be attributed to the YA genre. I do like the quotes you’ve chosen. The author’s style appeals. But I can’t be distracted at the moment. I just started Nayomi Munaweera’s “What Lies Between Us.” She’s our guest author for our school’s annual literary dinner fundraiser. I’ve got to get it read so I can write a decent intro for her. And perhaps I will dip into her first book, “Island of a Thousand Mirrors.” AND the dinner’s being held at our home, the one without bookshelves or books! Oh, woe! I suppose that does leave more room for guests…..
Oh the long continuing delights of house moves!
Thanks for your introduction to this book LF. I look forward to reading it as I’m very interested in many of the story elements you and Frances Hardinge describe. I’m a great fan of well written YA literature and always delighted to hear about another interesting title.
Thanks underrunner. She certainly is well written YA literature, and I have no doubt I will explore earlier writing by her
I read and really enjoyed The Lie Tree, for all the reasons you mentioned in your review and also I am quite captured by well-written coming-of-age stories, particularly where there is the sense that the young person encounters their shadow and must integrate this in order to keep moving toward greater maturity. That aspect of this story made me think of Ursula Le Guin’s Wizard of Earthsea and Margaret Mahy’s Changeover among other books. A great pleasure; I’m pleased to see Frances Hardinge has written a number of books and I look forward to reading more.
Oh, a lovely comment. I like Le Guin VERY much, now Mahy I don’t know, and I think I should investigate. I am very fond of well written books for the young, and what you say, re integration of shadow, is so true
Margaret Mahy was an NZ author who wrote prolifically for children and young people; I love the way she used language and her unique imaginative sensibility. She lived locally and was missed greatly for herself and her writing when she died a few years ago.
Thanks underrunner