Review | Ann-Marie MacDonald’s new book ‘Fayne’ a triple-decker Victorian spoof

Audaciously big, a Hummer of a historical novel upholstered in damask, 722-page “Fayne” interrogates and spoofs integral aspects of the late Victorian era — sexuality, gender, class, science — through a vehicle that recalls an extinct Victorian specialty: the triple-decker novel.

Largely set in Edinburgh and Fayne House, an eroding manor situated on “a shifting array of boggy expanses” in the “Disputed Country” between Scotland and England, MacDonald’s novel launches with a narrator, preternaturally bright twelve-year-old Charlotte, describing a stale domestic routine.

Other than servants, her father — Henry, a “vegetableist” and “the embodiment of Virtue” — is Charlotte’s sole companion. She’s more or less housebound, she explains, because of her “Condition,” that of being “morbidly susceptible to germs.” On the anniversary of her mother’s death (an event shrouded in mystery; ditto for Charlotte’s deceased elder brother), Charlotte’s life takes a radical turn when Henry hires Mr. Margalo, a tutor.

Though Charlotte’s instructor leaves Fayne House abruptly (and without explanation: another mystery), a few weeks of conversations with him expands her consciousness. Soon, Charlotte begins to question her father’s motives and various accounts of the family’s history.

After Henry calls for a new, gender-specific education, she learns much more about her Condition, which has nothing to do with germs.

In “Fayne” the family closet is stuffed with skeletons.

In a back story that starts with letters in 1871, Charlotte’s mother Mae describes a marriage of convenience (of her American money to Henry’s pedigree, essentially) followed by misfortunes and apparent mental breakdowns.

Of course, nothing is as it seems.

Consistently, Ann-Marie MacDonald’s fourth novel (the first since 2014’s “Adult Onset”) straddles the line between finely wrought and overwrought. A two-time Giller Prize finalist for “Fall On Your Knees,” which won the Commonwealth Prize, and “The Way the Crow Flies,” (she’s also an actor, playwright and broadcaster), MacDonald struggles to manage the enormity of her project; constructed from so many bolts of literary fabric, it grows unwieldy.

While fans of reduced-calorie fiction will balk at “Fayne”’s 100+ chapters, dogged readers may savour MacDonald’s humour, evident research and appealing portions of gothic tropes (seldom has “gorse country” been such an ecosystem of hazards, legends, ghost stories and missing persons). A complex tale of constrictive forces and stifling norms, “Fayne”’s size permits MacDonald to touch on all manner of Victoriana, whether Darwinism, education, psychiatry, sexology, cuisine (and there are some unexpectedly funny bits about mutton), or laudanum addiction.

The author’s liberal hand with exotic domestic terms — sacque, epergne, casquette, gasolier, and crinolette, to count just one handful — will appeal to some but perhaps irk others.

Similarly, archaic constructions in MacDonald’s narrative result in Victorian literary pastiche, to dubious effect. In digesting them — “In her smile is the promise of compensations for the strictures of this mortal coil the like of which Henry, Lord Bell, Seventeenth Baron of the DC de Fayne, had never imagined until setting eyes on her last April”; “Thus we wended our way through the beauteous green Borders, those contested lands of yore, their still-dubious frontiers so unlike the civilized concordance with contradiction contained by Fayne” — we might be reminded of George Orwell’s advocacy of “avoidable ugliness.”

Despite the superabundance of material, MacDonald fashions an appealing, if overstuffed, story. True to its forebears, “Fayne” criticizes society as it indulges in melodrama and sensationalism. The novel has much to consider, and could have done so with less weight (literally) and fewer decorative flourishes.

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