Review: Tara Isabella Burton’s fairy tale for grownups
(iStock)Tara Isabella Burton opens her novel Here in Avalon with a time-honored line: “Once there were two sisters.” Right away, we know what awaits. This is a fairy tale. But entering into the realm of fairy tale is far from a guarantee of happy endings for all involved. Nor is it a signal that the story is meant for the immature: Fairy tales did not begin as stories only for children. Once they were stories for whole communities, stories that pointed the way back toward the recovery of lost identities, broken hearts and potentials long gone to rust and dust.
Where a lesser work might lean on the borrowed finery of mythic grandeur, Here in Avalon turns immediately to laying out circumstances of contemporary life. Burton takes care to ground her story in the obviously and materially real: We may or may not believe in fairy tales, but we can believe in Rose and Cecilia because we have met them, or women who may as well be them.
The two sisters represent the time-tested antithesis of Good Girl and Rebel, though Burton prevents this from being burdensomely allegorical by stitching some contrast into the tapestry.
Rose in her way is also a rebel against the sisters’ bohemian upbringing, and Cecilia in her own way refuses to be satisfied with an unexamined life. While Cecilia has spent years chasing meaning and experience in dozens of forms—“from lover to lover, from continent to continent, from ashram to monastery”—Rose has always sought instead “the feeling of building a life: something clean and complete and self-contained.”
By the time the plot begins to move, their overlapping quests have resulted in each sister acquiring the quality of character she did not seek: Rose’s rectitude has brought her experience in the forms of both romance and worldly shrewdness, while Cecilia’s impractical instability and self-inflicted sufferings have gone hand-in-hand with wide-eyed receptivity and an unjudging—perhaps at times undiscerning—but surprisingly clean heart.
The story’s point of view, a sympathetic but cool third-person perspective, tracks closely to the savvy and worldly responsible sister of the pair: Rose, an app developer engaged to Caleb, a man whose clean whiteboard of goals is positioned to be the first thing he sees when he wakes up every morning. Cecilia, by contrast, lives the kind of life that gets labeled a hot mess: disheveled hair, laddered tights, undone laundry covered by a haze of fragrance, big childlike questions that Cecilia either cannot or will not numb down or paper over.
Through this study in contrasts, Burton gives presence to both the Apollonian seduction of self-improvement—with its quasi-Pelagian promise that our will’s good efforts always reap rewards in the realm of nature if not of grace—and the Dionysian undertow of desire that pulls with such heavy traction against the noble lie of Apollo’s myth.
The sisters’ names are a deliberate allusion to “Snow-white and Rose-red,” two fickle sisters from the Brothers Grimm who in the course of their classic fairy tale have to be told, “Don’t beat your lover dead.”
The lover in this case is Paul, Cecilia’s ex-husband. Despite their breakup, Paul becomes a serious agent of the story’s development, as he becomes Rose’s ally in her protracted, largely futile effort to protect Cecilia from herself. He suffers intensely for his principles, yet without ever grandstanding or calling undue attention to his pain; he is an imperfect man, awkward, sentimental and ill-adapted to modernity, but also reliable, generous, unassuming; he never uses his imperfections as an excuse or a crutch. For all these reasons and more, readers are likely to find Paul especially admirable: Here is a man who manages to be Christlike without the weight of savior or martyr complexes.
Here in Avalon appeals to a sense of playfulness with its profuse, sometimes sly, but never coy web of allusions. For example, later in the story, Rose has to take up an undercover alias; her choice of “Lily” resonates with a deliberate attempt to recapture innocence over experience. That departure awakens the reader’s own imagination to try to predict what other out-of-character choices Rose may make next.
Not only fans of the Grimms and the Greeks, but audiences for Arthurian legends, Romantic poets, German opera and the Christian devotional tradition will find plenty of thematic suggestion that nevertheless cleverly slips free of strict allegory. Still, this deep-rooted, thickly layered story can also be enjoyed for its own sake without an acquaintance with older books—a difficult trick for a writer to pull off, but Burton’s light touch makes the feat possible.
A complex revelation that lands rather early in the plot arc proves to be only the first of a series of spiraling rotations up the novel’s seven-storey mountain. Inside the fictional frame, and in a certain limited sense, it turns out that fairies are real.
The idea that something thought not to be part of reality could turn out to be so may appeal not only to adult readers who grew up on childhood fantasy but also, in an analogous sense, to the religious believer. After all, a belief in anything unseen strikes many as equally improbable, and raises the same questions for many in this era of broken trust: Are you sure that what you think is real is really real, or is your belief just the result of your own disorder and your desperation for rescue? Are these supposedly superior beings just using you—for power, control, some obscure and nefarious satisfaction of their own? Or might they really, under all the smoke and mirrors, have your good in mind?
The porousness of the self in the face of such questions underlines an implicit assertion of Burton’s fictional rhetoric: No matter how much effort we pour into narrating, mythologizing and transforming ourselves, we are always also given to ourselves by others’ responses to us.
Whereas the floating life of the second half of the novel might leave some readers struggling with having their patterned expectations of novelistic action overturned, I found it sublime. It would have been sublime enough merely to spend time among “the fairies” in their enchanted enclosure, worshippers of an Eros without Venus—an idyllic neverland of flowers, music, incense, glitter, silk, velvet, damask and gilding. But in a brave move, Burton also takes us behind the scenes of the enchanted enclosure, showing us the deep humanity of her lost souls—to an effect that the fictional fabric, and the play-within-a-play it weaves, becomes denser, richer and more compelling.
Burton understands how dangerous beauty, or “bad enchantment,” can embody the deathly illness at the heart of distorted love, and how that love leads to destruction unless and until it becomes fully spiritual.
Like all fairy tale magic, the enchanted enclosure of Avalon has rules. This Avalon’s rules are those of medieval courtesy, or courtly love: Never cheat; love jealously; lie only in the service of the loved one; and, above all, never, ever drop the facade. As with courtly love (and as in heaven), there can be, in Avalon, no marriage, no consummation, no pairing. Its ethos reflects less a genuine, untroubled childhood than a perpetual early adolescence: the first hints of desire but without fulfillment, for as one character says of married life (things such as an adolescent easily believes), “That’s the world’s love, not ours. That kind of love corrodes. And is always corroded.” Another echoes: “All the greatest love stories are the unconsummated ones.”
If what we need now is the kind of story that restores wonder to the world, Here in Avalon provides one avenue to that destination. Against the world’s many broken stories of love that can never be either finished or completely fulfilled, the novel sets the vision of a more mysterious love that says, simply, undyingly: “My dear one. My dear, dear lost one.... We’ve been waiting for you.”
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