The Icarus Girl: A Novel - Hardcover

Oyeyemi, Helen

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385513836 ISBN 13: 9780385513838

Publisher: Nan A. Talese, 2005

Synopsis

“The Icarus Girl is an astonishing achievement.” —Sunday Telegraph (London)

Jessamy “Jess” Harrison is eight years old. Sensitive, whimsical, possessed of an extraordinary and powerful imagination, she spends hours writing haiku, reading Shakespeare, or simply hiding in the dark warmth of the airing cupboard. As the child of an English father and a Nigerian mother, Jess just can’t shake off the feeling of being alone wherever she goes, and the other kids in her class are wary of her tendency to succumb to terrified fits of screaming. Believing that a change from her English environment might be the perfect antidote to Jess’s alarming mood swings, her parents whisk her off to Nigeria for the first time where she meets her mother’s family—including her formidable grandfather.

Jess’s adjustment to Nigeria is only beginning when she encounters Titiola, or TillyTilly, a ragged little girl her own age. To Jess, it seems that, at last, she has found someone who will understand her. But gradually, TillyTilly’s visits become more disturbing, making Jess start to realize that she doesn’t know who TillyTilly is at all.

Helen Oyeyemi draws on Nigerian mythology to present a strikingly original variation on a classic literary theme: the existence of "doubles," both real and spiritual, who play havoc with our perceptions and our lives. Lyrical, haunting, and compelling, The Icarus Girl is a story of twins and ghosts, of a little girl growing up between cultures and colors. It heralds the arrival of a remarkable new talent.

About this title

About the Author

HELEN OYEYEMI was born in Nigeria in 1984 and has lived in London from the age of four. She completed The Icarus Girl just before her nineteenth birthday, while studying for her A-levels. She is now a student of social and political sciences at Cambridge University. She has written two plays, Juniper’s Whitening and Victimese. The Icarus Girl is her first novel, and she is at work on her second.

Reviews

Adult/High School–This first novel, completed before its author turned 20, uses elements of Yoruba and Western myths to create a tale of psychological horror with echoes of both Henry James and Stephen King. When British academic star Jessamy Harrison is skipped ahead a year in school (to the pride of her English father and Nigerian mother), the nervous eight-year-old finds the change difficult. Unable to make friends or to cope with teasing about her mixed-race status, she breaks down in screaming tantrums and is prey to odd, feverish illnesses. During a family trip to Nigeria, Jess is elated to make her first friend, a fey girl nicknamed TillyTilly who is devoted to her–and who may be invisible. Delight turns to anxiety when Tilly reveals a shocking secret, and then to horror as she demonstrates her capacity for cruel magic. Is Tilly real? A spirit? An extension of Jess's personality? The creepy ambiguity persists until and beyond the disturbing denouement. Related entirely from Jess's perspective, the book perfectly captures the fear and confusion of a child confronted by inexplicable circumstances, although thinly drawn other characters and a somewhat repetitive structure make it less than a total success. Still, Oyeyemi is a talent to watch.–Starr E. Smith, Fairfax County Public Library, VA
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

The story of Helen Oyeyemi's rise to fame is hard to resist: A Nigerian-born British high school student tells her parents she's working on an essay (a really, really long essay), while in actuality she's writing a novel; and then she sells the rights in 17 countries. All this by age 19. A reviewer begins to worry that the book can't possibly be worth all the hype, that this is the publishing industry at its worst, relentlessly searching for novelty and youth and ruthlessly capitalizing on an extraordinary story in order to sell copies. That perception may be true of publishing, but The Icarus Girl is worth the attention. Oyeyemi is a promising if not fully developed talent, and her debut novel provides evidence of a vivid imagination capable of moving freely between cultures and continents.

Set in England and Nigeria, The Icarus Girl fuses a familiar story of migration and cultural displacement with a gripping undertow of horror reminiscent of Stephen King. The daughter of a Nigerian mother and a British father, 8-year-old Jessamy Wuraola Harrison lives in Crankbrook, England. Bookish by nature and prone to screaming fits and tantrums, Jess is shunned by her peers at school and loved but misunderstood at home. During a family visit with her mother's relations in Nigeria, she meets an odd, barefoot girl with bushy hair and a winning smile who quickly becomes her only friend. TillyTilly, as Jess affectionately names her, makes unexpected appearances and leads Jess into forbidden territory -- her grandfather's locked study, a closed amusement park -- when no one is looking. Captivated by her mischievous and mysterious friend, Jess feels even lonelier when she returns to England.

But then TillyTilly shows up at her back door, and as her friend's antics become even more astonishing Jess is forced to ask some questions: Where does TillyTilly live? Why can she and TillyTilly walk right into a neighbor's kitchen without anyone seeing them? How does her friend suddenly appear upstairs at her house, and how does she pull Jess down and through the staircase, right in front of the babysitter? With each new, inexplicable feat, Jess finds herself increasingly enmeshed with her capricious and intimidating friend. As the story gains momentum, Oyeyemi unveils the full extent of TillyTilly's powers.

The Icarus Girl is a haunting and suspense-filled story. Written in the third person, its narrative stance closely aligned with the protagonist's, the novel presents events from the point of view of an 8-year-old who still lives in a world of fairy tales and children's fantasy novels. But the author also makes use of the first person, frequently dipping into Jess's consciousness. This strategy has mixed results. On the one hand, it enables Oyeyemi to draw on the immediacy of Jess's thoughts, allowing her to capture the moody voice of little-girlhood: "Because it all started in Nigeria, where it was hot, and, although she didn't realise this until much later, the way she felt might have been only a phase, and she might have got better if only (oh, if only if only if ONLY, Mummy) she hadn't gone."

On the other hand, at times I wanted less intimacy and more distance. For while the story is fully attuned to the world of children, it's slightly fuzzy when it comes to adults. Take Jess's mother: Viewed through the eyes of a child, Sarah Harrison's motivations remain murky, and this perspective threatens to turn her into the stereotypical bad mother, ultimately responsible for her daughter's predicament. A judicious use of narrative distance might have shed some light on Sarah, just as it might have helped to place the entire story within the long, complex history of African migration.

Like The Famished Road, Ben Okri's 1991 Booker Prize-winning novel, The Icarus Girl plays with narrative and myth, particularly Yoruba mythologies surrounding twins, spirit children and the powerful intersections between the material and supernatural realms. Oyeyemi's inventive exploration of these connections takes a decidedly creepy turn as TillyTilly begins to resemble a Poe-esque doppelgänger. The Icarus Girl relishes the possibilities presented by the "three worlds" -- this world, the spirit world and the "Bush" of the imagination -- and it does not shy from unpleasant outcomes. Nor does it shrink from exploring how children can suffer from the deep pain incurred when moving between cultures. This bold curiosity bodes well not only for Oyeyemi's career as a writer, but also for the future of British literature.

Reviewed by Heather Hewett
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

The story of a troubled eight-year-old haunted and ultimately possessed by family secrets, this spooky debut novel from a 20-year-old Nigerian-born Cambridge student is sure to garner attention for its precocity and literary self-consciousness. The sensitive protagonist, Jessamy Harrison, born to a British father and Nigerian mother, writes haikus and reads Shakespeare, but regularly throws tantrums and avoids social interaction both at school and at home. As an intervention, her parents take her to stay with family in Nigeria for the summer. At her grandfather's compound, she encounters TillyTilly, a mysterious girl who seems to know everything about Jess and who, Jess realizes, is not visible to anyone else. In Nigeria with TillyTilly, Jess finds a sense of belonging and intimacy for the first time, but when Jess returns to England, TillyTilly becomes less comforting and more troublesome. In confident, heavily stylized prose, Oyeyemi illustrates Jess's cultural dislocation, using both Nigerian and Christian imagery to evoke a sense of her unreality. As sophisticated as she is, Jess's eight-year-old observations provide a limited lens, and at times, the novel's fantasy element veers into young adult suspense territory. Agent, Robin Wade. (June)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Oyeyemi, born in Nigeria and now a 20-year-old Cambridge student, has written about what she knows while drawing on Nigerian folklore and a belief in the power of the mind to alter reality. Born of a Nigerian mother and a British father, Jessamy, a difficult child, feels somehow out of place in London. When she is eight, her mother decides a trip to Nigeria to meet her African relatives might define Jessamy's sense of identity and perhaps erase her sometimes violent tantrums. While there, Jessamy can't connect with her Nigerian cousins, but she meets a "barefoot and strange" new friend, TillyTilly, whom surprisingly no one else ever sees. After the family's return to London, nothing much has changed; Jessamy has no real friends, and she begins to experience periodic fevers. TillyTilly shows up and becomes an increasingly dominant figure in Jessamy's life, eventually revealing information that changes her perception of herself. Oyeyemi subtly weaves together Nigerian myth and a classic doppelganger tale to create a sensitive and precocious debut. Deborah Donovan
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

ONE


"Jess?"

Her mother's voice sounded through the hallway, mixing with the mustiness around her so well that the sound almost had a smell. To Jess, sitting in the cupboard, the sound of her name was strange, wobbly, misformed, as if she were inside a bottle, or a glass cube, maybe, and Mum was outside it, tapping.

I must have been in here too long--

"Jessamy!" Her mother's voice was stern.

Jessamy Harrison did not reply.

She was sitting inside the cupboard on the landing, where the towels and other linen were kept, saying quietly to herself, I am in the cupboard.

She felt that she needed to be saying this so that it would be real. It was similar to her waking up and saying to herself, My name is Jessamy. I am eight years old.

If she reminded herself that she was in the cupboard, she would know exactly where she was, something that was increasingly difficult each day. Jess found it easier not to remember, for example, that the cupboard she had hidden in was inside a detached house on Langtree Avenue.

It was a small house. Her cousin Dulcie's house was quite a lot bigger, and so was Tunde Coker's. The house had three bedrooms, but the smallest one had been taken over and cheerily cluttered with books, paper and broken pens by Jess's mum. There were small patches of front and back garden which Jess's parents, who cited lack of time to tend them and lack of funds to get a gardener, both readily referred to as "appalling." Jess preferred cupboards and enclosed spaces to gardens, but she liked the clumpy lengths of brownish grass that sometimes hid earthworms when it was wet, and she liked the mysterious plants (weeds, according to her father) that bent and straggled around the inside of the fence.

Both the cupboard and the house were in Crankbrook, not too far from Dulcie's house in Bromley. In Jess's opinion, this proximity was unfortunate. Dulcie put Jess in mind of a bad elf--all sharp chin and silver-blonde hair, with chill blue-green lakes for eyes. Even when Dulcie didn't have the specific intention of smashing a hole through Jess's fragile peace, she did anyway. In general, Jess didn't like life outside the cupboard.

Outside the cupboard, Jess felt as if she was in a place where everything moved past too fast, all colours, all people talking and wanting her to say things. So she kept her eyes on the ground, which pretty much stayed the same.

Then the grown-up would say, "What's the matter, Jess? Why are you sad?" And she'd have to explain that she wasn't sad, just tired, though how she could be so tired in the middle of the day with the sun shining and everything, she didn't know. It made her feel ashamed.

"JESSAMY!"

"I am in the cupboard," she whispered, moving backwards and stretching her arms out, feeling her elbows pillowed by thick, soft masses of towel. She felt as if she were in bed.

A slit of light grew as the cupboard door opened and her mother looked in at her. Jess could already smell the stain of thick, wrong-flowing biro ink, the way it smelt when the pen went all leaky. She couldn't see her mum's fingers yet, but she knew that they would be blue with the ink, and probably the sleeves of the long yellow T-shirt she was wearing as well. Jess felt like laughing because she could see only half of her mum's face, and it was like one of those Where's Spot? books. Lift the flap to find the rest. But she didn't laugh, because her mum looked sort of cross. She pushed the door wider open.

"You were in here all this time?" Sarah Harrison asked, her lips pursed.

Jess sat up, trying to gauge the situation. She was getting good at this.

"Yeah," she said hesitantly.

"Then why didn't you answer?"

"Sorry, Mummy."

Her mother waited, and Jessamy's brow wrinkled as she scanned her face, perplexed. An explanation was somehow still required.

"I was thinking about something," she said, after another moment.

Her mum leaned on the cupboard door, trying to peer into the cupboard, trying, Jess realised, to see her face.

"Didn't you play out with the others today?" she asked.

"Yeah," Jessamy lied. She had just caught sight of the clock. It was nearly six now, and she had hidden herself in the landing cupboard after lunch.

She saw her mum's shoulders relax and wondered why she got so anxious about things like this. She'd heard her say lots of times, in lowered tones, that maybe it wasn't right for Jessamy to play by herself so much, that it wasn't right that she seemed to have nothing to say for herself. In Nigeria, her mother had said, children were always getting themselves into mischief, and surely that was better than sitting inside reading and staring into space all day. But her father, who was English and insisted that things were different here, said it was more or less normal behaviour and that she'd grow out of it. Jess didn't know who was right; she certainly didn't feel as if she was about to run off and get herself into mischief, and she wasn't sure whether she should hope to or not.

Her mother held out a hand and grasping it, Jess reluctantly left her towel pillows and stepped out on to the landing. They stood there for a second, looking at each other, then her mother crouched and took Jessamy's face in her hands, examining her. Jess held still, tried to assume an expression that would satisfy whatever her mother was looking for, although she could not know what this was.

Then her mum said quietly. "I didn't hear the back door all day."

Jessamy started a little.

"What?"

Her mum let go of her, shook her head, laughed. Then she said, "How would you like for us to go to Nigeria?"

Jess, still distracted, found herself asking, "Who?"

Sarah laughed.

"Us! You, me and Daddy!"

Jess felt stupid.

"Ohhhhh," she said. "In an aeroplane?"

Her mum, who was convinced that this was the thing to bring Jessamy out of herself, smiled.

"Yes! In an aeroplane! Would you like that?"

Jess began to feel excited. To Nigeria! In an aeroplane! She tried to imagine Nigeria, but couldn't. Hot. It would be hot.

"Yeah," she said, and smiled.

But if she had known the trouble it would cause, she would have shouted "No!" at the top of her voice and run back into the cupboard. Because it all STARTED in Nigeria, where it was hot, and, although she didn't realise this until much later, the way she felt might have been only a phase, and she might have got better if only (oh, if only if only if ONLY, Mummy) she hadn't gone.


Jess liked haiku.

She thought they were incredible and really sort of terrible. She felt, when reading over the ones she'd written herself, as if she were being punched very hard, just once, with each haiku.

One day, Jess spent six hours spread untidily across her bedroom floor, chin in hand, motionless except for the movement of her other hand going back and forth across the page. She was writing, crossing out, rewriting, fighting with words and punctuation to mould her sentiment into the perfect form. She continued in the dark without getting up to switch on a light, but eventually she sank and sank until her head was on the paper and her neck was stretching slightly painfully so that she could watch her hand forming letters with the pencil. She didn't sharpen the pencil, but switched to different colours instead, languidly patting her hand out in front of her to pick up a pencil that had rolled into her path. Her parents, looking in on her and seeing her with her cheek pressed against the floor, thought that she had fallen asleep, and her father tiptoed into the room to lift her into bed, only to be disconcerted by the gleam of her wide-open eyes over the top of her arm. She gave no resistance to his putting her into bed and tucking her in, but when her father checked on her again after three hours or so, he found that she had noiselessly relocated herself back on the floor, writing in the dark. The haiku phase lasted a week before she fell ill with the same quietness that she had pursued her interest.

When she got better, she realised she didn't like haiku anymore.


In the departure lounge at the airport, Jess sat staring at her shoes and the way they sat quietly beside each other, occasionally clicking their heels together or putting right heel to left toe.

Did they do that by themselves?

She tried to not think about clicking her heels together, then watched her feet to see if the heels clicked independently. They did. Then she realised that she had been thinking about it.

When she looked about her, she noticed that everything was too quiet. Virtually no one was talking. Some of the people she looked at stared blankly back at her, and she quickly swivelled in her seat and turned her attention on to her father. He was reading a broadsheet, chin in hand as his eyes, narrowed with concentration behind the spectacle lenses, scanned the page. He looked slightly awkward as he attempted to make room for the paper across his knees; his elbows created a dimple in the paper every time he adjusted his position. When he became aware of her gaze, he gave her a quick glance, smiled, nudged her, then returned to his reverie. On the bench opposite her sat an immense woman wearing the most fantastical traditional dress she had ever seen. Yellow snakes, coiled up like golden orange peel, sprang from the beaks of the vivid red birds with outstretched wings which soared across the royal blue background of the woman's clothing. Jess called it eero ahty booby whenever she tried to imitate her mum's pronunciation of it. Sometimes, when her mum was having some of her friends around, she would dress up in traditional costume, tying the thick cloth with riotous patterns a...

Edition details

• Publisher: Nan A. Talese
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0385513836
• ISBN 13: 9780385513838
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 352