#BOY FALLS IN LOVE WITH AUTOMATON STORY SERIES#

(Oyeyemi apparently got this idea from Marina Abramović’s account of such practices in Eastern Europe.) Boy feels he’s torturing her for some purpose too, ‘trying to train me’, but she never finds out what for, because at 20 she runs away, taking the first bus she can get from Port Authority, and ends up in a town called Flax Hill, in Massachusetts.Īll this happens in the novel’s first few pages, but the rat catcher haunts the book, reappearing in flashes in Boy’s thoughts and dreams (‘the rat catcher held me by the tail … and answered questions on my habits’), and occasionally in her own violent impulses. The culprit is her father, ‘the rat catcher’, a nightmarish figure who keeps rodents in cages in the basement, starving and blinding them so they can be relied on to attack other rats in the factories and warehouses that want his services. In one of her first memories Boy is washing her hair when a ‘clean hand descends out of nowhere’ and holds her facedown in the water she recalls fainting, then waking on the floor with burning lungs. Plenty of villains start out as princesses: it’s only a question of where you begin or end the story. In the original tale, the bad queen is the fairest of them all until Snow White grows up. Oyeyemi is playing with a fairytale template, and yet there isn’t all that much scope there for alteration. She’s half Rapunzel, half Cinderella, but will become the novel’s wicked stepmother. The motherless teenage girl she sees in the mirror resembles a fairytale princess: pale skin, fine bones, dark eyes and a great quantity of ice-blonde hair. ‘I’d hide myself away inside them,’ she says of the mirrors, but they are also a neat way to show the reader Boy from the outside.

#BOY FALLS IN LOVE WITH AUTOMATON STORY SERIES#

‘Nobody ever warned me about mirrors,’ Boy says, and then describes her relationship with her own reflection: ‘I was on the most familiar terms with her, same as any other junior dope too lonely to be selective about the company she keeps.’ Not content with one double, Boy tells us, she used to stand between two mirrors to create an infinite series of Boys that moved when she did: the effect was ‘like the working of an automaton’. The story nominally begins on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the middle of the 20th century, but its opening has many of the hallmarks of a once-upon-a-time. The latest book is another unpredictable mingling of realism and magic. Each book has been an experiment: The Icarus Girl (2005), written while she was doing her A-levels, is about an eight-year-old prone to screaming tantrums and hiding in cupboards, whose seemingly imaginary Nigerian friend begins to take over in sinister, bullying fashion The Opposite House (2007) makes bigger leaps in time, place and tone, cutting between a troubled young pregnant woman in London and a mythical ‘somewherehouse’ in Cuba, where her family once lived White Is for Witching (2009) is a polyphonic haunted-house tale in which the house itself speaks and plots along with its inhabitants Mr Fox (2011) is a fractured, ambitious novel in which the characters (a Bluebeard figure and his female antagonist) continually rewrite one another.

Boy, Snow, Bird is Oyeyemi’s fifth novel.

The title of Helen Oyeyemi’s new novel comes from the storybookish names of its three principal women, Boy, Snow and Bird – ‘a wicked stepmother and her daughters’, as Oyeyemi described them to an interviewer. F airy tales deal in ones, twos and threes, in lone heroines, haunting doubles, sets of wishes and curses: they are patternings, engines for producing extreme and ambiguous effects from simple elements.

Boy falls in love with automaton story