It will surprise no one who reads The Poison That Fascinates that Jennifer Clement is also a published poet.  Her prose is saturated with a poet’s awareness of language: its flexibility, its sounds, its resonance. This does not mean that the book is filled with page after page of hyperbolic description.  Each word is placed carefully for the effect it has on the novel and ripples that may only be felt pages and chapters later.  There is even a chorus of sorts, with clippings and facts on women murderers punctuating each chapter.

The novel’s driving force is Emily Neale.  A girl who was abandoned by her mother and raised by her father

“on encyclopaedias and dictionaries. She likes to collect facts. She knows she can travel in an atlas and fall in love in a novel.
She knows she can kill someone in a book.”

For Emily, books, stories, and facts are living, breathing things.  They serve as protections from the losses in life. The possibilities inherent in books  (a mode of travel, a place for love, a murder), and the fact that the main character has been raised on such heady fare, begins a strange journey to a Mexico that is plagued with disappearances, filled with saints, and haunted by the quiet despair left behind whenever a parent leaves a child.

Emily salves some of her hurt from her own mother’s disappearance by working at a nearby orphanage.  Like nearly everything in this novel, the orphanage is strangely entwined with Emily’s past, and Mother Agata, the nun who runs the orphanage, is a surrogate mother to Emily as well as the orphans officially in her charge. There are odd echoes here as well; the orphans are both to be pitied and pitying.  Their parents are dead, not missing, and Emily and the orphans, most of all, understand the difference:

Disappeared. An eleven-letter word. Disappeared like a lost ring, a sweater, and a spoon. Vanished. This is a word with eight letters. Vanished like early morning fog and dew. Vanished into the magician’s hat. Lost is a four-letter word. Lost into a genie’s lamp. Missing is a seven-letter word.

Emily’s life is quiet, livened only by the stories of saints and murderers that she trades with Mother Agata.  She seems content to spend her days with the orphans and her evenings with her father as he catalogues butterflies and disappearances.  Soon, though, her estranged and enigmatic cousin Santiago arrives, and her life begins a slow collapse into the vacuum her mother’s disappearance left behind.

The Poison That Fascinates is a strange little book. Its vivid description throws the terse prose of the newspaper clippings into sharp relief. The survivors of its tragedies can never escape the losses they have felt. The women within it are just as often destructive as loving. Willful blindness, denial, is sometimes the only things keeping anyone safe. “Woman, divine woman,” runs the song by the Mexican singer Augustin Lara from which the title is taken. “You have the poison that fascinates in your eyes.” Toxic, innocent, fragile, fierce, Emily Neale

said that her mother knew that there were some things that were worth killing for and going to jail for, like being lied to or spat on.

Bookmark to