Climbing into Different Ways of Being in the World: Marcie McCauley Reviews Farzana Doctor's The Beauty of Us
September 17, 2024
The Beauty of Us. Farzana Doctor. ECW Press. $19.95, 304 pp., ISBN: 9781770417694
On the campus of Thornton, a girls’ boarding school in rural Ontario, you can hear bells from three different churches clang, an “asynchronous” cacophony. In Farzana Doctor’s fifth novel, readers gain entrance to Thornton’s grounds, classrooms, and residences via three narrators, complementary voices.
The Beauty of Us opens in the fall term of September 1984 and concludes with the spring term, and it begins and ends with students’ perspectives: one a newcomer on the margins of the social hierarchy—attending because she lobbied hard for her father’s permission—and one a fixture in the school’s inner circle—whose mother was a Class-of-’61-Old-Girl.
Readers are welcomed alongside the new French teacher—Miss Naim to the girls, Nahla to readers. We orient ourselves with her: delighting in the charm of her classroom “The Attic,” opening the heavy wooden door then climbing the “steep and slightly uneven staircase,” and emerging into a “large open space with slanted ceilings.” We are in-step, aligned: “Sunshine radiated through the stained-glass windows, beaming blue, red, and yellow diamonds across the white walls.”
Nahla’s positioning invites us into a closer relationship, even though the decision to present one student’s experience in the first person suggests the intended focus is the youths’ experiences and challenges. (The other characters in the trio of narrators are presented in close-third-person views, so readers are still privy to their thoughts and desires, fears and inconsistencies.)
It’s Nahla who relays the experience of the three bells’ clanging, which reminds her of “the mosques in her old Beirut neighbourhood, their competing adhans mixing and melding.” It’s she who slows the pace and nudges readers to pause and “to listen, her imagination inserting the muezzin’s melodic call to prayer into the bell ringer’s unholy noise.”
Nahla’s observation reminds readers that it’s how we mix and meld, how we differentiate between melody and noise, how we bring the past into the present that allows us to inhabit our whole selves. That’s the underlying story here, how these three characters are moving across thresholds and climbing into different ways of being in the world, up the uneven stairs into a thrumming and colourful space.
With an ‘80s soundtrack (Cyndi Lauper and Madonna, Duran Duran and Wham!—every school dance ending with “Stairway to Heaven”), and Walkmans as the innovative technology, readers are also invited into a space where women are topping the charts, solidly on the other side of Betty Friedan and legendary bra-burning.
It’s also a space where the borders of sex positivity and predatory behaviour by authority figures are freshly contested; those terms were not part of the cultural lexicon then, however, and Doctor’s therapeutic background in social work uniquely qualifies her to articulate the terminology of the day.
Her explanation of the term ‘grooming’, for instance, reflects its original usage rather than the current headline-media usage, and one of the students clarifies her understanding by employing the term ‘pedo’ (occasionally it’s uncomfortable when writers get vocabulary and historical behaviours right). This tendency, however, pulls the narrative’s balance away from entertainment and towards instruction.
Socially conscious writers have to balance creativity with edification, and Doctor’s novels tackle challenging issues, from her 2007 debut Stealing Nasreen about belonging and queer identity, through 2020’s Seven, about bodily autonomy and mental health. But she also lavishes attention on characterization, so highlighting a couple of themes leaves much unsaid. Her characters’ identities and experiences are rich and complex, and this counters the didactic pull.
One way Doctor expresses her multi-faceted character development is through Nahla’s language, when she responds unthinkingly in her mother tongue and moves towards English: “‘Marhaba’, she called out, then ‘bonjour, hello?’” When she first tours the campus, she murmurs ‘sahira’ and then ‘charmant’ before she lands on ‘charming’. It’s a subtle reflection of intersectional identity, but it’s also consistent and orderly. Occasionally these elements feel more orchestrated, land in over-earnestness, but as with fiction by Catherine Hernandez and Zoe Whittall, loyal readers will expect (even crave) this energy.
The Beauty of Us resonates with the immersive, alternating teacher-student points-of-view in Elaine Feeney’s How to Build a Boat (2023), and the specifically class-conscious writing in Kiley Reid’s Come & Get It (2024). It’s neither the classic Susan Swan story of a fictionalised Havergal College in The Wives of Bath (1993), nor the fantastical upset of Mona Awad’s campus coming-of-age Bunny (2019), nor the spiralling darkness of Suzette Mayr’s Dr. Edith Vane and the Hares of Crawley Hall (2017), but it could be shelved with them all, for the after-hours shenanigans, diabolical behaviours, and haunting presences (respectively).
Farzana Doctor’s new novel queries the intricate relationship between activism and art, and her characters illuminate the complicated relationship between authority and autonomy. There’s just enough suspense surrounding Nahla’s predecessor’s death and whether/how that relates to one student’s evening absences to keep the pages turning, and more than enough story against a backdrop of social inequity to keep readers’ minds churning.
Marcie McCauley writes and reads in Tkaronto (Toronto) and N’Swakamok (Sudbury) on the homelands of Indigenous peoples—including the Haudenosaunee, Anishnaabeg and Wendat—land still inhabited by their descendants. Her writing has been published in American, British and Canadian magazines and journals, in print and online. Visit her at buriedinprint.com.