Helen Charman 

The Harpy by Megan Hunter review – a dark tale of domestic destruction

A wronged wife wreaks three acts of revenge in an exploration of the constraints of contemporary marriage and motherhood
  
  

Unsettling psychological terrain … Megan Hunter.
Unsettling psychological terrain … Megan Hunter. Photograph: Tim Hunter/Macmillan

Following her 2017 debut The End We Start From, a novel set in a post-apocalyptic flooded landscape, Megan Hunter’s The Harpy imagines a more familiar kind of catastrophe: adultery. Bored, stifled by the responsibilities of motherhood and spending day after day at home, narrator Lucy responds to her husband’s infidelity by becoming the agent of her own domestic destruction.

In an attempt to keep their family together, the couple strike an agreement: Lucy can have her revenge on adulterous Jake by hurting him three times. Within this fairytale framework, Hunter’s purposefully non-specific language – the town her protagonists inhabit, recognisably Cambridge, is never named – adds an atmosphere of vague threat, which has a curiously numbing effect. Italicised interludes told from the perspective of the eponymous harpy that Lucy appears to transform into invite a paranoid mode of reading: as Lucy and her family go about their daily lives, it feels as if we’re watching them inside a specimen jar, experimental evidence of human beings’ capacity to damage each other.

This atmosphere of suspended reality infects the portrayal of the characters themselves: Jake is never really given much of a personality or a motive, functioning instead as an off-centre tragic figure. In another story – perhaps one of the classical texts that his wife used to study – his downfall would occupy centre stage, but here the dismantling of his life is the mechanism by which the disintegration of Lucy’s mind is illustrated.

Though perhaps “mind” is not the right term. It’s intentionally ambiguous whether the metamorphosis The Harpy’s main character undergoes is supposed to represent a horrific potential outcome of the stifling of the self by the nuclear family, or a solution to it. Lucy’s violence is always muffled and curiously suspended, as if in aspic, alongside recollections of the aggression of her own parents. Although she does truly awful things, it’s difficult as a reader to pass judgment on her behaviour.

The Harpy asks its readers to consider whether emotional violence can be uncoupled from its physical counterpart, and whether one can justify the other. By blurring the boundaries of the two – a mild poisoning and revenge pornography occupy the same textual category of harm – the novel sketches out the unsettling psychological terrain that can lie beneath bourgeois marital composure.

• The Harpy is published by Pan Macmillan (£14.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

 

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