It’s everyone, all the people of Herot Hall, the police and the babies, the men with their names all the same, the women with their perfect faces, all cracking and showing what’s underneath, what’s always been there, coarse fur and gaping maws, whipping tails, scales, claws and hunger, and teeth, and teeth, and teeth. [loc. 3616]
Dana Mills, a US Marine deployed in a desert country, is captured by enemy forces. Her 'execution' is televised: but, months later, she staggers out of the desert, amnesiac and pregnant. (Rape or consensual? She doesn't know.) The military are keen on discovering what really happened, but Dana escapes hospital/prison and makes her way back to the town where she was born. Which turns out to have been levelled, and replaced by the pristine gated community of Herot Hall. Dana holes up in an abandoned train station underneath the mountain that overlooks Herot Hall, and bears her son -- Gren -- and guards him as he grows.
Meanwhile down in Herot Hall, Willa, the wife of Roger Herot, circulates through the routine of meal plans, cocktail hours (the toast is 'to us, and people like us') and diets approved by her mother. Her son, Dylan, grows up with every luxury: yet it's the strange 'wild' boy from the mountain whom he befriends.
If some of those names resonate, it may be because The Mere Wife is a feminist reimagining of Beowulf, that Old English poem about monsters. Headley opens her novel with translations of terms used in the original: "AGLÆCA (Old English, noun, masculine): fighter, warrior, hero: AGLÆC-WIF (Old English, noun, feminine): wretch, monster, hell-bride, hag". Though these definitions are contentious, they highlight how the same qualities can be heroic in a man in monstrous in a woman. And the focal characters in this novel are the women. You can read the title two ways: Dana is the merewif, 'woman of the mere', living beside the underground lake; Willa is, to all appearances, merely a trophy wife -- until her son is threatened. Then she enlists the help of another former Marine, Ben Woolf, who can't help casting himself as the hero.
But who are the heroes and who are the monsters?
Lots to consider here: racism (Dana thinks her son will be othered, monstered, by the folk down the mountain because of his brown skin), social class, sexism, Willa hiding her ferocity beneath designer clothes and glossy cosmetics, Dana hiding her whole self in the darkness ...
The language of this novel is rich and bloody. There are some unpleasant and unsettling scenes, and there are moments of great beauty. I loved the contrast between Dana's first-person narrative, Willa's third-person chapters (external, because she is always, always under observation -- by her mother and her mother's coterie, by CCTV, by her internalised prejudices), and especially the first-person-plural narratives of a dog pack, a group of older women and (possibly?) the assembled spirits who live underneath the mountain.
Headley's translation of Beowulf has recently been published, and I'm very much looking forward to reading it and then rereading this novel. Which, if it's not clear, I enjoyed and admired: was moved by: has taken up residence in the dark recesses of my mind.
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