...instead of taking my invisibility as a sign that I have reached my expiry date, I can see it for what it really is. A superpower. [loc. 1563]
When Bernie Moon was a little girl -- 'when magic was easier than maths' -- she used to play House with her friend Katie. Their version of House was a kind of telepathy or empathy, a 'looking inside other people'. Katie and Bernie fell out over an incident at primary school, and Bernie lost that ability -- after a lightly-sketched but harrowing incident at secondary school -- when she had her first period. Now she's menopausal, and it's coming back...
The novel opens with a vivid dream, a woman jogging in the park at night, attacked. It's not just a dream, and Bernie's rage at the 'she shouldn't have been running alone' victim-blaming is tempered by unease at her vivid second-hand experience. Sensing predatory intentions from a man in a cafe -- who turns out to be Woody, an old friend of her husband's -- Bernie befriends barista Iris, Woody's target. She's a woman in her twenties, a comics fan who quickly recognises Bernie's gift ('Jesus, Bernie. If you’re going to have a superpower, you could at least take an interest') and encourages her to use it in positive ways. Positive for women, anyway... Woody, who now passes out every time he thinks a predatory thought, is convinced that there's a terrible feminist conspiracy to eliminate masculinity. But it's never that simple, even for somebody who can, literally, change minds.
Broken Light is told almost entirely in two voices: Bernie's LiveJournal entries, and a memoir entitled Class of '92, by Bernie's childhood friend Katie. It's evident from the start that something terrible has happened, but Harris' pacing is excellent, and keeps us guessing until (and beyond?) the end. Bernie doesn't really dwell on her own isolation, but she's married to a man who is (at best) emotionally distant; barely sees her adult son; and is endlessly frustrated by her mother. Until she joins an all-women (and very diverse) running group she doesn't really have friends.
Plenty of talking points here. Are all the men Bernie meets really that vile? Isn't she engaged in a sort of violation (a word Katie uses) when she 'looks inside' people who are unaware of her presence in their minds? Is there something especially unsettling about lurking in someone else's mind while they masturbate? Is the death of the man killed in an all-female space ('he’d seen no need to dress as a woman to do so') his own fault, or Bernie's? And why does Bernie still want to prove herself at the class reunion?
I read this voraciously, wondering (of course) what I would do with Bernie's power, what I would do in her place. Harris has said this novel was written in response to Stephen King's Carrie (in which supernatural powers arrive with Carrie's menses). I like the idea of menopause as the beginning of magic, rather than the end of visibility. Broken Light is not entirely cheerful, but I found it uplifting and positive, and full of rage, and full of hope.
This is how we change the world. Not in violence or in war, but in clarity and contemplation. Change is the thing that waits; that hopes; that sometimes skirts the shadows; that hides under the bedclothes; that tidies up the leftovers; that whispers to your children; that looks at you from polished doors and in reflective surfaces; that sometimes bleeds; and yet is strong, maybe stronger than anyone. [loc. 5180]
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