Cutesy title, I thought, which may presage a cutesy book – but no. Neurodivergence – the label given to the concept that our brains don’t all function in the same way, and that how we engage with and make sense of the world will differ from one person to another – is a simple enough notion to grasp and yet is also poorly understood.
It’s caricatured in pop culture by, for example, Dustin Hoffman’s Raymond in the movie Rain Man and by Jim Parsons’ Sheldon Cooper in The Big Bang Theory. Such caricatures tend towards comedy – and also make the assumption that neurodivergence is a cloak concealing genius.
The unnamed protagonist of Alice Franklin’s novel is no genius, but she is precocious, hyperliterate, awkward and easily over-stimulated. She has trouble understanding tone and metaphor, and interprets language quite literally, stripped of context.
She navigates her way with no compass, no star to guide her, and the adults in her life are of little help. Her mother is unstable, in and out of psychiatric care, and her father is stressed and barely holding things together himself. Some adults are cruel, others merely obtuse and a few are kind. She finds refuge, as so many awkward, nerdy kids do, in libraries – which are quite simply the best public spaces in the world, along with parks.
One night when she can’t sleep she watches a documentary in which a woman is talking about a curious literary artefact known as the Voynich Manuscript – a still untranslated 15-century work named after a book dealer who bought it a little over 100 years ago.
The Voynich Manuscript is something of a MacGuffin in the novel, as the protagonist’s attempt to make sense of it is speculative and perhaps fruitless, but it provides her with a focus for her intellectual curiosity and brings her into an orbit of librarians, archivists, researchers, enthusiasts and academics – kindred minds who find her odd but not weird. They have a pretty generous dose of oddness themselves. In other words, she finds her people.
The entire novel is narrated in the second person, a perspective that in another writer’s hands could feel like being poked in the chest after a while: you do this, you do that. But the narrator in this story is not so much addressing the reader as she is addressing herself: her child self, from the future, wiser adult self that this child became.
This narrative technique has a dissociative effect – the narrator and the protagonist are both the same person, yet also distinct from each other. One observes the other from a detached yet fond height. It’s a novel a neurodivergent person might write, and the author acknowledges this in an endnote that says her central character “is partly informed by her own experience with autism”. What could have been yet another fictional portrayal of autism played for laughs is instead an insightful, moving and well-written account of growing up different from others.
