This thriller, The lie Tree, one can say, is a rather pleasant fusion of the essence of the scientific progress vs faith debate of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and the mystery and supernatural elements of the short-lived genre of the Sensational novels. Sensational novels were those whose plots were based on crime and scandal usually with regard to the life of their female characters. It is again a female, Faith, who occupies the central position in Hardinge’s plot but the focus on a scandal which concerns the unfolding of a mysterious scientific secret by a woman, rather than the unveiling of the secrets of a woman’s life, lends the novel its newness and freshness.
Set in the 1800s, Hardinge makes her novel accessible to the readers through its primary character Faith — “a 14 year old girl with wooden features and a mud brown plait”. Born to the Sunderly family, Faith is the daughter of Reverend Erasumus — a natural scientist who is an expert in fossils. A scandal around Faith’s family forces them to be driven out of Kent. Upon the arrival of the Sunderly family at the island of Vane, the plot of the novel is guided by Faith’s quest to finding out the reason and the people behind the mysterious murder of her father.
Everything in the plot post the death of Faith’s father awakens or heightens fear, mystery and the the readers’ consciousness, rendering it extremely difficult for the reader to put down the book as it progresses to reveal the supernatural, gothic and mystical world of The Mendacity Tree — a tree which feeds on lies to supply the fruit of eternal truth and knowledge.
The novel with its arresting narrative bares open to its readers the multiple facets of the Victorian society, its household and its traditions. It provides an insight into the attitude of the Victorian society towards its women through its emphatic descriptions of demeaning and discriminatory ideas propagated about them such as how their skulls are smaller in size, how “widows in full mourning must not make house calls” and how daughters must be “dutiful” and not “clever”.
In another instance, Hardinge’s work presents a picture of the excessively patriarchal male “scientific” society at this time. Faith, being a girl, or rather a woman goes through struggles to be included in what she feels naturally inclined towards — the discipline of Natural Science. She aspires to be an accomplice to her father and the custodian of his knowledge. She works towards it despite constantly finding herself being dismissed by the scientific community (the domain of men alone), for being a girl. Faith quite often feels like a beggar and at other times she is seen retracting things she knows for the fear of being perceived as being too scientifically educated for a ‘girl’ her age. Working against the likes of her mother who tries to train her to be a woman of repute and good manners, and her younger brother Howard — the son and the alleged rightful heir of all scientific temperament and endeavours, she does everything to be noticed by her father in order to be his secret-keeper. It is only upon her father’s sudden mysterious death that Faith finds his journals and embarks on the journey to find the cause of his death.
Hardinge has thus wisely and rather impressively places Faith not merely as a challenger in the story but also a challenge to Victorian thought and belief system with regard to the place and intellect of women in the world of Science and progress.
In addition to its focus on the representation of the condition of women in Britain, the novel familiarises its readers to various commonplace yet extremely engaging features of the Victorian age such as craniometry, the myths about left handed children, evil spirits and the burial of the dead; and the newfound inclination towards visuality (the photograph, devices like the stereoscope) and some rather uncanny practices which emerged out of it such as the photographing the dead.
Categorised as “children’s fiction” by Hardinge and her publishers, the book is anything but simplistic. It is in fact an extremely complex interweaving of Darwin’s theories of evolution, the deeply embedded sexism in the Victorian social fabric, a social history of the England of nineteenth century and the fantastic elements from Hardinge’s impressive imagination. Hardinge’s prose is fluent, nuanced and smooth and it is with the vividness and effortlessness of its detailed prose, that the novel transports its readers to Victorian England.
Her choice of a title and the name of her central protagonist is an interesting one which denotes the various facets of her story where Faith seems to question and feed into the lies around her.
The multiple layers to the plot and the multiplicity of its concerns makes it extremely tough to place the novel within a single category both thematically and in terms of its genre. The lie Tree is a book for everyone — scholars, researchers, children, mystery and gothic lovers. It is a book which has its charm in the elongated descriptions where the fantastic collaborates with the real, imagination meets facts and faith meets doubt and lies.
The writer is a PhD Research Scholar at St Andrews University, Scotland