Maresi by Maria Turtschaninoff (trans. from Finnish by Annie Prime)
Pushkin's Children's Books, January 2016
256 pages, e-book
*My copy provided by the publisher through Netgalley.
Maria Turtschaninoff's startling YA novel begins with an arrival. A silent, traumatised girl disembarks from a ship in a remote place; money changes hands. The women who live on the island have been expecting her, with some apprehension. She barely says a word, except to give her name, Jai, and to ask, with fear, if there are any men there. There are not. She has made it on a long lonely journey to the fabled Red Abbey, an island settlement in the middle of a wide ocean populated entirely by women. The Sisters are devoted to the three aspects of the Goddess - the Maiden, Mother and Crone - and to the care and education of young girls in all the arts of life. The girls, each with her own story and from all corners of far-away lands, live at the Abbey as novices until they decide whether to stay forever or to take their skills back out into the world. Some are sent by their families, others like Jai are fleeing horror or disease. Men are forbidden to step a foot on land; when they come to trade they bob about in boats at the quayside. The Abbey is otherwise entirely self-sufficient, making it's money from a precious dye found only on the island.
It sounds like a paradise. Our narrator, the eponymous Maresi, certainly thinks so. She arrived at the Red Abbey some years before Jai, half-starved and grieving for the younger sister who didn't survive the famine she fled. Her life before the hunger had been happy, her parents loving. It is nature that has been cruel to her. At the Abbey she learns about a different kind of life, one of rhythm, harmony, peace, in which everybody has a place, is entitled to the same in all things and nobody wants. She cares for her fellow novices - although she is getting a little old not to have been apprenticed to a Sister - and takes Jai under her wing. She shows her the Abbey's ways, and even allows her to share in her most personal and thrilling pleasure: reading. Maresi has been taught her letters and languages by the enigmatic Sister O, and each evening retires to the scriptorium to read histories, science books, memoirs of ancient times.
Slowly slowly Jai emerges from her silence, learning to trust the women around her, and shares a shocking secret. Once the revelation is out it's impossible for the peace of the Abbey to hold. Because Jai is being pursued, relentlessly and ruthlessly, by a man who should love her better than he does, and he will never never never stop. Safety is an illusion.
I can't say much more without spoilers, and I really wouldn't want to spoil this compelling story for anyone. Maresi is a book that grew and grew on me as I read it. It starts out as a lulling pre-lapsarian boarding school story, exploring the Abbey through Maresi and Jai's eyes. Instead of midnight feasts and bun breaks there are morning rituals and seasonal celebrations; mythology and herbcraft are taught rather than maths or geography. The girls chase goats over the mountain side rather than playing lacrosse. You get the idea. Underlying the brand-newness of the world of Red Abbey are all the familiar tropes. The Sisters are like school mistresses, each with her foibles. The relationships between the junior and senior novices in their dormitories are like those between the big girls and the shrimps.
Then, bam, Jai's story jolts the world and tips it sideways. The book becomes something infinitely darker, disorientated by a horror taken straight out of our own cruel world. The realities of misogyny and violence flood into the Red Abbey, reclassifying the story from school saga to feminist, humanist fable. What seems like a sweet book about friendship and love becomes an unflinching confrontation between hate and humanity. In what follows Maresi is forced to face up to the darkest parts of herself, the bits that the Crone breathed on as she took her sister, while Jai is brought to the brink of self-annihilation. The other Sisters and novices at the Abbey are tested in their own ways too. What must they give to protect their way of life? By the end, the story is breathless and ferocious.
Belief in a better way to live powers Maresi from beginning to end. It's a book about hope, an exercise in utopia, and about how women might change the world. I had planned to post about it yesterday, on International Women's Day and then things got in the way. Ah well, every day is a day for women around here. Listen: don't wait for next year to read this beguiling, compelling book. It's the first in a series and the next will be a prequel about the founding of the Abbey, Naondel. I'm told it's out next January, which is precisely when I will be reading it. (If I can't get my cheeky hands on a review copy that is.) Join me.
~~Victoria~~