Book Review: See What I Have Done
/See What I Have Done
by Sarah SchmidtGrove Atlantic, 20172017, the good folks at Grove Atlantic helpfully point out, marks the 125th anniversary of the infamous Fall River murders of 1892, in which Andrew and Abby Borden were savagely killed, their heads pulped beyond recognition (the crime scene photos still retain the power to shock). Their daughter Lizzie was eventually arrested for the crime and stood trial in a media frenzy that set the entire country talking. She was acquitted, but it hardly mattered: she had long since been convicted in the public view. She entered the country's folklore as an axe-wielding murderer, and a flood of books began that continues to this day.The latest of these, Sarah Schmidt's debut novel See What I Have Done, greets the reader with a beautiful, startling cover by Design by Committee: the head of one of the pigeons Lizzie lovingly tended, but bloodily decapitated – and, in the genius detail, dripping not blood but feather-aquamarine from its plumage. Such a cover promises a full measure of creepiness, and the book delivers: Schmidt takes the potentially tricky route of breaking up her narrative into different perspectives, not just Lizzie's but that of her sister and the household servant Bridget and a visiting stranger named Benjamin. The risks here are twofold: that multiple perspectives will dilute the claustrophobic horror of the Fall River events, and that the device will draw attention to its own artificiality by having all the separate narrative perspective sound more or less exactly the same. Schmidt is a very talented prose stylist, but she only manages to avoid one of these two risks this time around: her focal point characters do indeed sound virtually identical, but if anything the different perspectives combine to enhance the book's creeping miasma rather than weaken it. When Bridget watches a typical instance of family brutality, for example, readers are given one of many side-glimpses into the obdurate insanity that is in some ways Lizzie's only means of survival:
Mr Borden stood then, adjusted his trousers and came towards Lizzie. I'd seen this before. I prepared myself. I could see little yellow string-saliva in his beard. He went in close to Lizzie, slapped her across the face. Oh, the sound filled the room, that noise of skin, a cleaver working meat, and Lizzie's head snapped to the side, her shoulders metered wide, wings, and my heart raced, my knees weakened, brought sweat to my brow. Lizzie stared at her father.'Andrew, please.' Mrs Borden held her napkin tight.'You better start listening to me, Lizzie.'Lizzie shook her head. 'You're a nasty.'
Another warning-sign that might be raised in the minds of readers by the presence of many narrators – and particularly by the addition of the bounder Benjamin – is that Schmidt might be the latest in a long line of writers to toy with the idea that Lizzie Borden might actually have been innocent. Certainly our author is skilled in both the dramatics of the slow reveal and the many ironies of the case itself. When news of the atrocity becomes known and the police arrive at the little house and first encounter the ghastly evidence, Schmidt presents some rapid-fire scenes that ripple with a mordant playfulness that somehow works even in the midst of tragedy:
The officer stared blank, then looked towards the ceiling where Mrs Borden was lying face down in a swelling pool of dark red, her arms by her side, her feet crumpled in her soft leather boots. Her hair, plain then rolled tightly around the crown of her head, hacked off and tossed aside onto the bed. What a horrid thing …More police officers came into the dining room, formed a semicircle around me, let's find out how many more people we can fit.It made me hotter, feel like I needed to vomit. “What's going on?” I asked.'Miss Borden, under no circumstances are you to leave this room,' the officer said.'Should I be very frightened?' My hand moved across my stomach.Bridget cried. Mrs Churchill cried. Those high-pitched wails.'We have reason to believe that the killer is still in the house.'
See What I Have Done is both a very accomplished debut and – admittedly no great relative feat – by far the most skilled and effective Lizzie Borden novel of them all. Neither this book nor any of the actual histories of the Fall River murders manages to explain the weird mythic power of this one garish but hardly unprecedented crime, but that might be too much to ask, even after 125 years.
