But Chee’s first-person, present-tense narrative differs from most, in an apparent paradox. retroactive. This isn’t exactly an innovation: the Modernists tried it, and it’s not uncommon in French either; Marguerite Duras’s film “The Lover” may come to mind, which goes all-out in terms of tenses and makes a lot of use of the retrospective present tense. And in the twenty-five years since the publication of “Edinburgh,” present-oriented narration has become more common in new writings in English. But even in this context, I find Chee’s use of the term distinctly radical. This is not just a matter of tension, but also of tone and tone more generally. All retrospect divides Later And Nowbut this is not the case in “Edinburgh,” where there is no attempt to distinguish between the voices of young Fee having the experience and those of adult Fee narrating. At every point in the novel, the experience is felt immediately, in all its complexity and intensity; We can access thought and wisdom born of time at every point. Time is the novelist’s tool, and in my experience as a reader, it becomes almost uniquely strange in “Edinburgh.” It doesn’t move as it should; It refuses to give us any basis. Deictics, which are guiding words (“here”, “there”, “before”, “after”), cannot do their job. It’s as if gravity was suspended, as if normal physics didn’t apply; time becomes a vast, undifferentiated region that threatens with irreparable loss. No Later in this novel. There is just Now.
The book’s formal choices respond to a psychological crisis: something has happened to Fee’s experience of time; something turned time into a question. The story told by the first half of “Edinburgh” is a disturbingly familiar tale of child sexual abuse, conveyed here with unusual emotional sensitivity. Fee participates in a community children’s choir; he has a revelatory experience of beauty and of himself as the agent of that beauty; The same man who made this revelation possible by introducing her to art treats her and the other members of the choir poorly. Chee avoids physical details but is uncompromising in examining the social and psychological dynamics of abuse. We see how the choir director (the choir calls him Big Eric) invites his victims into social silence, how he makes them feel like a special, chosen member; We see how children use the things they need from adults (attention, affection, education) to victimize them.
Fee is physically abused, but Big Eric treats him differently than other children and raises him to be a fellow predator, not a victim. He treats Fee as a peer, as if Fee shares his appetite. Big Eric shares a joke with Fee about Robin Hood and Reverend Tuck, creating one of the most sickening moments I’ve ever known in Chee’s literary history. This treatment causes deep confusion in Fee, especially about his queerness, and we see him repeatedly rehearse false logic: Big Eric likes men; Fee likes men; therefore they must be the same. Like many queer people who were abused as children, she will grapple with the question of whether queerness preceded the abuse or was created by it, whether it was the effect or the cause in an excruciatingly false dichotomy.
In “Edinburgh,” we see how abuse threatens to corrupt every aspect of Fee’s life: Her first sexual experiences, those with her friends, will be associated with Big Eric; Fee begins to wonder if all the men, even her father, like the pornography the choirmaster shows her. Fire and plague, two of the novel’s most important motifs, serve as metaphors for the way abuse and its consequences spread, and for Fee’s sense of being something that could destroy the world. It destroys his world; Peter is not the only friend he will lose after this incident. And Fee does not experience this loss only with the helplessness and anger of the victim, the feeling of being treated unfairly; he too feels a deep and deeply misplaced sense of responsibility. At his thirteenth birthday party, he muses: “Someone has to kill me before the damage spreads.” The second half of the novel contains narrative exposition that should not be spoiled; Suffice to say, Chee shows what sexual harassment can look like. activity– something that can be localized and therefore contained at a particular time – actually threatens to infect all time, past and future. What appears to be an individual trauma turns out to be an intergenerational trauma, just like the wartime displacement and loss of the grandfather with whom the book begins.