When I was in Toronto, I met up with a listener to Tea or Books? – Debra – and, after a lovely dinner, we went book shopping. I told her I was on the lookout for Canadian authors writing about present-day Canada, and she had lots of great recommendations. Indeed, if I hadn’t already bought a lot of books in Vancouver, I’d probably have come home with a great deal more. One I couldn’t resist was Bellevue Square (2017) by Michael Redhill. (Sidenote: wouldn’t the cover be amazing if they hadn’t PRINTED on that sticker?) I now follow the cover designer, Jennifer Griffiths, on Instagram and really love her work.
The premise of Bellevue Square really appealed to me: Jean Mason discovers she has a doppelganger. She lives an ordinary life, working in a bookstore, husband and two sons, when regular visitors to the bookstore start to ask about the woman who looks exactly like her that they’ve seen in the neighbourhood. Indeed, they thought she was Jean.
Jean doesn’t see the woman herself, but becomes obsessed with discovering her. She even pays someone living in Bellevue Square Park to take photographs when they see this other woman, so she can keep track of her movements. (I believe Bellevue Square Park had an encampment of unhoused people in tents at the time of writing the novel.) She meets other people who know both women, such as someone in the food market selling pupusa. But then the people who know them both start dying.
If this sounds like I’ve given a lot away than, hoo boy, you’re in for a wild ride. I’m not going to say too much about the plot of Bellevue Square – but it’s certainly not the novel it seems going in. Indeed, it reinvents itself constantly. And the bit about people dying is revealed in a brilliant sentence on p.8:
I put the phone away and at that exact moment a woman I would later be accused of murdering walked into my shop. She wore a green dress embroidered with tiny mirrors and had warm, buttery skin.
Reading Bellevue Square felt a bit like watching the brilliant film The Father, which disorients the viewer over and over and over, giving a sense of what it is like to have dementia. Jean doesn’t have dementia, but the novel never leaves us on steady ground. Everything we think we know is repeatedly undermined, and even when you think the new piece of information has put you on more solid ground, the rug gets pulled from under you again.
What makes Redhill’s novel so masterful is that Bellevue Square feels so compelling and readable, even when you don’t have a clue what to believe. This sort of trickery could be irritating or confusing from another writer’s pen, but it is done so confidently that you always know you’re in safe hands. Wisely, he leans into clarity and simplicity in the prose – it often feels beautifully written, and is very sharp and funny in places, but he avoids anything overly elaborate. If the plot is a mystery to us, then let’s make sure the individual sentences aren’t. It also helps that the novel is anchored by Jean – her incisiveness, her determination, her wit, her occasional abrasiveness. She was a very compelling character.
I loved reading the novel – and it helped that I knew the streets that Jean was walking around from my visit last year. The moments of recognition were lovely.
I’m also fascinated by the cultural significance of doppelgangers. They come up time and again, from Dostoevsky’s The Double onwards (and probably before) – and every time people mention Shelley seeing his doppelganger shortly before he died. And, yes, it’s mentioned in Bellevue Square too. Readers seem captivated by the idea of encountering their doppelganger, and it is a phenomenon laden with eeriness and even menace. Reading a novel like Bellevue Square as an identical twin is quite an unusual experience. Because I have a doppelganger and have always had one – this spectre that is so eerie to most people is normal, everyday experience for me and for the other identical twins reading this book. So it’s interesting to see the experience from another side, used as the central plot point of a book. (I also think that most people, if they met their doppelganger, wouldn’t think it looked much like them. You know how photos never look like you-in-the-mirror? It’s like that having an identical twin.)
Let’s finish with a quote from early in the book that isn’t very relevant to the rest of the novel – but I love anything about arranging books:
But alphabetical is not the only order. I’m not a library, so I don’t have to go full-Dewey. A bookstore is a collection. It reflects someone’s taste. In the same way that curators decide what order you see the art in, I’m allowed to meddle with the browser’s logic, or even to please myself. Mix it up, see what happens. If you don’t like it, don’t shop here. January to June I alphabetize biographies by author. July to December: by subject.
There are moral issues involved, too. Should parenting books be displayed chronologically by year of publication? I don’t want to screw someone’s kid up by suggesting outdate parenting advice is on par with the new thinking. Aesthetic issues: should I arrange art books by height to avoid cover bleaching? Ethical: do dieting books belong near books about anorexia? And should I move books about confidence into the business section? And what is Self-Help? Is it anything like Self Storage (which is only for things, it turns out.) In Self-Help, I have found it is helpful not to read the books at all.