Book review: 'Wild Geese' by Soula Emmanuel
It is not often that life offers a second chance to understand why things turned out the way they did, but in this gripping debut Soula Emmanuel reflects on what it would be like to comb over the details of a life lived, discarded and then rediscovered.
Wild Geese tells the story of a thirty-year-old transwoman, Phoebe, who lives in Copenhagen in relative isolation from her colleagues at the university, where she is working on a PhD that she has almost lost interest in, and from her past life in Dublin. She lives in a flat with a needy dog, goes to work, comes home and contemplates the relationship between the person she used to be and the person she has become. It is a novel is about an extremely specific manner of self-reflection and self-realisation, but it is handled in a way that is at once authentic and down-to-earth, relatable to anybody and everybody.
As the narrative begins to rumble along, the thing that strikes the reader so bluntly is the atmosphere of supernatural calm, as if the sharp chill of the Scandinavian wind has brushed against the words on the page. The protagonist’s orderly existence translates into a comforting, but at the same time stark, sense of security that the reader feels with the same uneasy pleasure as the character does, which is all, of course, a foil that foreshadows the novel’s central and immediate disruption.
Opening with evocative but restrained descriptions of the Lund University campus, detailing how ‘the streets are kissed with grey’ and ‘mud-sodden footpaths hemmed by naked birches’, Phoebe’s sense of desolation is writ large on the landscape that swaddles her. But as she moves through the streets, where ‘the old town hums’ and where Lund ‘hoards its own warmth’, a softness emerges that sets the scene for a tender, restrained drama that unfolds over the course of a weekend. It seems like a story about loneliness, living as she does in a space that where her landlady’s possessions – ‘a custard-coloured sofa, a television, someone else’s trinkets’ and even the dog, her constant companion – are a constant reminder that the self is always somebody else’s property, but it is more a story about companionship in all its forms. The flat, on loan from a colleague, also a transwoman with whom Phoebe struck up a friendship in her early days away from Ireland, is a metaphor for the body she now inhabits, something both possessed entirely but also something which she must grow into and learn to inhabit anew, something that kind of always feels like it belongs to somebody else.
A knock at the door then changes everything. Phoebe is unwittingly wrenched from her comfort zone by the arrival of Grace, an ex from another life in Dublin, a reminder of a past with a different body and a different mindset. The pair of them are well-rounded characters whose humility is both comforting and surprising, which Emmanuel handles with extreme deftness. In the initial encounter, there are no fireworks but only a prevailing mood of light suspicion that continues throughout the novel, not is there overt conflict or much in the way in frayed tempers. This is one the book’s great strengths: Emmanuel resists the temptation to overstate the emotions that are the undercurrent of the story, but weaves a patchwork of feelings, described and felt rather than narrated or extrapolated such as a ‘swollen moment’ between the two women and the closing sensation of how ‘the air in the flat is stale, with sharp notes of old love’. Sensations, emotions, ideas are mined from the dust of human anguish and left to falter in the air, gestating in the mind of the reader.
Indeed, Emmanuel’s characters are inquisitive, circumspect and measured in their quest to get to know one another all over again: they drink wine and fuss over the dog, they share tender memories of the past as they see the sights of Copenhagen, where a stature of a mermaid is serves as a stark reminder of how disappointment is the other side of the coin of anticipation. There is even a magical visit to a fairground, where Emmanuel excels in describing the awkward wonder grownups feel at such sights as ‘a mechanical dragon with eyes like sunflower stalks’. The story is replete with moments like this, where Emmanuel derives symbolism from the landscape. It anchors the characts in time and space, which is the central paradox of the story, in fact, because Phoebe feels listless, unattached to anything around her, and is yet a product of the worlds she has moved through.
Rather than chapters, it is divided into time-stamped sections, starting at 16:12 on Thursday and ending at 10:07 on Monday, creating a tension that rumbles along and never quite overflows. We go on the journey with Phoebe, unfolding minute by minute, as surprised or as delighted at every turn of events as she is. Much of this tension arises from the caution with which the characters approach each other, always uncertain, always on the edge of offending one another as they dissect their former relationship over the course of the weekend. It makes you think about what you would do in a similar situation, whether you would be able to stand the awkwardness of a weekend, every waking minute, spent with an ex who had all but vanished from your life for years.
Many will recognise themselves in the novel. It is replete with humanity. In its portrait of the reality of gender transition, which is described in visceral detail, it is a rumination on how people change, and those changes are not restricted to transitioning, for there is a relatable stand of thought here on how we grow as a result of our decisions and experiences, particularly in the way we interact with, or do not, with our families and friends. On top of that, the painstaking analysis of a past relationship is something have all done, if not quite in the claustrophobic way that Phoebe and Grace do, but there are grains of wisdom and hard truths for us all if we look back soberly as they do.
Wild Geese is beautifully woven together with metaphors that express the core of the story, the most haunting of which is the opening sequence in which we are told the Swedish word for ‘hedgehog’, igellkot, is a combination of the words for ‘sea urchin’ and ‘cat’, as if one thing can simultaneously be two things, neither of which is seems to be, but who is to say either way except the hedgehog itself.
Soula Emmanuel, Wild Geese, was published on 30 March 2023 by Footnote Press, London. ISBN 9781804440148.