Consent
By Annabel Lyon
Random House
It took me a while to write this review, and truthfully, I’m still not sure what to make of this novel. I am a big fan of author Annabel Lyon and loved her earlier books The Golden Mean, which won the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and its follow up The Sweet Girl. The Golden Mean is about Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle and The Sweet Girl is about his daughter. Both were smart, magical, well-written stories.
Consent is smart too, and extremely well written. It’s mysterious – so mysterious it kept me turning pages just to try to figure it out. Who's right? Who's wrong? Is it okay to spend your college tuition on expensive clothes or spoil your challenged sister's happiness? What about violent sex versus the studious life, is one superior? Why? The morals and ethics seethe a writhe throughout this jam-packed thinkers' novel.
It’s basically two parallel stories of pairs of sisters. They do come together in the end, but they really only glance off of each other; the two stories never fully merge.
One set of sisters are twins, raised in a wealthy family in Kerrisdale. (Did I mention Lyon is from Vancouver? She teaches creative writing at the University of British Columbia.) One of the twins, Saskia, is studious and the other, Jenny, is a thrill-seeking beauty.
The other set of sisters are born 10 years apart and the younger lives with intellectual challenges. The older sister, Sara, cares for the younger one, Mattie, after their parents die. Just shortly after their mother dies, Sara returns home from school to discover that Mattie is married to the family’s handyman. Because of Mattie’s disability, Sara gets the marriage annulled and forbids her from seeing Robert.
There, the story begins.
Themes woven throughout include high fashion, posh perfumes, intellectuals, dangerous sex, life and death, addiction, indulgence, ghosts, suicide, murder, innocence, duty and guilt. The heavy and dark along with the light and airy. All of this, plus much more that I probably missed, is all found within the mere 211 pages of Consent.
This novel is easy to read, but hard to ponder. It’s going to take me a while to digest everything that happened and decide, say for instance, whether or not I loved the ending or whether I can accept the morals and ethics of the story.
I suggest you read it, so we can discuss it and perhaps figure it all out.
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