THE INVISIBLE LIFE OF ADDIE LARUE by V.E.Schwab (BOOK REVIEW)
France, 1714: in a moment of desperation, a young woman makes a Faustian bargain to live forever and is cursed to be forgotten by everyone she meets.
Thus begins the extraordinary life of Addie LaRue, and a dazzling adventure that will play out across centuries and continents, across history and art, as a young woman learns how far she will go to leave her mark on the world.
But everything changes when, after nearly 300 years, Addie stumbles across a young man in a hidden bookstore and he remembers her name.
The relationship between book and reader has some similarities with the relationship between lovers – finding that perfect match, the yin to your yang, the half that makes you whole. No reader is a blank page, any more than the books we read are. We come to each one laden with our own perspectives, priorities and – yes – even prejudices. Which is all by way of saying, I absolutely loved this book and I probably was always going to. Its central premise resonates so sharply with themes I tried to address in my own writing, although Schwab’s approach and execution is radically different and far more accomplished.
Buried deep within the narrative flesh of my epic fantasy trilogy, the spine of the story is the pursuit of immortality. The plot is driven by the different crimes and sacrifices that two old adversaries made in a bid to live for ever – and their epiphany is that true immortality is not in securing a personal eternity, but in the legacies we leave – the memories, artefacts and other ways in which we leave the world changed as we pass through it.
Schwab’s explores similar themes in the desperate plight of eternal 23 year old Addie LaRue. For Addie, immortality offers the chance to escape the predicable and claustrophobic limits of her village existence and experience all the rich variety of life previously only glimpsed in brief trips to the nearby town of Le Mans. In the depths of her despair Addie makes a deal with darkness – an old god, maybe the devil, who torments her by assuming the form of a fantasy lover that her artistry and imagination have drawn many times. The fantasy lover may have been at one time Lucien, but in the form assumed by the darkness she names him Lucifer – or Luc for short either way.
However, in any deal beware the small print, as he reminds her years later
“You came to me. You pleaded. You begged. You chose the words. I chose the terms.”
And Luc’s terms are a calculated cruelty. Addie may live for ever – or until she tires of forever and voluntarily surrenders her soul to him – but under his terms she may leave no mark, no impression, no legacy on the world either in word or deed. She cannot even leave footsteps in the snow without the surface quickly reforming into crisp white perfection. No matter how often or how deeply she interacts with people they lose all memory of her the moment she is gone from their sight. A closed door, a night’s sleep, even a trip to the bar for a round of drinks will erase all trace of her leaving the person’s memory as smooth and Addie-free as the virgin snow.
You would think that to live such a life would be torture and that to tell such a tale would be to torment the reader, and certainly Addie’s travails are significant and onerous. But Schwab gifts her protagonist with a resourceful determination and garbs her story in such succulent prose that Addie’s tale is always a joy to read as she tests and flexes against the chains Luc has cast around her – or, as Schwab puts it
“It will be a long time before she knows the contours of her curse, longer still before she understands the shadow’s sense of humour.”
Schwab structures Addie’s story into two timelines. There is the present time of the story, set in 2014 as Addie approaches the 300th anniversary of her deal with the devil, and there is the past time-line of fragments of Addie’s long life speckled through history – incidents caught in amber. Schwab shows us the first 23 years of Addy’s life so we can understand how she came to make that fateful deal, and then the years after as she learned to live with this strange invisible life. The timelines give the narrative variety while the short chapters enhance its pace. I never seemed to be more than 3 minutes from the end of a chapter, or so my kindle told me, but then this is a book it is easy to devour at speed.
There are elements of historical fiction as Addie meets great artists and thinkers of the past. For writers of historical fiction there is always the question of how one’s protagonist might distort either historic events or – by their presence – suggest history was imperfectly recorded. (For example, despite Bernard Cornwell’s best efforts in Sharpe’s Trafalgar there were only 27 British versus 33 Franco-Spanish ships of the line at Nelson’s final victory, not 28 and 34!) However, Addie’s curse gives Schwab the perfect means by which her protagonist can flit utterly unrecorded through the lives – and deaths – of the famous!
Many of the past moments are set on the anniversary of the night she made her deal with the shadow because Luc has a tendency (though not a cast iron predictability) to turn up then and test if she is yet tired of immortality and ready to surrender her soul to him. Despite the torment he has subjected her to, there is a touch of Stockholm syndrome in these encounters, for Luc alone remembers her and can use her name and talk of the past they have shared. And Addie too – in her endurance – tests Luc’s patience and challenges his expectations. So these meetings are always deliciously tense – the interaction of jailer and prisoner played out many times over centuries. But one must never forget Luc’s fundamental malevolence.
“Some nights you love to see me suffer so that I will yield. Others, you seem intent to spare me from it. I do wish you’d make up your mind.”
A shadow sweeps across his face. “Trust me, my dear, you don’t… Do not mistake this-any of it- for kindness, Adeline.” His eyes go bright with mischief. “I simply want to be the one who breaks you.”
Alongside these vignettes examining Addie’s past, her struggles and her relationship with Luc, the present time story follows a settled Addie in New York. Here she leads a life of casual shop lifter, sofa surfer and veteran of so many more than 50 first dates. But the narrative engine is driven by the twist – about a third of the book where a young man in a bookshop says three words she hasn’t heard from anyone but Luc in 300 years, the words “I remember you.”
OK, up to now I have tried to describe broad aspects of the book, its captivating protagonists, lyrical prose and absorbing central premise. I’ve tried to give you enough flavour of the piece to show if this might be a book for you, without shedding any details that might temper your enjoyment. In short, I’ve been trying to be spoiler free in my review. But that stops now, spoilers are coming!
So come back here when you have read the book and – like me – might be aching to hear other people’s views on the development and resolution of Addie’s unique ‘situation.’
However, I must write down my own thoughts, for Schwab skilfully braids another deep theme into the tale of Addie’s immortality, and like a musical harmony – or a culinary taste combination – the effect is a story that is bigger than the sum of its parts.
FROM THIS POINT ON THERE WILL BE (BIG) SPOILERS
HAVE YOU BOUGHT AND READ THE BOOK YET?
IF NOT, THEN WHY ARE YOU STILL SCROLLING DOWN
GO AWAY, BUY THE BOOK, READ IT, THEN COME BACK
LAST WARNING
OK – so the key moment in the book (well the second inciting incident – the first having been the moment of crisis that precipitated Addie’s deal with Luc) – is when Addie meets Henry in a bookshop, trying to get an exchange on a book she shoplifted the previous day and Henry says, “I remember you.”
That exchange allows Addie to finally experience that tentative exploration of love where both parties know this is a second or a third date, rather than one always experiencing the encounter for the first time. Of course, there’s still the problem that Henry’s friends will never remember her. Schwab leads us delightfully through Addie’s efforts to resolve the once in three-hundred year opportunity and the constraints of Luc’s curse.
“He gropes for his glasses, puts them on, and looks at her, and smiles, and this is the part that will never get old. The knowing. The present folding on top of the past instead of erasing it, replacing it.”
The illumination cast by the challenges of past, puts a fresh and joyful light on the everyday business of a couple falling in love, and love after all is the second theme subjected to Schwab’s forensic-through-fiction interrogation.
OK THERE’S ANOTHER BIG SPOILER COMING UP – SO ONLY READ ON IF YOU’RE SURE YOU’VE ALREADY READ THE BOOK.
Of course, there has to be a reason why Henry remembers Addie – why he is immune to the curse that befell her through the deal she made with Luc. And the reason is that Henry himself also made a deal with Luc!
Henry, encountered Luc when he was drunk and despairing after previous girlfriend rejected his proposal of marriage – in an interesting inversion of the moment of crisis that drove Addie to flee in desperation from the prospect of marriage. Sitting in the rain with a demon who could never get wet Henry makes his deal. If his would-be-fiance thought he/it/their romance was “not enough” then Luc’s promise him he would “be enough” for everyone is too alluring to resist – he would be what they always wanted. And the Venn diagrams of Addie and Henry’s separate curses overlap at the point where Addie just needs somebody to remember her, and Henry just needs to be enough for Addie.
Of course with ordinary people in Henry’s life the outworking of Luc’s gift/curse is just as tainted by unexpected consequences as Addie’s. Everyone Henry meets sees in him the absolute perfection of their desire in a son/lover/friend/brother. Suddenly he is everything anyone (indeed everyone, ever wanted. A succession of former lovers, both male and female, find that Henry is now in fact exactly what they thought he wasn’t when they decided to break off the relationship. But of course this isn’t real, the threads of Luc’s curse showing in the clouding of people’s eyes as they see and love Henry not for who is, but because they think he is who they want him to be.
Henry’s dilemma reminds me of an old quote on love in a book called the Cynic’s Lexicon that I read long ago. It said, “The person one loves never really exists, but is simply a fiction of the imagination focussed on the screen it fits with least distortion.” There is some truth in that, not just for lovers but for enemies too, we know but a fraction of them and to a degree extrapolate into the gaps, ascribing thoughts and motivations they never had to weave a person who doesn’t entirely exist.
Henry, however, experiences a more extreme manifestation of that tendency to the point where no-one ‘sees’ the true Henry – flaws and all. In a real sense Henry’s curse has rendered him as invisible, as unknown, as Addie. But Addie seems him true, partly because she only needs him to remember and partly because – as Luc tells her she is not human.
“So you missed me,” she says with a smile, and there is the briefest glimpse in those green eyes. A fracture of light.
“Life is long, and humans boring. You are better company.”
“You forget I am human.”
“Adeline,” he says, a shade of pity in his voice. “You have not been human since the night we met. You will never be human again.”
Schwab’s three protagonists – Luc is surely too charming to be considered an antagonist – orbit each other in a kind of supernatural menage-a-trois. Addie’s immortality and stubborn endurance make her an object of fascination for the unfolding shadow that is Luc, as well as the bright truth in Henry’s life of empty infatuations.
As Schwab describes one evening between Addie and Luc, “They sit before the fire like friends, or at least, like foes at rest.” And Addie, partly by accident, partly by design has found her way to leave a mark not in her own work, but in how – sometimes over several encounters – she can shape the thoughts, the ideas – though not the memories – of the artists whose lives she repeatedly inhabits. There is Toby, the musician who – over successive first dates finds he has composed a song of a girl he can only dream about, there are painters who catch the sleeping essence of a girl – blank faced but for seven dots that might be freckles.
In my own work I had a character talk of four kinds of immortality, two of which are barred by Luc’s curse to Addie, she sows no memories in people’s mind, leaves no physical artefacts in the world. However, the third on my list was the way you change the behaviour of others through them having met you. Schwab echoes this in the way Addie can still evoke ideas in other people, can still conjure and kindle them like a delicate flame that flowers in art.
“And ideas are wilder than memories. They’re like weeds. Always finding their way up.”
There is, in this aspect of Schwab’s masterpiece, a nod to the power of art to endure, to inspire, to tell. In Henry, Addie finds a cypher she can finally tell her tale to, a scribe who can record it all and ultimately tell her story – free her from Luc’s curse to be forgotten, to be shrouded in invisibility.
Of course, Luc’s curse is not easily confounded, his deals are not to be broken and Schwab sprinkles in moments of dark foreboding to remind us that Luc will not allow everything to end in simple happiness for Henry and Addie. For a while I thought I might be heading for the kind of unavoidable tragedy that clouded the ending of Audrey Niffenberger’s The Time Traveller’s Wife.
I would even have forgiven Schwab a trite unsubtle defeat of Luc’s power and ambition – anything to give Henry and Addie a happy ever after. But what Schwab does in the end is so much better than that, an act of authorial legerdemain that managed to surprise as well as satisfy, to give all the protagonists and the reader exactly what they wanted, what they needed, and ultimately, as any good author should, to play creatively with the semantics of the deal.
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue is available now – pick up your copy from Bookshop.org