Toxic tale for a pandemic night
By Rebecca Dinerstein Knight
Bloomsbury £16.99
Hex begins with an irritating inventory of its heroine’s personal preferences — her weight, diet and family history. “My daddy was a nice Jewish boy who married a nice Christian girl and raised me in Kansas and got on with it”, is how she summarises her parents, whom she telephones twice a year. It feels like the beginning of The Secret History. A college student is in crisis but, although you are drawn to seriously question the mental balance of the story-teller, she claims: “I live in order”.
Nell Barber is a scientist, fascinated with botany. Her anguished account is addressed to her university tutor, Joan Kallas, whose cleverness and elegance her PhD student worships. Tense bursts of writing produce a provocative read, perfect for a pandemic. Nell is semi-isolating at home and sleeps on the floor “in the dirt” among the strange plants she rears in this tale of toxicity, personal and botanical. Things have gone dreadfully wrong at “school”. Nell’s colleague Rachel has died after experimentation with thallium, and her cohort of six scientists face discipline before a safety committee. Nell attends the hearing dressed in a hazard suit — and can hardly see her accusers through the scratched visor.
Her avenging mission is to continue Rachel’s work in defiance of Professor Joan’s strictures to “leave and get something done”. She decides to grow poison: Monkshood — parent toxin, Aconitum — “a medicinal dose” killed Alexander the Great, apparently. The novel comes quirkily alive with Nell’s researches into the ancient uses of poisons. Medea, she discovers, tried to poison Theseus with Monkshood and “Athena armed with aconite turned Ariadne into a spider”.
Hecate created it from the saliva of Hades’ guardian, Cerberus. Its deadly powers of destructive mythic vengeance bob up in the tale of Dracula, and Nell has it by her bedside for protection. She aims to raise the Monkshood seeds at home — without the help of the laboratory — as an antidote. Or perhaps for her own botanical vengeance?
This is a short, sharp, sassy work. Tales of poison (and top tips, too — never eat daffodils or cashew nut shells or old potatoes) weave through its matrix of illicit relationships. Dialogue is dense, brittle and demanding. We hear about poisons in items as common as castor oil and that ricin is a hundred times more potent than strychnine; and then, just as randomly, of the ferociously poisonous Upas tree which appears in Pushkin’s poetry.
If you can take the snappy, elliptical dialogue and right-on sexuality (no gender boundaries here), Hex is a book to intrigue. And who knew “peas make a person courageous” — or so argued the 12th-century Christian mystic and composer, Hildegard von Bingen?
Anne Garvey is co-editor of Cambridge Critique