Murderousmythmeetsreality
What’s in a name? Identity, you might say, along with heritage, culture and perhaps a wish for the infant to emulate the namesake.
That’s all very fine if the name evokes virtue, but what if you’re called Lilith, like the heroine of Jemma Wayne’s psychological thriller When I Close My Eyes ? Her parents hoped to endow their daughter with feminist strength, but the Lilith of Judaic mythology, as Wayne’s shocked protagonist discovers during a university lecture, was also dark and dangerous. She was Adam’s first wife, the primordial she-demon exiled from Eden for failing to obey him or comply.
Legend has it that Lilith went on to bear babies all on her own and, when punished by having 100 of her children killed every day, took revenge by snatching newborns from their beds. This ancient narrative strikes the fictional Lilith as a message of doom, mirroring her childhood dread of inflicting accidental damage. She concludes that she can never risk becoming a mother.
Wayne’s Lilith is the embodiment of both curse and empowerment. We meet her first in adulthood – a feisty and precociously successful series scriptwriter, in which capacity she’s known as Lily, living well in Santa Monica and far removed from her Buckinghamshire girlhood friends. In this re-invented life, no one, not even her boyfriend Patrick, knows about the younger Lilith, traumatised by stumbling on a taboo, suffering from obsessive compulsions and terrified that she might harm her adored baby brother while serially sleepwalking.
The plot unfolds in two periods, shifting from cool California back to the dark childhood days when Lilith hid extreme fragility even from her therapist mother, though she was unaware of the burden her biblical alias inflicts.
Jemma Wayne writes as if observing her literary world through a spyglass. Her sharp focus is familiar from previous novels, but although each book lands us in specific geographical territory, there are shared themes of buried secrets, illusion and interwoven lives.
The bridge between Lilith/Lily’s past and present is the seemingly solid figure of Cassius, her childhood friend, first love and unique source of support and solace,.
Despite a painful family breakup, it was teenage Cassius, of the two youngsters, who seemed more assured of a golden future. His reappearance in Lily’s Californian life, as an impecunious new widower with an adorable small daughter, unsettles her, prompting a rearrangement of her everyday routines to help Cassius as he once held her together. But, in his company, cracks appear in Lily’s carefully constructed protective wall. It crumbles entirely when little blonde Jessie goes missing, and Lily blames herself.
At times in this cannily crafted trompe l’oeil of a whodunnit, I felt certain I had figured out the denouement that lay ahead just out of eyeshot. A soupcon of my suspicion was spot on. But Wayne was always several steps ahead with twists in the tale one couldn’t foresee either with eyes wide open or (not so safely) shut.