The Poison that Fascinates by Jennifer Clement

Permeated with strangeness and an oblique sense of otherness, Jennifer Clement’s The Poison that Fascinates is an engaging and thought-provoking read. Emily, who through a process of de-personification becomes Emilia, is a fourth generation immigrant to Mexico who lives with her doting but flawed father and splits her time between her studies and helping out at the local orphanage which her family founded many years ago.

In this aromatic novel, full of the smells of people, of coffee, of coriander and melons, of grapes and rain and roses and skin, Clement recreates a Mexico City which the imagination can swell and wallow in; and this is the Mexico City which the somewhat unworldly Emily inhabits, that is until the arrival of the enigmatic and increasingly creepy Santi, son of her father’s long-lost and long-dead brother, whose obsessive love sullies and then destroys Emily’s contentment and morality. The developing relationship between Santi and Emily is mirrored by that of young, oriental looking cousins at the orphanage, whose loss of both sets of parents caused such trauma that their personalities begin to merge; and yet, over time, the balance of proprietitorial doubt shifts from ‘the Japanese’ orphans to Santi and Emily.

Clement’s lyrically luscious prose encapsulates scenes of real tenderness – the brief pen portrait of Emily’s father desperate to love her enough to make up for the absence of her mother comes stands out – and of real, if understated, terror.

A highly structured, tight novel, sections of the narrative are interspersed with ‘facts’ about notorious murderers the relevance of which emerges only slowly, and only by keeping many elements in mind and making connections between fictional facts and factual fictions, does the denouement become inevitable.

There are weaknesses: the time frame for the narrative is undefined, making it hard to assess the credibility of developments, and there are sections which seem to fulfil no purpose other than to allow Clement the opportunity to display her obvious passion for writing beautiful words, but these are small flaws and do little to detract from what is overall and engaging, troubling, mystical read.