The Juniper Tree by Barbara Comyns (review)

“This was a long time ago now, perhaps two thousand years,” begins the Brothers Grimm fairy tale “The Juniper Tree,” in an unsettlingly specific variation on “Once upon a time.” Published first in 1985, Barbara Comyns’s reimagining of the Grimm story is set in the equally unsettling British 1980s—a decade defined by physical extravagance, ominous social antagonisms, and two remote blonde figureheads, a princess and a prime minister. It is an appropriately totemic world for a fairy tale, and Comyns’s novel proves to be an uneven yet often arresting retelling.

The novel opens with the image of yet another imposing blonde, as if to complete a trinity: a woman named Gertrude Forbes stands in her garden, paring an apple and praying for a child to call her own. Watching Gertrude from the street is Comyns’s narrator Bella Winter, a destitute single mother and would-be antiques dealer. As Bella is drawn into Gertrude’s orbit, the novel explores what it means to negotiate entry into aestheticized, enchanted spaces—and the terrible destruction that can sometimes result.

Bella proves to be a singular, sometimes confounding narrator. She is drawn to displays of emblem-like beauty, describing Gertrude, Gertrude’s husband Bernard, and their airy, imposing Georgian house, where she becomes a frequent visitor, in terms she reserves for her beloved antiques: Gertrude is “a beautiful fair woman . . . like a statue,” Bernard is so “beautiful” that Bella feels proud to look at him, even the Forbeses’ garden is “like an illustration in a gardening book.” Yet despite the artistry of her imagination, Bella devotes little time to analyzing or explaining her own feelings, which can give her narration a clipped, gnomic quality. At several points she confesses love or hatred for other characters with a vehemence that takes the reader completely by surprise. Similarly, the story’s magical elements and more realistic ones sometimes feel unevenly mixed. Bella goes from extolling the Forbeses in exalted symbolic terms to plainly noting, “I didn’t see much of my mother at this time.” Perhaps this is a flaw in the book, but it is certainly an interesting one: Comyns’s imagination is simultaneously exacting and inexact, creating a tension that propels the reader through the novel.

On the level of ideas, the most interesting concept The Juniper Tree puts forward is the notion that even a rarefied and special place like the Forbeses’ home can be unwholesome under certain circumstances, or for certain people. As much as she admires the enchanted place, and is drawn to it, Bella is unable to thrive there. After Gertrude’s death in childbirth about halfway through the novel, the house becomes an actively unstable space. Cooks and nannies cause trouble and get dismissed, and as Bernard’s frustration grows, it becomes clearer and clearer that Bella will take it upon herself to preserve the home by becoming his second wife, even though Bernard openly admits to not caring for her as he did for Gertrude. Bella’s choice is framed not as an act of self-sacrifice, but of inertia: she has been magnetized by the Forbeses’ beauty and cannot stay away.

At this point, Bella’s straightforwardness and honesty as a narrator once again have an arresting effect, giving the transformations she undergoes in the Forbes house a surreal starkness. “And now comes a terrible time, a time when I behaved quite out of character,” she tells the reader, knocking against the fourth wall without quite shattering it. Her eventual breakdown, described in Plathian terms in the novel’s concluding chapters (like so many novels about mental illness, The Juniper Tree owes a spiritual debt to The Bell Jar), becomes an intriguing testament to the destructive power of beauty. Though Bella is cast out of the enchanted space where she made an uneasy home, the end of the novel offers a hopeful and valuable hint that, free of the Forbeses’ influence, she might be able to use her own resources to build a beautiful, self-contained world of her...