Book Review: See What I Have Done by Sarah Schmidt
[image error]This year, I’m doing twelve reviews of books written by Australian female writers, starting with See What I Have Done by Sarah Schmidt. Some would say writing by Australian women is having a renaissance but that’s assuming it was ever this good before. There are so many stories getting a lot of attention, some rightfully, some less so.
I wish I could say this is one of those Australian female writers who deserves all the attention the category has been receiving but I found the book disappointing. On the back it says, “You know the rhyme. You don’t know the story.” I knew the story and this book doesn’t add anything to it. Not to the real story anyway. In fact, it adds a lot of fictional elements that just muddy the waters.
Based on the true story of Lizzie Borden, who was charged with and acquitted of the murders of her father and stepmother, See What I Have Done is told through the viewpoints of Lizzie herself (self-involved), her older sister Emma (resentful), their maid Bridget (ill-treated) and a stranger named Benjamin (random). It isn’t chronological – it jumps all over the place – and I’ve often found this is a device used in stories that aren’t strong enough to be told in a simple linear format, definitely the case here.
Lizzie, Emma and Bridget were real people. Benjamin is completely fictional and completely irrelevant. He spends most of his time hiding in their barn or under the dining room table, watching the events of the story unfold. It’s ironic because he and his back story were the most interesting and deserved a book of their own, rather than being misplaced here as they were.
So what is the story? Thirty-two-year-old Lizzie and forty-one-year-old Emma live with their father, Andrew, and stepmother, Abby, in Fall River. Emma feels the burden of being her selfish sister’s carer and has gone to Fairhaven to stay with a friend and escape the unpleasantness. While she is away, her father kills all of Lizzie’s pet pigeons, claiming they are diseased. A few days later, Andrew is murdered in the sitting room and Abby is killed in an upstairs guest bedroom, both dying from multiple blows to the head.
The rest of the book deals with the aftermath, smattered with stories of the family’s life before. The death of Emma and Lizzie’s real mother, their complicated co-dependent relationship with each other, the first time they met their stepmother, Emma’s near escape into marriage but ultimate failure, their slightly creepy Uncle John.
As with many of these historical reimaginings of true stories, there is a very large focus on bodily functions. There is more vomiting in this book than I have personally experienced in my entire life. Sweating is prominent. Everyone, at some point, seems to pick a pear from the pear tree, eat it and let pear juice drip down their faces, necks and hands. The dead bodies lie in state on the dining room table to two days, stinking up the house in the middle of summer.
The book is poetic with a leisurely writing style but has a number of affectations and ticks, like constantly repeating words. Clocks don’t just tick, they tick tick. Hearts don’t just gallop, they gallop gallop. And there are lots of sentence fragments, giving it a staccato, interrupted flow. This book is the literary equivalent of someone who loves the sound of their own voice. It just goes on and on and one with minute focus on tiny details that add very little. And it’s the author’s voice we hear, not the characters’.
If you liked Hannah Kent’s Burial Rites (another book by an Australian female writer), you’ll probably like this book as well. But it feels like a wasted opportunity. It could have been something great. But it isn’t.
2 stars
*First published on Goodreads 1 December 2018
