The Honeyeater is Jessie Tu’s second novel, following A Lonely Girl is a Dangerous Thing (2020). It moves between Paris, Sydney and Taipei, unravelling a story of deceit and confusion, as its protagonist, Miss Fay C, struggles to establish her identity among a cast of narcissists. Its transnational scope and powerful intimacy justify the accolades Tu has received and her growing success on the literary scene.
Review: The Honeyeater – Jessie Tu (Allen & Unwin)
Fay works as a translator and an academic at a well-regarded university in Sydney. Her life appears to be largely limited to her work, which makes her feel stifled and exhausted, and her similarly suffocating home life with her mother. She has recently had an affair with a man who remains unidentified until some way into the novel. But this relationship has also left her feeling unheard and unappreciated. These themes of restriction, subservience and self-effacement take a range of forms in the novel, as Fay struggles to assert herself and move out of these various imposing shadows.
This is evident in the ironic title of the novel. “My honeyeater” is the affectionate nickname Fay’s married lover bestows on her. The name implies Fay possesses Dionysian qualities, but this is not the impression given at any other point in the book. Fay only gratefully sips at the honey offered to her by others, never seeking her own pleasure.
That her lover settles on “honeyeater” after Fay protests at being termed “blackbird” should not be overlooked. He had cast her as his “blackbird” after reciting Wallace Stevens’ Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, a poem which exhibits shifts in meaning made by subtle alterations of perspective and the capacity of language to conjure – indeed, to pin down – its object.
In this sense, Fay belongs to her lover. But perhaps more significantly, “honeyeater” is not an epithet Fay’s lover uses only for her. He adopts it for at least one other lover as well, implying that Fay’s qualities are generic, replaceable. The honeyeater is not even a specific bird, but rather a family of birds, a detail that underscores his lack of interest in her as an individual. Fay’s lover calls all of his lovers the same name, gives them the same gifts, meets them in the same place (his office) – there is no intimacy or specificity about their relationship at all.
That Fay is engaged in such an anonymising relationship is unsurprising, since her personality is itself so flattened. She is bland, meek, naïve, bullied. The wallpaper on her phone is “a generic photo of a beach on a tropical island”. Even after she and her lover have become romantically entangled, she insists that she “hadn’t known” he and his wife “were having problems in their marriage”, simply because he “hadn’t yet told me anything was wrong”.
Fay exhibits no real desire or curiosity or agency or ambition – certainly not what one might expect of a brilliant young postdoctoral student at a sandstone university. She finds meaning only in her attachments or use to others – her mother, her married lover, and her boss (and former PhD supervisor) Professor Samantha Egan-Smith, whom Fay only ever refers to as “the Professor”.
These relationships are obsessive, suffocating, parasitic. Fay is her lover’s honeyeater, an “object” to the Professor. She takes her mother on a “romantic” trip to Paris to please her. “My mother has always wanted to go to Paris,” the novel begins; we do not know where Fay has always wanted to go.
Power, exploitation and romance
Fay is exploited at work. Her lover, who is also a translator, steals a significant idea she has about a translation on which he is working; the Professor, too, takes credit for Fay’s work. But Fay always hides her feelings, priding herself on not showing her anger and distress to others.
She is not unlike the protagonist of the novel she is translating, titled Beef on Naan – a play on Charles Bukowski’s famous autobiographical novel Ham on Rye (1982). Fay’s similarity to Beef on Naan’s author, Shyla Ma, is the point on which she begins a presentation on the work at an international translation conference:
In many ways, Shyla Ma and I have an almost identical background – we’re both immigrants, we’re both children of single parents, we’re both avid readers and we both can’t say we have many friends.
“Herein lies our only commonalities,” Fay insists – refusing to recognise the way she, like the protagonist of Shyla Ma’s autobiographical novel, is manipulated and oppressed by others.
Fay’s strange relationships cause her to confuse parental care or guardianship with romance. She takes her mother on a “romantic” trip to Paris, where they walk hand in hand. Her mother gifts Fay a brooch, just as her lover is wont to do. She admires – and is even jealous of – her mother’s beauty and elegance, wanting it for herself, rather than for it to be recognised by others.
Emails from the Professor are signed off “Love x S”. When a colleague expresses concern for the Professor after the loss of a loved one – “Poor woman. I hope she’s got a good support network” – Fay responds: “She’s got me.”
Fay confuses familial, romantic and professional relations in others, too. She assumes a young man and older woman in the Paris tour group are mother and son, rather than, as turns out to be true, lovers. That the couple had once been teacher and student contributes to Fay’s misinterpretation: once again, the power differential is confused with romance.
The invisible double
Fay’s view on translation is one of fidelity to the parent text: the “translator should become the author’s double”. There is no emphasis on the translator, who becomes “invisible”:
You are the bridge between two cultures. What I didn’t know was that I’d always remain on the bridge – never settling on either side of the bank.
In this sense, she and her mother are similar. Fay’s mother
is a cleaner, after all. Cleaners slip in and out of offices and homes, silent, operating under the optics of everyday life.
Her lover, on the other hand, prioritises his own interpretation over the original work – one of the things that prompts Fay’s eventual realisation that he is
a narcissist. Everything began and ended with him at the centre – he was the sun in every solar system.
Fay has not just been the “author’s double”. She has also been the double of those around her, perhaps most significantly the Professor. Fay’s insistence on referring to the Professor by her title rather than her name signifies the older woman’s power and authority. Fay is her student in every sense; she has been shaped entirely by the Professor’s wishes:
I think of the ways I have given into her suggestions over the years like a dutiful protegee: “Read this”, “Taste this”, “Watch this”, “Listen to this”. I was her experiment, an animated reflection of her own tastes and styles. And I complied […] Perhaps by being so agreeable, I have somehow rubbed out my own identity.
Despite Fay’s codependent relationship with her mother, there is a distinction between her respective relationships with the two women. She and the Professor argue about meaning and word choice, indicating that they do not really speak the same language. Fay and her mother “speak Mandarin when we are in public, a secret code between us”. Fay’s mother prays for her daughter and tries to protect her; the Professor only lies, uses and prevaricates.
Fay eventually returns to Sydney after attending a major international translation conference in Taipei, where the conflict between Fay and the Professor reaches its climax. But does she “escape” or does she “run away”? This is a distinction Fay struggles with in her translation of Beef on Naan. Fay’s mother has named her after the Taiwanese word for “fly”, but what does it mean for this honeyeater to fly? The magnolia Fay gifts her mother at the novel’s end suggests that she returns the desire for protection, ultimately choosing a parental relationship of care and understanding over romance tinged with power.
If Beef on Naan is, as Fay’s mother observes, a novel about growing up, the same is true of The Honeyeater. It is a bildungsroman condensed into the space of three months. Fay has been sheltered and fearful, but (as Fay herself meditates) the events of the novel “thrust or shove” her into adulthood. Much has ended, but this ending looks more like freedom.
Jessica Gildersleeve does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
