This thoughtful and discomfiting novel, Ann Morgan’s first excursion into fiction, is concerned with the nature and the formation of identity.
It tells the story of Helen and Ellie – identical twins who, when we meet them at the start, aged six, inhabit social and familial roles that seem discrete and fixed. Helen, the elder of the two, is regarded as “the good one”. She is bright, sensible, well behaved, a natural leader, mature and, accordingly, the object of the world’s approval and admiration. Ellie, who was deprived of oxygen at birth, is not so developed. She lacks her sister’s poise and intelligence, and is a routinely petulant and messy girl who finds herself consigned to the position of the difficult child. She is often dismissed and overlooked.
Early in the novel, however, the two sisters decide to swap places. They do so for a joke, but also to see if anybody notices, and to enjoy the frisson of lying to, and perhaps successfully deceiving, the adults in their lives. Initially, their plan unfolds agreeably enough. They fool a teacher, acquaintances, their mother. Yet when Helen decides that she wants to switch back and regain her true character, Ellie refuses.
To begin with, Helen’s faith in the nature of her personality is such that she feels sure she can alert the world to the deception her sister is perpetuating, simply by being as pure a version of herself as possible. As she puts it: “I make up my mind to do everything I can to be my best possible Helen so that even with the rubbish Ellie hair and clothes, the real Helen-nes will shine through and Mother will have no choice but to know that it’s me.”
Yet her efforts to establish her true identity convince no one, and as her desperation at the situation grows, so she comes to appear – and behave – more and more like the sister she is determined to prove she is not: she becomes unreasonable, prone to tantrums, troublesome.
Before long, she finds herself living the marginal and unhappy life that had once been Ellie’s. The promise she had shown at school dissipates, and by the time she has reached adulthood and renamed herself Smudge, she has developed an alcohol problem, mental illness, and a radically unstable sense of self. She has also spent time working as a prostitute. Ellie, by contrast, has flourished, and works as a successful television actress under the name of Hellie Sallis.
Morgan introduces us to these developments from the perspective of Helen. The elements of the story that unfold during her childhood are told in the first person; those that pertain to her adult life take place in the third. Yet rather than structuring her narrative chronologically, Morgan switches chapter by chapter from one narrative strand to the other.
You can see the point of this, in a way: there is a certain horror to knowing early on in the book just how total and unpleasant the erasure of Helen’s identity will be by the time she reaches maturity. Yet this awareness diminishes the narrative propulsion of the book, and divests those episodes that deal with Helen’s childhood of force, tension, possibility.
As the book progresses, however, Helen discovers in adulthood that her estranged sister has been left comatose following a car accident, and at this point the story does start to make more room for uncertainty: Ellie's accident, for example, introduces the possibility that Helen might find a way to reclaim her lost identity. But the novel as a whole militates so forcefully against the idea of individual agency – at one point Helen (as Smudge) gets hold of a copy of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, one of the great accounts of the way in which a sensibility can be brutalised, and feels an affinity with the monster – that this possibility never feels much more than remote.
For all of that, Beside Myself is enjoyable, intelligent and often diverting. The questions Morgan poses about the extent to which we can be said to be in control of our identity are compelling in themselves. It is just a pity that she has failed to bring them more dramatically, and more convincingly, to life.
Matthew Adams lives in London and writes for the TLS, The Spectator and the Literary Review.
