Ayesha Manazir iddiqi: The Centre (Gillian Flynn Books)
Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi’s The Centre
is a thriller, a horror story, and a satire, but above all else an
investigation of the relationahip of selfhood and language. The horror element
comes not from an alien or supernatural source, but from the depths of human
nature, with a reference not to technology but to anthropology and human
history, myth, and ritual. Siddiqi’s novel occupies the fraught line between
fascination and disgust, between the satiric and the gruesome. Siddiqi, like
some other writers working in or adjacent to the horror genre, tends to hold
the terrifying elements at arm’s length for a large part of the novel, to shift
abruptly away from thrilling or shocking possibilities, withholding them until a climactic moment later in the story.
This deferral of horror has the effect of highlighting, alongside the shocking
elements of the story, the ordinary conflicts, struggles, and terrors of
everyday lie.
The novel is strictly from Anisa’s
point of view (and at one point there is a sly hint of association between the
narrator and the author); that narrative choice emphasizes the core of the novel,
the insistence that subjective experience is impossible to communicate
transparently—all communication involves a translation that is distorted by the
point of view and experience of each party to the conversation. This
incommunicability is most obvious in Anisa’s relationships with two friends and
a lover. At the heart of the novel, though, is a mysterious process that seeks
to break down this barrier to understanding by providing a process of acquiring
languages and adopting other people’s experience. The institution that sponsors
this process is The Centre of the book’s title.
The story follows three primary arcs. The first is Anisa’s
relationship with her friend Naima, who makes a living from tarot readings,
tantra, and ayahuasca workshops for women of color. Anisa met Naima when she
first moved to London at 18 to attend college, and they are now in their 30s. This
part of the story is the most conventional, two friends struggling for love and
for a place in the world, a storyline that ends with a wedding (though not the
most reassuring of literary weddings). Naima is not only Anisa’s anchor, her
best friend and confidant, but their relationship is also, despite Naima’s
unconventional way of making a living, the “normal” against which Anisa’s
stranger experiences can be measured. The second narrative arc deals with Adam,
a man whom she meets at a seminar on literary translation: Adam is the person
who introduces her to the Centre, a cult-like language school that claims to
achieve for its adherents total fluency in a language in 10 days. The third
narrative deals with the Centre itself and with
Anisa’s relationship with Shiba, a staff member at the Centre who
becomes her guide (her Virgil, even) through the the Centre’s mysteries,
possibilities, and even horrors.
Anisa,
dissatisfied with settling for a life that falls below her personal and
literary ambitions, begins her journey, though, with a tarot reading that Naima
does for her (with a comic touch: Naima consults the instruction booklet that
came with the pack of cards for her interpreatation): according to Naima (and
the instructions that came with the cards) Anisa is ”searching for the reasons
for her discontent outside yourself, when the discontent itself is the reason
for the discontent.” Thinking about her discontent leads Anisa to consider
translation as a profession and an art form, meditating on the difficulties of
finding an emotional equivalent for even the most basic elements of language.
As evidence she references Harold Bloom’s discussion of the difficulty of adequately
translating the famous first line of Camus’s L’Etranger.
She is inspired to attend a seminar on literary translation,
where she first encounters Adam, who is also in the audience. She is impressed
by his seeming fluency in several languages, and after striking up a
conversation with him. When she asks how he has managed to learn so many
languages, he offers the stale line that he could tell her but then he’d have
to kill her, a line that serves as both a joke and a premonition. Their
relationship is tentative at first: he is shy and cautious, particularly about
sex, and he is also reticent regarding his skill in learning languages. As she
ultimately says, there’s something “off” about Adam, and otherness that
provides a lot of the tension in the first half of the story, and is finally
explicated in an angry confrontation between what is at that point the former
couple, toward the end.
For the
first quarter of the novel, the story is a frequently funny rom-com and
coming-of-age late story about thirty-somethings in London finding their way
through sexual, cultural, friendship, and family stresses—except for the
occasional mention of “the horror that was to come.” Anisa navigates her
ambitions, her sometimes fractious relationship with Naima, ad her slowly,
hesitantly developing relationship with Adam, up to an including the adoption
of a cat together (a big step, after all, toward shared domesticity). The break
in the narrative occurs when a Anisa and Adam travel to introduce him to her
family in Pakistan. Cultural and sexual tensions arise, from multiple
misunderstandings based in incommensurable personal experience of a man and a
woman from opposite ends of the colonial history of t heir countries. The
biggest shock to their relationship comes when Adam reveals that he has learned
Urdu, as a sort of gift to Anisa, but her reaction is not what he expects (not
the least of which is that he now speaks the language better than she does, a
fact that her family remarks upon). This insistence on the linguistic and
translational aspects of disconnections between individuals with differing
bodily experience of life prepares for both the couple’s breakup and the more
startling aspects of the tale in the chapters to come.
After Adam provides Anisa with a
referral to The Centre (something that p[articipants are only eligible to do
once in a lifetime), almost as a parting gift upon their breakup, she undergoes
an odd interview and an even stranger physical exam, and then journeys to the
remote facility. The building is half 18th-century mansion and half
modern glass and steel, the two sections surrounding a central courtyard and
garden. The two halves of the building suggest the two tendencies of the story:
toward gothic mystery and speculative fiction (both, though, grounded more in
anthropology than in the supernatural or the technological).
The central garden: It seems perpetually lush and green,
regardless of the season, but more pointedly, there is in the center of the
garden a fenced-off section of poisonous plants. Their role in the Centre’s
activity is never specified, so they function as a menacing presence and, by
the end, a suggestion that there is more going on than the narrator is
revealing. The poisonous presence are also a first hint of Anisa’s growing suspicions
abut what is going on in the facility.
At first,
though, the program of The Centre is almost monastic. The regimen involves,
first, the confiscation of all communication devices, then a strict schedule of
meditation, meals, silence (except for occasional contact with staff), and long
hours of sitting in a booth listening to a “Storyteller” drone on and on in a
language that the learner does not (yet) understand. Anisa’s first crises are,
on the one hand, boredom (despite the excellence of the meals prepared by the
on-site chefs), and the forced withdrawal from Whatsapp and social media. At
one point, she breaks down in her cell-like room and is comforted by an elderly
cleaner (with whom she is not supposed to interact) who convinces her to go
back to her language booth. Her other, sanctioned, interactions are only with
Shiba, who encourages her but also echoes her life experience as a South Asian
émigré. Their bond grows to fill ghe gap left by Anisa’s growing distance from
Naima (who has become engaged to a man that Anisa does not approve of) and by
Shiba’s isolation as the chief of staff
(she is not only in charge but is the daughter of one of the founders).
Their
friendship softens the cult-like atmosphere and the, suddently, Anisa begins to
understand Peter, Her German Storyteller, as he drones on and on in her
headphones, telling his life story in intimate detail. Her new facility in
Germanm though, also has a darker side: she realizes that her recent,
disturbing nightmares seem to be based on Peter’s story, even though she was
having the nightmares before she could understand him.
After
“graduating” from The Centre, Anisa seeks to fulfill her professional
ambitions, selecting a German literary novel (which is an allegory about
language and translation) and publishes a successful English version of the
text. Her feeling of success is mixed with her sense of inadequacy, which she
identifies as the imposter syndrome, and sheh reaches out to Shiba. They meet
and bond further, and then Anisa decides to go back to The Centre to learn
Ruissian. On her second visit, the institution’s linguistic labyrinth darkens.
She learns that her new Storyteller is in fact the elderly cleaner kthat she
encountered on her first visit, but she is told that she will not be able to
meet her this time, since the old woman is ill and in hospital. A further
crisis comes when Shiba invites Anisa to visit her in the private quatters that
are forbidden to leaners, and in a moment when Shiba is occupied and her laptop
is open, Anisa further violates the ru les by checking her email. Whe follows
is a thriller-like sequence of panic ,fear, and flight, ending abruptly when
she attempts to enter another forbidden area: whereupon the narrator and the
hnarrative go black. The secret behind the door will not be revealed until much
later (following the pattern of the novel’s thriller and horror elements: at
each stage, the narrative pulls back, postponing the full effect as the normal
(though still ominous) life at The Centre and beyond resumes.
The resto
fthe story follows Anisa’s success as a translator, and a second trip to South
Asia, this time in the company of Shiba, to visit with Shiba’s father and the
other founders, who are coming together, from their various institutions around
the world, to conduct The Centre’s essential business and the plans for its
future. The visit is initially amicable, but rapidly falls apart in two ways:
The final revelation of The Centre’s secrets in their full horror become clear,
but Anisa’s final break with Shiba, her father, and the intstitution stem from
a more banal, but in a way even more horrifying and disgusting, incident.
Anisa’s flight from India and from
Shiba’s famiy does not quite resolve her relation to The Centre and its
horrors. A further revelation, in a conversation with Shiba during the novel’s
final weddiing scenes, both turns the screw further andn threatens to inveigle
Anisa again in the web of The Centre, despite her awareness of its dark heart.
As horror fiction, The Centre has much in common with
other historical and contemporary horror novels that are grounded in cults and
human history (rather than supernatural or alien forces). I kept thinking of
Charlotte Jay’s Beat Not the Bones, whose horror derives from essential
and powerful cultural misunderstandings and colonial domination of one culture
over another. The Centre is full of the same criticism of colonial domination,
but usually in a lighter and more satirical tone, but like Jay’s famous novel,
its horror is rooted in anthropology and history. Among more recent novels,
Siddiqi’s book has in common with Elisabeth Thomas’s Catherine House a
focus on cult-like enclaves and on female experience of the world. The
Centre also has themes in common with Alma Katsu’s The Hunger,
though without that story’s supernatural and historical elements. And John
Darnielle’s invocation of the disruption of ordinary means of communication and
the eruption of terrifying possibilities into ordinary (if unsatisfying) lives
in his Universal Harvester has parallels in Siddiqi’s contrast between
the ordinary conflicts and the awful potentialities of human nature.
What distinguishes The Centre
from these books is partly tone: there is a lightness in Siddiqi’s evocation of
the social lives of thirty-something Londoners of varying backgrounds that both
contrasts and hightlights the anger and misunderstanding, both cultural and
personal, among her characters. Much of the narrative’s tension is based not on
exceptional circumstances but on ordinary life, not on the horror underneath but
on the banality on the surface of the characters’ lives. In Anisa’s heated
arguments with Adam, Naima, and Shiba, what is revealed is the
incommensurability of individual experience: our inner lives, and basic points
of view, and. Untranslatable across the gap between us. Anisa and the founders
of The Centre are, each in their own way and each with their own moral dilemmas
and lapses, trying to overcome that barrier. The question is whether total
understanding across the barrier between us, a kind of telepathic
communication, would result in horror and conflict or peace and understanding. Would
sharing another person’s consciousness lead to empathy or nightmares. Rather
than the style of horror that mines anxiety and shock as emotional forces,
