ISBN: 9780450553455
Date read: 07/09/2021
How strongly I recommend it: 8/10
Support your local bookshop by going to Bookshop.org to buy your copy (instead of THAT online shopping website…)
‘Altogether it’s been one hell of a time, but Barton hasn’t changed a lot. (Here I’m awfully tempted to tell you all about… bunches of other stuff. But that’s all after the end, so why should you care?) The Ben Franklin Store’s been squeezed out by more boutiques. Some new people own the Magic Key now, and they don’t call it that. The worst thing by a long shot is that Uncle De Witte Sinclair is dead. I could tell you quite a bit about that; but you wouldn’t want to read it. And to tell you the truth, I wouldn’t want to write it. So long, Uncle Dee. Kisses.’
Holly H. Hollander
Barton, Illinois
1990[1]
As you can see from the opening quote, this is not your average foreword to a novel. In fact, Gene Wolfe is not writing Pandora. Holly is. We are reading a book written by her, and she tells us that she is ‘kind of tall, but not real tall. My hair’s brown, like my father’s was before it turned gray… My eyes are brown, my face is squarer than Elaine’s, with high cheekbones, and my nose turns up in a way that I guess makes me look snotty sometimes.’[2]
She also informs us that, ‘When I was a little kid in Middle School the teachers were always asking what we wanted to be when we grew up. Well I’m grown up now, and I guess since you’re reading this it’s pretty obvious what one thing I want to be is.’[3] And so we as readers really are thrown in at the deep end. Where is Barton, who is Uncle Dee, and why in the world does the book’s first chapter then open with Holly quoting to us from a book on the German 88 mm artillery gun used in World War II? If you’re confused, but hopefully intrigued, don’t worry. All will be revealed, and in one of the most structurally satisfying ways possible that only a genius like Wolfe can produce.
Wolfe uses these digressions of Holly’s to skilfully build up this believable character of a young girl, without falling into any of the trappings that male author’s all too often do when trying to write as a female. Wolfe is way too good of a writer for this, however, and chooses instead to infuse the narrative with digressions synonymous with the tall tales or ever fluctuating High School drama that could be told to us by white, middle class, teenage girls.
Pandora By Holly Hollander is Holly’s account of something awful that happened at the antiques fair one year in Barton, the suburb of Chicago that she calls home. The aftermath of which leads her down a rabbit hole of discovery, and with the help of the mysterious criminologist Aladdin Blue, begins her own investigation into the hidden pasts of several Barton community members, most of which she has known for years, including the personal lives of her own parents.
To reveal more details of the plot would almost be giving too much away, in my opinion. Suffice to say that Pandora By Holly Hollander is a detective story quite unlike any other. Sure, there’s a couple of tropes; the mysterious locked box, a death (or is it a murder?), even a blossoming love affair (of sorts,) but it is all told through Holly’s beautifully idiosyncratic, and often quite naïve, narration, and Wolfe is consistent in the way that he twists and flips any genre conventions.
For anyone who has yet to encounter Gene Wolfe’s work, he specializes in truly innovative first-person narratives. His narrators are not simply stand-ins for the author himself, but rather fully developed characters in their own right, who actually alter, warp and mould the telling of their tale to suit their own needs, whether deliberately or unconsciously. In the hands of a lesser writer, this would make these novels confusing and maybe even needlessly complicated, but Wolfe is a master storyteller, who occupies himself not only with writing the tale, but expertly tweaking and experimenting with the telling of it. As the man himself says:
‘It always seems to me that if you have a narrator, if the narration is not by an all-knowing, all-seeing author, if you’re going to say that this person in the story is going to tell the story, then the narrator is damn well going to be unreliable. Real people really are unreliable narrators all the time, even if they try to be reliable narrators. Ask any courtroom lawyer about examining five or six different witnesses to the same event. The five or six witnesses are all trying to tell the truth, but they have all seen different things, or in some cases think they have seen things that are not in fact there.’[4]
This novel is a great jumping on point for anyone new to Gene Wolfe, with the book clocking in at a slim 198 pages and a narrative that is so completely gripping, that I’d be surprised if you didn’t finish this in one sitting. This happens to be particularly convenient, as Wolfe deliberately engineers his novels to be read more than once. Having reread portions of this book while writing this review, I have noticed multiple clues and allusions that now seem to make much of the plot’s twists and turns downright explicit, but only to the reader who is revisiting the book for a second time. And you will definitely want to revisit this one a second time. And a third.
You might also like…
- How To Read Gene Wolfe by Neil Gaiman – I highly recommend giving this short piece a read before reading any of Gene Wolfe’s books. It’ll take you 5 minutes, and it’s a perfect introduction as well as a nice little primer to get you ready and into the reading mindset you should be adopting while reading Wolfe’s masterful work.
[1] Gene Wolfe, Pandora By Holly Hollander, (Great Britain: New English Library, 1991), pp. vii-viii
[2] Ibid, pp. 3-4
[3] Ibid, p. 4
[4] https://web.archive.org/web/20090916170648/http://home.roadrunner.com/~lperson1/wolfe.html