Emma Tennant: Heathcliff’s tale (2005)

There are something about the Brontë tales. I know. I’ve read all their novels. I’ve been to Haworth two or three times. I love Kate Bush’s “Wuthering Heights”. The lives of the Brontë sisters are made for fiction. But please everyone, do not attempt to write a sequel to any of their books. It simply doesn’t work. I’ve read a few of them, and end up disappointed and slightly irritated that I bother reading them at all. You cannot recreate the magic of the Brontës. It is one of the simple facts of life. Emma Tennant has attempted to write Heathcliff’s story, without success. Her story is inconsistent, too intricate, it doesn’t make any sense to me, and her version of Heathcliff’s life is not credible. According to her story, Heathcliff grew up in “a country where it was white with snow nearly all year round, and people went into the long hut on hands and knees”(p. 43). Where could this be, I wonder. Alaska? Greenland?? Tennant further writes that Heathcliff’s thumb and first finger were longer than normal. “This came from climbing the trees and grasping the branches” (p. 44). At the age of three or four, in other words, he had done so much tree climbing that his fingers had stretched. Somehow, this seems a bit far fetched to me! And then there is Mr. Henry Newby, who has the Lockwood function in this story, or rather a sort of Lockwood caricature. He is on a mission to find a lost manuscript, on behalf of his uncle, an editor. To top it all, it turns out that Heathcliff and Catherine had a sexual relationship, and that Heathcliff, not Edgar Linton, is the father of Catherine’s daughter. All in all, this novel is a mess. Only for really hardboiled Brontë fans!

Mariann Cesilie Løkse

December 2006