Review: The Far Cry by Emma Smith
I have never personally shopped at Persephone Books in London, but Yasmine is a huge fan and she’s brought me back at least 2 books from the shop. It’s also definitely on my list of places to go whenever I get the chance to go back to London.
Persephone is focused on unearthing undervalued works by female authors of the 20th century so that they can be republished for all of our viewing pleasure. Their collection currently boasts 135 books, and they reprint everything from novels to short stories to diaries to memoirs. On the outside, all of their books look the same: a sharp gray cover with the title in a cream rectangle. You’ll find the difference on the inside cover and complimentary bookmark: each is covered in a beautiful fabric motif.
Yasmine gifted me The Far Cry by Emma Smith right before she left Paris to move back to America. She also gave me a bag of around 20 other books to add to my “to be read” pile. Thanks to the stay at home orders of the past few months, I’ve finally been able to tackle what has become an entire shelf in my personal library of titles that I want to get through. And by getting through I mean savor and enjoy, of course.
The Far Cry was originally published in 1949 and was reprinted by Persephone in 2002. It is the 33rd book in their collection and features a preface written by Smith in 2001. I personally loved that the novel began with a little bit of background from the author. I felt that it better prepared me to read the story.
Smith traveled to India in 1946 to work as an assistant on a documentary film set. She was clearly inspired by her journey as The Far Cry tells the story of a father and daughter who move from London to India in the mid-1940s. Thanks to her personal experiences, the novel is filled with beautiful and realistic descriptions of the journey from England to India and the environment Smith found when she stepped off the boat. There is also a light sprinkling of feminist ideas throughout.
In the preface of the novel, Smith says, “Looking back with the vantage-point of old age at the young person I was in 1946 I realise now that the ignorance I so deplored was really a blessing in disguise. I went down the gangplank at Bombay, and India burst upon me with the force of an explosion. I was totally unprepared for it.”
The main character of The Far Cry is a fourteen-year-old girl named Teresa, and she steps off the boat in Bombay with a similar ignorance. The reader can imagine that Smith must have felt like a child in a new world when she arrived in India and she does an excellent job conveying her feelings through Teresa.
Let’s go back further to the beginning: the first sentence of the novel introduces us to Teresa Digby, a fourteen-year-old girl who lives with her aunt, who we understand to be very strict. We quickly learn that Mr. Digby, Teresa’s father is due in for an impromptu visit. Teresa doesn’t spend a lot of time with her father, and her mother ran away to America when Teresa was four years old. She hasn’t seen her mother since.
When Mr. Digby gets to his sister’s home, he announces that he will be taking Teresa with him to India to visit his other daughter and Teresa’s half-sister, Ruth. He is indignant that they leave as soon as possible as he is trying to get his daughter out of the country. He just received a letter from Teresa’s runaway mother in which she told him that she was coming back to England and wanted to see Teresa.
Teresa is taken back from the news and doesn’t truly come to terms with any of it until she gets to Bombay. Before she gets there, Smith takes us on the seemingly neverending boat ride between England and India. Teresa and her father then take another neverending train ride before they arrive at the tea plantation where Ruth is living with her husband.
Most of Smith’s feminist observations center around Ruth. Ruth is a beautiful woman who has fallen trap to the unrealistic expectations felt by women in the 20th century. She has been praised for her beauty her entire life and was told that it was her most valuable attribute. Ruth spent so much of her life nurturing her looks that she feels that she now wears a mask. She doesn’t know who she truly is and she is a very lost character.
One line that really stuck out for me is found on page 186-187. Ruth is contemplating if she could ever speak to her husband, Edwin, about how lost she truly feels:
“But confession was impossible, for how could she start? What could she say? There were no words for it.
‘Edwin - I’m not like this; I’m a fraud.’
‘A fraud?’ he would say. ‘Ruth, how can you be? You are what you are. I know what you are.’
‘Oh, but you don’t. I’m not like that. I’m different.’
‘Then what are you like, Ruth?’
‘I don’t know. I’ve forgotten. But not like this - this is pretence. Help me.’
Such words were wild.”
Ruth clearly feels utterly and completely trapped in her life, and the fact that she lives on an isolated tea plantation in India doesn’t seem to be helping her. She has a strained relationship with her husband Edwin, a character who the reader understands very quickly as being someone who doesn’t understand why Ruth feels so alone.
Teresa is an interesting character and clearly the main one of the novel, but my heart went out to Ruth and at times I shared some of her secret thoughts. Ruth is the character to pay attention to in The Far Cry if you choose to read it through a feminist lens so I encourage readers to take note of her thoughts and actions in order to gain insight into the life of a 20th-century woman. It’s not a pretty place, but it needs to be considered and understood in order to move forward in the 21st-century.