murasaki's Full Review: Margot Livesey - Eva Moves the Furniture
The cover of Eva Moves the Furniture features a woman in a red party dress floating in a body of water. The trees reflect in the water and the skirt of the red dress bells around the floating woman, eyes closed, her feet together and perfectly pointed. The cover has nothing to do with the story, but I find it strangely compelling, nonetheless.
The Plot
Eva Moves the Furniture is the story of a life. The novel opens with Eva relating the story of her birth in 1920, a story she knows through her father and the aunt that takes care of her. Shortly after Eva’s birth, her mother, Barbara lapses into sickness and dies. Eva lives in a house called Ballintyre in Scotland and she is a lonely child with only two people on the far side of middle age with whom to talk. Lonely that is, until the companions begin to appear.
The companions are a grown woman with silvery blonde hair and a girl about 14 years of age. Eva doesn’t know their names, but they talk to her and they move the furniture from time to time. Eva quickly understands that no one else can see them; whether these ghostly companions mean her good or ill is not so easily discerned.
Eva narrates her childhood, her adulthood as she moves to Glasgow for nurses training and works in a hospital burn unit during World War II, and finally her move to Glenaird, where her mother grew up. We follow her friendships, her romances, and the sporadic presence of the companions in her life. Other than the companions, Eva has a fairly normal life, but I found myself hard-pressed to put the book down, and I read it through in two sittings, though not hurriedly, I wanted to savor every moment.
Elements of Style
To say that author Margot Livesey’s prose flows lucidly would be a gross understatement. Her metaphors are so flawless that I hardly recognized them. In some instances, the writing has a stream-of-consciousness feel, we are inside of Eva’s thoughts after all, and they sometimes skip randomly around and then come back to center. Livesey’s neglect of antecedents alters the meaning of sentences sometimes, but I have the sense that this alteration is deliberate and playful at the same time.
Because the presence of the companions remains unexplained for most of the novel, though I had a few guesses, some of the events in Eva’s life take on the qualities of magical realism. In one instance, a couple of gypsies chase Eva and the companions get her away from them--or that’s what Eva tells us. I wondered for most of the novel whether Eva had really escaped or had just escaped into her own mind while she was raped (and no, I’m not going to tell what really happens). During events like these, the thoughtful reader questions whether events are real, whether the narrator is reliable, and that gives Eva Moves the Furniture unexpected depth.
Overall
One could say that this book is about moving the furniture of the mind. In the end, I think this book is about the love we have and the love we give. And though I can’t quite articulate why, I find this book, like its unrelated cover, strangely compelling.
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