Readers familiar with Mary Morrissy's first novel, Mother of Pearl, are aware that she does not flinch from the harrowing. Her crystalline, meticulously controlled prose teases out the most furtive and subtle of psychological states: no one is spared. This is the case, too, in her latest book, The Pre- tender, which takes as its subject the woman who claimed to be the Grand Duchess Anastasia, fourth daughter of the last Tsar and sole survivor of the Romanov massacre.
In truth, Anastasia was Franziska Schanzkowska, a working-class Polish woman who, in the wake of a hideous accident at the factory where she worked, spent time in various asylums before assuming her new identity .
It is , in every regard, a sensational story: Anastasia, married in her old age to a doting American professor 20 years her junior, ending her life in self-imposed squalor in his genteel home in Charlottesville, Virginia; Anastasia pulled, amnesiac, from the Landwehr Canal in Berlin in 1920, and known for two years as "Fraulein Unbekannt", "the unknown one", before disclosing her royal identity. In Morrissy's deft hands, however, these events do not have the splash of tabloid drama: they are jagged, poignant episodes, conjured with remorseless precision. A glimpse of Anastasia's home in Charlottesville, for example, opens the novel: "dreg-tided cups, plates with pools of congealed food, the sour tang of cat piss".
And Fraulein Unbekannt's temporary home, at Dalldorf asylum, is grimmer still: "One long woman with ginger hair and a slack mouth approached her bed and stood staring at her, then pointed her finger and cackled noisily. The rest of them took up her laughter, though from their mouths it sounded more like ululation, a lament. A dry skinned dwarf ran up and poked her about the ribs." To read the trials of Fraulein Unbekannt, so vividly depicted, is to suffer them with her; and Morrissy expertly lures her readers onwards with the mystery's promise: who is this tormented, complicated creature? And of what does her identity consist? In delicate, painful layers, the novel lays bare Franziska Schanzkowska's dramatic young life, a series of willed new beginnings, each of which seems to bring only more disaster, to herself and to others alike. When her fiance is felled at the Front, she reflects: "Hans had been doomed. Not because of the war but because of her, Franziska Schanzkowska; she had given him the kiss of death."
The Pretender builds not forwards but backwards, delving ever deeper into the imagined past of the ruined young woman who stole Anastasia's name. Mother of Pearl told the story of a stolen baby; this novel, too, sets out to explain an unthinkable theft. Madness lies at the core of both books - not of the histrionic, slobbering kind, but rather the slight twist of the psyche that threatens the reasoning world. If, in Dalldorf, Anastasia seems comparatively functional, her previous incarnation, out in society, never seems knowable, and hence trails the whiff of insanity. After her factory accident, Franziska's closest ally, Louise, conceded that whereas before she had been secretive and odd, now she was acting as if she was not all there. "As if," Louise said, "she was lost in time."
When, in the novel's final third, Franziska's childhood is created for us, we are given both the girl's satisfactions and her most primal tragedies. It is a relief to find that Franziska, known to her family as Sissy, has known joy, not least in the absolute love of her favouring father; but the threat of love's loss leads the child to commit terrible acts. That this twist in Sissy's psyche is inevitable, innate, is suggested by her mother: "Sissy she distrusted. Right from the start. From the moment she fell pregnant with Sissy, she was subject to extraordinary cravings. She did not tell her husband that in the third month she ate fish, expressly forbidden . . . When Josef was away she asked Felix to fetch her some herring she had pickled and hidden in the store. The taste remains with her, salty and tart . It reminds her of Sissy's temperament." Morrissy, in order to bring us the fullness of Franziska Schanzkowska's tale, enters various points of view, and slides fluidly from past tense to present and back again. The effect, sometimes unsettling, is of a prism, through which we see diverse and fragmentary Franziskas in the course of her short life. We come to understand, too, the great relief that lies in shucking off these selves and becoming Anastasia: a unitary self, a known identity, a whole and historical person. In this powerful, disturbing book, Morrissy does not simply illuminate the dark recesses behind Anastasia's flamboyant facade; she explores, also, the universal question of - the universal quest for - individual identity in a fallen world.
Clare Messud's second novel, The Last Life, was published last year