Audrey Niffenegger has become a well known name, thanks to her single huge success, The Time Traveler’s Wife. Even though I personally avoided The Time Traveler’s Wife for a long, long time (haven written it off as a bestseller and so trash), it is indeed an astonishing piece of writing. Science fiction, fantasy, high end romance, a serious look at the human condition and some brilliant time travel make it a strange hybrid of a novel and yet one that works seamlessly. So it stands to good reason that Niffenegger was given a $6 million advance on her next work – Her Fearful Symmetry. Does it live up to the expectations of her fans? Is as good a book as her first? Ultimately, that’s just a matter of opinion.

Her Fearful Symmetry opens with the death of a 44 year old woman from cancer. She leaves behind her younger lover, her estranged twin sister an odd collection of friends who worked with her at London’s famous Highgate Cemetery and a flat overlooking the graveyard that she bequeaths to her twin nieces. They move in, but she can not move out – not even after death. So is this then a ghost story? Yes, it is. Is an effective ghost story? No, sadly enough, its not. Considering Niffenegger spends a great deal of time building up the haunting of the twins and their inherited flat by Elspeth, the haunting itself is just a little silly – and fairly ineffective. For a ghost story, this one has surprisingly little atmosphere.

Niffenegger spent a long, long time researching both the city of London and Highgate Cemetery itself. She even worked as a guide, the way a number of her characters do. As much as I’d like to say that the cemetery itself is a character in the book, it is oddly enough, not. It is just not as spooky as she’d like it to be. While there is plenty in the novel that is strange and disturbs as it compels, the ghost part is about as scary as…well, Ghost, the film with Patrick Swayze: not at all. Niffenegger’s prose is very matter of fact and perhaps this is the reason why the gothic or grotesque element of the book fails to inspire any chills. Even her strange twist in the tale seems a little forced, and to be perfectly honest, a little unbelievable. I know – if you can believe in a ghost, why cant you believe that the ghost can remove a living things soul? Because, ghosts just cant do that! And if Niffenegger is trying to create an entire new repertoire for ghosts, she has a lot of convincing to do.

The one part of this book that is utterly convincing is the portrait of the upstairs neighbour, Martin. An obsessive compylsive, he is unable to leave his house and unable to relate to his wife anymore. She leaves him to his compulsions, and he is befriended by one of the twins, who is intent on helping him get better. Martin is a wonderfully drawn character – his psychosis itself, his own personal understanding of his psychosis, his relationship with his wife and every last detail of him, down to his bleach scraped and bloodied hands makes him a much more sympathetic character than most of the others in the book.

The disturbingly close twin girls in question are 20, but are described as if they were 12. In fact, a number of characters observe that the girls look very, very young. Which makes it increasingly disturbing that Elspeth’s lover (younger than her, but older than her nieces) becomes involved with one of the twins. It’s a strange pattern that seems to run through both of Niffenegger’s work – this idea of older man, younger girl is fairly disturbing. In The Time Traveler’s Wife, the female protagonist meets her husband to be when she is 5 and he is an adult: she does not know who he is, but he knows exactly who she is, who will grow up to be, when all the various important things in their relationships will happen – essentially he can more or less mold this child into the woman he will eventually marry and have a child with. This is disturbing on so many levels, but somehow adds to the texture of the novel, which itself is very odd. Now, in Her Fearful Symmetry, you have an older man who has fallen for the young niece of his dead girlfriend. This young niece is quite a bit younger, and while she’s 20 years old, she looks a 12 year old version of her dead aunt. As if this in itself isn’t odd enough, the fact that no one else seems to think there is much wrong with this is decidedly off kilter.