sawyl | The Girl with Glass Feet

I was very much taken with Ali Shaw's modern fairy-tale The Girl with Glass Feet, which I found both beautiful and disturbing by turns.

Ida Maclaird, the girl whose body is vitrifying by degrees, has returned to the islands of St Hauda's Land in search of a man she believes might be able to offer her a cure for her condition. Ida's appearance on the island catalyses the locals, forcing them to confront the buried secrets of their past. Midas Crook, an obsessive and damaged photographer, slowly comes to realise that he has fallen in love with Ida and draws upon her strength to confront the painful memories of his cold and domineering father. Carl Maulsen, Ida's host on the island, is still gripped by his obsessive love for Freya Maclaird and begins to nurture a rather creepy hope that, having failed with her mother, he might get a second chance at love through Ida .

Although key to events, Ida actually comes across as quite a slight character. Her childhood has been difficult, but not as difficult as Midas's; she has travelled extensively and lived a full life, bungee jumping and skydiving and skiing, but she only really seems to feel passionate about swimming and diving. But perhaps this lightness is intentional. Ida isn't so much a character in herself, as the lens that brings the characters of those she meets into focus.

Midas, on the other hand, is deeply detailed and a complete contrast to Ida. He is completely defined by stasis. Unable to interact with the real world, he obsessively photographs it in an attempt to reduce complex three dimensional problems to something flat and static and monochrome; his life completely mediated through the lenses of his cameras. Still trying to escape the influence of his father — Crook senior having fallen into a similar error to Moulsen, by trying to force his son to become a reincarnation of himself — Midas constantly asks himself what his father would have done in a particular situation, so that he can take the opposite course of action. Except that he can't; his emotional paralysis is too extreme.

The setting, too, is wonderfully drawn. The ice-bound islands of St Hauda's is a classic fairy-tale setting, with its woods that no sensible person wants to enter, its secret filled marshes, and its snows that seem to reflect the emotional states of its inhabitants. It is just the sort of place at the edge of the world, a latter-day Tír na nÓg with cellphones and digital cameras, where people might quite easily start changing into glass and where mysterious spirits might haunt its quiet places turning everything they see bone white. Even the local fauna are strange, from miniature moth-winged cattle to jellyfish that luminesce as they die, marking their passing with a brilliant show of photons.

Shaw's writing is consistantly excellent and often extremely beautiful, even in the most unpleasant of moments. Here, for example, is the moment when Midas first sees Ida's vitrified feet:

Her toes were pure glass. Smooth, clear, shining glass. Glinting crescents of light edged each toenail and each crease between the joints of each digit. Seen through her toes, the silver spots on the bed sheet diffused into metallic vapours. The ball of her foot was glass too, but murkier, losing its transparency in a gradient until, near her ankle, it reached skin: matt and flesh-toned like any other. And yet... Those few inches of transition astonished him even more than her solid glass toes. Bones materialised faintly inside the ball of her foot, then became lily-white and precise nearer her unaltered ankle, shrouded along the way by translucent red ligaments in denser layers. In the curve of her instep wisps of blood hung trapped like twirls of paint in marbles. And there were places in the glass where the petrification was incomplete. Here was a pinprick mole, there a fine blond hair.

But despite the poetry of the description, the circumstances are rather unpleasant. Ida has invited Midas to stay but, in the middle of the night, he violates her trust by taking off her socks and photographing her feet while she is asleep. Ida's reactions, too, are similarly problematic: initially, she tries to pretend that the nothing has happened, only acknowledging the night's events when Midas confesses. Which is absolutely consistent with the rest of the book: there are no easy answers, no quick fixes, no sudden magic to make everything right again, no happy ending. Or maybe there is. I suppose it depends on how you read it.

Despite its darkness and uncertainties I think The Girl with Glass Feet is going to stay with me for a long time, like one of Angela Carter's dark fables of transformation, or AS Byatt's The Stone Woman, or Book Three of Alasdair Gray's Lanark. It really is that good.