How “Edinburgh” Reimagines Time to Tell a Story of Trauma

But Chee’s first-person, present-tense narration differs from most in being, in a seeming paradox, retrospective. This isn’t exactly an innovation: the modernists experimented with it, and it’s not uncommon in French; one might think of Marguerite Duras’s “The Lover,” which is omnivorous in its tenses and makes much use of retrospective present. And, in the twenty-five years since “Edinburgh” was published, present-retrospective narration has become more common in new writing in English. Even in this context, though, I experience Chee’s use of it as distinctively radical. This isn’t just a question of tense but also of tone, and of style more generally. All retrospection divides then and now, but this isn’t true of “Edinburgh,” in which there’s no attempt to distinguish between the voices of young Fee undergoing experience and adult Fee narrating. At every point in the novel, experience, with all its confusion and intensity, feels immediate; at every point, we have access to reflection, to wisdom born of time. Time is the novelist’s medium, and in “Edinburgh” it becomes, in my experience as a reader, almost uniquely strange. It doesn’t move in the way it should; it refuses us any footing. Deictics, those orienting words (“here,” “there,” “before,” “after”), fail to do their jobs. It’s as though gravity is suspended, as though the usual physics don’t apply; time becomes vast, undifferentiated, a territory of what threatens to be irremediable lostness. There is no then in this novel. There is only now.

The book’s formal choices respond to a psychological crisis: something has happened to Fee’s experience of time; something has turned time into a question. The story the first half of “Edinburgh” tells is a distressingly familiar one of child sexual abuse, rendered here with uncommon emotional precision. Fee joins a community children’s choir; he has a revelatory experience of beauty, and of himself as a conduit for that beauty; the same man who makes that revelation possible, by introducing him to art, abuses him and other members of the choir. Chee is sparing of physical detail but unsparing in dissecting the social and psychological dynamics of abuse. We see how the choir director—the choir calls him Big Eric—enlists his victims in communal silence, how he makes them feel special, members of an elect; we see how he makes use of precisely what children need from adults (attention, affection, education) to victimize them.

Fee is physically abused, but Big Eric treats him differently from the other children, grooming him not as a victim but as a fellow-predator. He treats Fee as though they are peers, as though Fee shares his appetites. Chee produces one of the queasiest moments I know in all of literature when Big Eric shares with Fee a joke about Robin Hood and Friar Tuck. This treatment produces a deep confusion in Fee, especially about his queerness, and we repeatedly see him rehearse a false logic: Big Eric likes boys; Fee likes boys; therefore, they must be the same. Like many queer people abused as children, he will be plagued by the question of whether queerness preceded the abuse or was created by it, about whether, in an excruciatingly false binary, it was consequence or cause.

In “Edinburgh,” we see how abuse threatens to corrupt all aspects of Fee’s life: his first sexual experiences, experimentation with his friends, will be associated with Big Eric; Fee will begin to wonder if all men, even his father, like the kind of pornography the choir director shows him. Two of the novel’s most important motifs, fire and plague, serve as metaphors for the way abuse and its consequences spread, the way it feels to Fee like something that can devour the world. It does devour his world; Peter is not the only friend he will lose to its aftermath. And Fee experiences this loss not only with the victim’s sense of helplessness and rage, the sense of having been wronged; he feels, too, a profound, and profoundly misplaced, sense of responsibility. At his thirteenth-birthday party, he thinks, “Someone should kill me now . . . before the damage spreads.” The novel’s second half contains narrative revelations that shouldn’t be spoiled; suffice it to say that Chee shows how sexual abuse, which might seem like an event—something localizable, and thus containable, in a particular time—in fact threatens to contaminate all of time, past and future. What might seem to be individual trauma is revealed to be, like the grandfather’s history of wartime displacement and loss with which the book begins, generational trauma.