Mr Fox by Helen Oyeyemi – review

This compelling novel recycles myth and legend with wit, wisdom… and some satisfactory new endings for those old misogynist fairytales
Helen Oyeyemi, Nigerian Writer Barcelona, Spain.
'Fantastical': Helen Oyeyemi. Photograph: Oscar Elias/Alamy

Cunning foxes have long prowled through the pages of fairytales and, in her fourth novel, Helen Oyeyemi harks back to these fictional foxes while creating her own fantastical – and fantastic – creatures. At the novel's heart is a reimagining of the gruesome myth of Bluebeard, serial killer of wives (itself a tale with many variants, such as The Robber Bridegroom and the old English fairytale Mr Fox). Here, with pen mightier than sword, the eponymous antihero is an eminent American writer who has a penchant for killing off his female characters.

  1. Mr Fox
  2. by Helen Oyeyemi

It is 1936, Mr Fox is sitting at his desk, trying but failing to write well, when his long-absent muse, Mary Foxe, "saunters in for a handshake", a typically playful passage. Thereafter a love triangle develops between Mr Fox, his beleaguered wife Daphne and his mysterious muse Mary, a lonely young governess with a fondness for flowers and fairytales. Mr Fox is torn between the real and imaginary women in his life.

The brave Mary ("Be bold, be bold; but not too bold," the fairytale warns) speaks out against the tradition of male writers poeticising women's deaths: "What you're doing is building a horrible kind of logic," admonishes Mary. "It's obscene to make such things reasonable." She insists that Mr Fox change the endings of his stories, thus altering the misogynist narratives that shape and reflect culture. Within the feisty framework of this engrossing main narrative are stories-within-stories, unfolding like Russian dolls, though the connections between them aren't always clear. Oyeyemi also weaves myths into the work, from the werefox Reynardine to Yoruba legends, creating a richly layered intertextuality. Mr Fox also becomes a meditation on the writing process itself, filled with vignettes about how language may ensnare or liberate. Words become characters in themselves: "I watched words turn amber and float away".

This ambitious novel is most compelling when Oyeyemi uses her trademark magic realism to blur the boundaries between the real and the fictional, questioning what it is to be alive. A Yoruba girl dances with her dead husband; Mary rolls in a bed filled with words; a fox tears the word "fox" from a dictionary, hoping to become human. Oyeyemi peoples her text with ghosts, dreams and talking animals, burrowing through the surface of the everyday to reveal the bizarreness beneath. Yet the core concern is with human suffering. With wit and wisdom, Mr Fox explores how stories can hurt or heal. Stealthy as a fox, this novel creeps into the imagination.

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