Deborah Levy’s characters convey a sense of not being at home in the world.Credit:Getty
Throughout this novel,Elsa is shadowed by a woman who wears similar clothes,distinctive shoes and is the same age as her. Is she a dream,a projection,a hallucination? To Elsa’s chagrin,this other woman lays claim to some battery-operated horses at an Athens street market. These horses can dance,but more importantly,when one pulls their tail down,they stop.
“With this tail I could start or end the magic any time I liked,” Elsa says. “I felt she had stolen something from me.”
From the outset,Levy’s characters convey an unnerving sense of transposition in the world,a sense of not quite being at home – like wrong notes,the protagonist can’t quite land. The blue of the title refers to the dye of Elsa’s new hair colour,a radical attempt to reject her old self. As she says,“blue was a separation from my DNA”.
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The question of who was her birth mother is one she both does and does not want an answer to. How do we humans make sense of the score,the strands of genetics and cells that encode our bodies? Who,indeed,is Elsa,or the Ann she was before she was adopted? “I had two mothers. One who had given me up. And I had given up the woman who had replaced her.”
Levy’s “living autobiographies”,her series of three memoirs,are acute explorations of what it is to be a woman writer. With her return to fiction,she places a creative woman at the centre of the story,a woman who wants to write the score.