Daphne by Will Boast

Reviewed by Annabel

The vogue for using ancient myth to inspire contemporary novels continues unabated. Last year, Kamila Shamsie updated the story of Antigone in Home Fire, in which a family is riven by politics. Now, Englishman relocated to the US, Will Boast uses the myth of Daphne to drive his debut novel.

You don’t need to know the story of the Daphne myth at all to appreciate this book but, for me, reading a little about it first, helped me to see more deeply into how Boast uses the myth to inform his writing and the characterisation of his singular heroine.

Here’s a summary: Daphne is a nymph who rejects the advances of Apollo. She asks her river god father, Ladon, for help: he turns her into a bay laurel tree. Boast uses a epigraph quoted from Ovid’s Metamorphoses to capture that moment of transformation.

As the novel begins, Daphne tells us about the first time she experienced cataplexy, although interestingly, Boast never names it as such. She was reading the Mayor of Casterbridge and Farfrae and Elizabeth-Jane are falling in love, fast…

The book dropped from my hands. Nested under my heavy blankets, I felt it: my skull buzzing, icy, electric, like I’d touched my tongue to a battery or bonked my funny bone, though it seemed to come not from outside but within me. I shook my head to clear it, reached for my book. I couldn’t get hold of it. It kept slipping from my fingers. […]
Yet somehow, for ten then twenty seconds, as both Elizabeth-Jane and I trembled on the verge of either ecstasy or disaster, I just couldn’t pick up the book.
I couldn’t move at all.

Experiencing any strong emotion can render Daphne temporarily paralysed, anytime, anywhere, the duration of the attacks variable, but generally corresponding to the strength of her emotion. Daphne’s life in San Francisco is rooted in coping mechanisms, finely honed in the years since her diagnosis. Each day she gets up; ear-buds in, she travels to work where she analyses the lab data, then to the gym, then home again, food and drink, bland TV, bath then bed. She gets through it day by day, using the same mind picture of cattails, willows and light on the river to calm any emotions as she tires.

But then it’s the weekend – and she meets her best friend, her only friend, Brook at a bar. They’ve been going to the same boring dive for ages. But there are new, noisy folk there, Brook who is Daphne’s opposite in character is at the bar. Daphne goes to play pool, a good distraction, and that’s when she meets Ollie.

Relationships have been a no-go area for Daphne, but there’s something about Ollie. They take tentative steps towards each other – an old-fashioned courtship in a way, sex being out of the question for Daphne for the moment. It was rather lovely to read about them getting to know each other in this way. But Ollie does begin to shake things up, surprising her in carefully calculated ways, and she begins to live a little. Will they last?

Matched against the story of Daphne and Ollie are those of Daphne and her work and her support group of other sufferers from the condition – to them she’s a hero, for she is able to work, many of them can’t. Daphne is a lab manager; she compartmentalises all the aspects of her work, she concentrates on the admin and data. She tries not to get too close to her co-workers, to let their stories affect her. As for what her lab does, testing medical devices like pacemakers in dogs, it’s as if she deliberately chose a job that few want to do, so she can box that away too. She does pride herself at being good at it, although she tries not to talk about it. Choosing this career does set the reader a challenge; it will take many out of their comfort zone, but it would be a mistake to stop reading because you disagree with it. The staff all need their jobs, and they all have their own problems which Daphne must deal with and find the right balanced approach.

In the background too, there is Daphne’s relationship with her widowed mother, who is about to embark on a new romance too. Daphne has to rehearse her conversations, so emotion doesn’t get in the way. Although her mother can irritate her (whose doesn’t?). their’s is a good relationship.

Although subtitled ‘a love story’, Daphne is far from a conventional romance. Instead it’s about a young woman whose missed out on a normal life, being able to branch out a little and find a new place in the world. Boast’s prose is not fancy, the story moves along at a good pace, with Daphne’s clipped dialogue, but, like the novel’s setting in San Francisco, there is a laid-back feel at times too, the city providing atmospheric detail. The other members of her group and the homeless guy she passes on her walk to the bus stop every day are also vividly realised. Daphne is the star though, and Boast’s narrator is hard not to like, however irritating she can be. When she is faced with a series of crises, our hearts are in our throats with concern for her and soothed every time her mantra about the cattails kicks in successfully.

Boast set himself a hard task in writing this novel, and he has succeeded in creating a rather beautiful thing, I loved it.