Joan Fleming’s The Fig Book follows a young poet and postgraduate literature student whom the narrative generally identifies only as “she,” although Bob calls her Eartha near the climax. Eartha begins the novel believing that she is finally on the verge of becoming a real adult woman. She has recently become engaged to Bob, the first man who has told her that he loves her, and the couple have temporarily moved into the magnificent rural home of a famous landscape artist, also named Robert and therefore absorbed into the novel’s deliberately broad category of “Bob.” The artist and his wife are travelling in Europe, leaving Eartha and her Bob to care for the house, the property and the artist’s dog. What initially appears to be an isolated domestic retreat gradually becomes a surreal story of bodily revolt, possession, ecological consciousness and escape from male control.
The novel is divided into fragments named after objects historically associated with demonic possession: coins, cinders, stones, meat, cloth, pottery, hair, nails, glass, coal, dung, feathers, blood, sand and pins and needles. These objects are not merely decorative symbols. As Eartha’s transformation progresses, many of them begin to emerge from her body or gather around her, as though everything that has been repressed, consumed, exploited or buried inside her is forcing its way outward. The opening epigraph describes accounts of possessed women vomiting pins, nails, glass, stones, cloth, coal, dung and other foreign materials. The structure prepares the reader to understand Eartha’s later behaviour both as supernatural possession and as the grotesque material expression of female experience.
At the beginning, however, Eartha is still trying desperately to be good. The artist’s house is immaculate, controlled and almost aggressively free from evidence of ordinary life. The fireplace has been swept clean, the surfaces gleam and a detailed binder written by the artist’s wife explains how the house must be maintained. The instructions include where to find rat poison, permission to burn as much wood as necessary and a command to “Enjoy the View,” with “View” capitalised as if the landscape were another valuable artwork. Eartha immediately understands that the house’s apparent effortlessness depends on the invisible labour of the artist’s wife, who manages everything so that the artist can inhabit the role of genius.
