Hilary Mantel - The Heart Fails Without Warning

We never learn what it is that has triggered Morna's disease. We are not privy to her thoughts, and she doesn't speak much to her family about what brought her to this state. Hilary Mantel, in her short story, The Heart Fails Without Warning, keeps a great deal of information away from us, allowing, if we are able, to infer, to discern through hint and subtext, the affliction that is traumatising this utterly ordinary family.

Morna has anorexia nervosa (anorexia). It's never stated outright, but the signs are clear. She doesn't eat, she loses weight. Her teeth fall out. Her bones are visible, her ribs can be counted. She grows a down known as lanugo on her body to keep her warm, because she simply doesn't have enough flesh.

As with many people suffering from a psychological illnesses, Morna's immediate family, and the backdrop of her friends and school, do not understand the problem, and are indeed incapable of confronting it head-on. Her mother tries, but she is vague, scattered, viewing the problem as something that can be yelled away. Her father doesn't try at all, and is in fact nothing more than a cipher, absent, and when he does open his mouth, irresolute. That leaves Lola, the younger daughter, neglected by her family because she “doesn't have any problems” when compared with Morna. Lola is our surrogate, acting as viewpoint, recorder, and commentator as she chronicles the gradual disintegration of Morna's body.

Their parents are aware of the situation, but it doesn't really seem to come home to them:

The sisters were no longer allowed a computer in their room because of the sites Morna liked to look at. They had pictures of girls with their arms stretched wide over their heads in a posture of crucifixion. Their ribs were spaced wide apart like the bars of oven shelves. These sites advised Morna how to be hungry, how not to be gross. Any food like bread, butter, an egg, is gross. A green apple or a green leaf, you may have one a day. The apple must be poison green. The leaf must be bitter.

Morna's mother instigates a daily weigh-in; Morna, with the guile and deceit typical of such sufferers, water loads to disguise her weight loss. Morna's mother, with the exasperation typical of parents in this situation, secretly folds cream into food and squirrels fattening ingredients into the very few foods Morna will agree to eat. The lies from both parties causes further fracturing in the family, and it must be said that Lola isn't much help either:

January: “You're going to send me back to the unit,” Morna said.
“No, no,” her mother said. “Not at all.”
“You were on the phone to Dr. Bhattacharya.”
“I was on the phone to the dentist. Booking in.”
Morna had lost some teeth lately, this was true. But she knew her mother was lying. “If you send me back I will drink bleach,” she said.
Lola said, “You will be shining white.”

Indeed, Lola is a failed surrogate for the reader. She is too clever by half; at eleven, her vocabulary is vastly inflated, and the awareness she shows regarding the inner motives of the three members of her family remains unrealistic throughout. In addition, as the reader, we are supposed to believe Lola is deeply disturbed by her sister's illness (the very fact that she dwells upon it with such intensity implies this; in addition, her thoughts remain sympathetic, or at the very least, engaged, interested, and involved), but her actions are unbelievably cruel and harsh. She says the very things she knows will hurt her sister, and she never, verbally at any rate, displays the slightest concern, even when Morna is carted back and forth to special clinics and hospitals.

There are several narrative mis-steps throughout the story. A rather bizarre sub-plot concerning the father's predilection for humiliating pornographic imagery appears and disappears without any rhyme or reason, and though a tenuous connection may be made between his desire to see women collared and treated like animals, and the canine motif surrounding Morna's devolution, it is up to Mantel and not us to do something to strengthen the ties. She doesn't, which leaves uneasy questions. Is there some sort of sexual attraction from her father to Morna? Is he, in his own way, enabling his daughter's subjugation to the illness (a stand-in for her submission to him)? Could be, but Mantel doesn't provide us with enough to draw any proper conclusion.

The construction of the story – beginning each paragraph with the name of the month it takes place – is an excellent touch, and adds immensely to the mounting intensity of Morna's inevitable fall, and it is without question that Mantel has done her research concerning anorexia. Toward the end, Lola starts to realise that her sister isn't coming back from her illness, and it is a relief that someone in the family is finally taking the situation seriously. The mother may wail on the phone to doctors, but the hours Morna and Lola spend whispering together in the dark shows in both characters a true emotional connection.

Problems aside, The Heart Fails Without Warning is a strong story, and it's hard not to feel sympathy toward Morna. At least for the duration of the story, she doesn't exist as a person but an illness, and as readers we known from the first few paragraphs where this story must end. Its very predictability requires Mantel to rise to the occasion in other ways, and generally she does, for Morna's illness is chronicled with sympathy and tenderness. The story rises above its weaknesses, but one can't help wonder as to the strength of the piece if these problems were removed.

The Heart Fails Without Warning by Hilary Mantel is a short story from the Dalkey Archive Press' anthology, Best European Fiction 2011

See Also

Other titles under review from the Best European Fiction 2011 anthology include:
---United Kingdom: Welsh: Roberts, Wiliam Owen - The Professionals
---Turkish: Üldes, Ersan - Professional Behaviour
---Swiss: Stefan, Verena - Doe a Deer
---Spanish: Catalan: Ibarz, Mercé - Nela and the Virgins
---Spanish: Castilian: Vila-Matas, Enrique - Far From Here
---Slovenian: Jančar, Drago - The Prophecy
---Serbian: Arsenijević, Vladimir - One Minute: Dumbo's Death
---Russian: Gelasimov, Andre - The Evil Eye
---Romanian: Teodorovici, Lucian Dan - Goose Chase
---Portuguese: Tavares, Gonçalo M. - Six Tales
---Polish: Tokarczuk, Olga - The Ugliest Woman in the World
---Norwegian: Grytten, Frode - Hotel by a Railroad
---Netherlands: Uphoff, Manon - Desire
---Montenegrin: Spahić, Ognjen - Raymond is No Longer with Us – Carver is Dead
---Moldovan: Ciocan, Iulian - Auntie Frosea

Index of titles by The Dalkey Archive Press under review

Index of short stories under review

Reviews

David Single