Even if you have never heard of Mr. Fox, the design of the book cover should snare you into wanting to read this book, but the desire goes even further within the pages to keep you reading. To further interest the reader, the type set changes often, moving from an old fashioned font of an antique typewriter, which designates the specific letters written between the two main characters, or to italics, or to basic modern day typeset. The author obviously uses the font changes to reflect the shifts in mood or perception of the two main characters.
Concerning the two main characters, one is a writer, hence the title: Mr. Fox, and the other, well, the other, is not real, but the reader comes to know her “as real”. Her name is Mary Fox, but she is of no relation to Mr. Fox. So, who is she? Well, to be precise, she is Mr. Fox’s muse, but not in your ordinary way, because, you see, Mary appears in the writer Mr. Fox’s short stories which are in essence what make up this book.This may sound confusing, and at the beginning of the book, things are rather confusing, even though the reader already knows the premise of the book. But, as the book flows along, one learns the power of the imagination which can summon or coax or even fear the muse. A third character, Daphne Fox, who is Mr. Fox’s wife, appears from time to time in the book. She is super jealous of Mary, even though Mr. Fox tells her that Mary is “not real”. Yet, Mary seems very real to Daphne who often loses her sanity due to her husband writer’s attention to Mary.
Once Mr. Fox tries to explain to his wife Daphne about Mary, “Daphne. There is no girl on the side….She’s in my head…I know this sounds unlikely, but you’ve got to believe me. If you don’t, I’ve got nothing else to tell you. ….Not a lot to tell. Her name’s Mary. You’d like her, I think. She’s kind of direct. No-nonsense. I made her up during the war. She started off as nothing but a stern British accent saying things like, ‘Chin up, Fox,’ and ‘Where’s your pluck?’ Just a precaution for the times I came dangerously close to feeling sorry for myself. Don’t look like that D., I don’t need a doctor. Anyhow–you see now, don’t you, that she couldn’t possibly call the house? That’s just people getting wrong numbers, or one of your brothers phoning you up to ask for money and then losing his nerve. ”
The author of this clever little novel, Helen Oyeyemi, also wrote The Icarus Girl, The Opposite House, and White Is for Witching, which won a 2010 Somerset Maugham Award. -Nan
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