Impossible Causes by Julie Mayhew

Published by Bloomsbury on November 19, 2019

Impossible Causes is a Me Too novel, telling a story that demonstrates the collective power of women who finally reveal their stories of abuse. It is also a novel about the corruption of power, a story of men who seek or hold power so that they can abuse it. The framework of the story, involving a remote British island whose religious inhabitants fear witchcraft, is so farfetched that it robs the story of its drama, and the story is so contrived that the title might more accurately have been Impossible Plot. There is much to like about Impossible Causes but the novel’s flaws nearly outweigh its merits.

Leah Cedars is a virgin when Impossible Causes begins. She has a teaching post on the forgotten British island of Lark, an island populated by a religious community that does not welcome the outside world. People not born on the island are known by the derisive term coycrock. Women with black hair, like Leah, are revered as bearers of good luck, but Leah —known to all as “Miss Cedars” after taking a teaching position — feels she has no luck at all. Her brother has fled the island as have many others. Some have chosen to run from evil rather than confront it.

In addition to Leah, the islanders who are most significant to the story are Viola Kendrick and three girls who are approaching adulthood, known collectively as the Eldest Girls of St. Rita, the name their school shares with the patron saint of impossible causes (as well as abused wives and heartbroken women). We learn in the first pages that Viola has found a body, but it is only in the last pages that we learn the body’s identity. The novel jumps around in time to build a backstory of events in 2017 and 2018 that lead to Viola’s discovery.

Viola is a coycrock who craves the acceptance of the Eldest Girls. She is also a drama queen and an attention-seeking liar with a history of making false accusations. She would have been a more interesting character if her lies had not been so obvious.

Other significant characters are Saul Cooper and Ben Hailey. Saul is the island’s Customs Officer, not quite twice Leah’s age but nevertheless smitten with Leah, an attraction that Viola encourages and that Leah does not shun. Saul’s competition is Ben, a young teacher (the first male in that role, apart from the headmaster) who is newly arrived from the mainland. Leah feels destined to fall in love with Ben thanks to a reading of Tarot cards.

Ben also befriends the Eldest Girls, who seem to be monkeying around with witchcraft or summoning the dead while prancing about in the nude at one of those a mystical circles of stones that seem to be everywhere in British fiction. Ben is suspected of playing a role in the slaying of a goat and in the Eldest Girl’s suspected use of the goat’s heart as an effigy to cause a death. Whether Ben has monkeyed around with the girls and/or the goat, whether he is a good or bad guy, is one of the novel’s suspense-building questions.

All of this is background to a plot that leads up to the Me Too moment. While the story attempts to illustrate how women (and men) might remain silent when confronted with sexual harassment and other forms of sexual abuse, the odd setting robs the story of its power. The women on Lark apparently remain silent because they are on Lark and thus unaware that women are no longer putting up with subjugation by men. The fact that women in the real world remain silent is a more compelling story than the one told in Impossible Causes. The behavior of women on a male-dominated religious community doesn’t tell the reader much about the behavior of women in a less artificial and more modern setting.

When the Me Too moment finally arrives, it feels too contrived to be meaningful. The novel’s other key dramatic moment, involving the body Viola discovers, also comes across as a contrivance, an unlikely event involving mistaken identity that exists solely to create drama without regard to its improbability.

While the events of the novel take place in the very recent past, the story seems like an attempt to engraft modern themes (including Me Too) onto a time when people still believed in witchcraft. I suppose an isolated religious community (its leaders refuse to allow the construction of a cellphone tower) might be reality challenged, but I wasn’t convinced

I admired the novel’s character development (apart from the Elder Girls, who have no obvious motivation to monkey about with witchcraft) and I enjoyed Julie Mayhew’s prose. Some of her provocative passages (“Women are the true masters of deception, have always had to be. They don’t get to decide which of their behaviours are virtues.”) might spark interesting book club discussions. The story’s suggestion that religious intolerance and power are destructive forces, while not an original thought, gives the novel some weight. Balancing the positives against the negatives, I can only say that readers who are drawn to the message or the prose without concern for the story’s plausibility will probably like the book more than I did.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS