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In the right-hand corner of author Amanda Leduc’s Zoom background, there is a fairly large potted plant – a monstera or fiddle-leaf fig, perhaps, although the resolution isn’t quite good enough for precise identification. In almost every other context, this would be the most banal of details. In the aftermath of reading Leduc’s new novel, however, it’s downright sinister.
That’s because The Centaur’s Wife is an apocalyptic tale of what happens when the Earth has decided it’s had enough of the tyranny of humanity, and the empire plantae strikes back in a way that will have many readers questioning the loyalty of their indoor plants – and thinking twice about how casually they’ve taken for granted the goodwill of the natural world in general.
But I’ve said too much already. The Centaur’s Wife, Leduc’s fourth book and second novel, is one of those genre-defying reads whose plotting is so clever – and action so immediate – that you’re into spoiler territory with almost any level of detail you disclose. It’s a burden Leduc, video-calling from her home in Hamilton, Ont., readily acknowledges.
“It’s been such a journey promoting this book,” she says with a laugh, “figuring what to say about it without ruining it.”
Safe(-ish) territory is to say that it begins with fire raining from the sky, destroying the hospital where Heather, one of the protagonists, has just given birth to twins. In the aftermath, she and the other survivors must attempt to live amidst the carnage of what appears to be an entire planet laid to ruin – and something distinctly strange happening with the vines that cover their city at an exponential rate while their own attempts at horticulture are stunted. Oh, and there are also centaurs living on the mountain above the city, flourishing despite the humans’ insistence all those stories are just old superstitions parents used to stop their children from wandering too far.
I had an inkling that this would be more of a Grimm-style fairy tale than a Disney-style one, but I don’t think I was prepared for quite how dark this book got. Did you know that it would be when you started writing it?
This book grew out of a short story, also called The Centaur’s Wife, that I wrote in 2014. That story was dark, so I knew that it was dealing with some heavy things. As for that part [Leduc refers to a terrifying twist midway through the book], I did not know that it was going to happen until I reached there, and I was like, “Oh, great – this is what’s going on. People are going to hate me.” But, looking back from the vantage point of having written it, and also having experienced my own difficult grief right after I finished it, it’s interesting how many of the themes in the book speak to the fact that trauma hits you out of nowhere. The book is about the process of learning to live again after grief, and the family you find in the wake of that and the coping mechanisms you have to have.
It’s interesting to read this book after living through a period where it sometimes felt like civilization as we knew it was about to fall around our ears.
The thing that I think makes the book relevant, even more so than the question of apocalypse, is that it is about dealing with things you don’t understand. The time we’re living in has really brought into sharp relief that, for all of our advancements, there is so much about the world that is so magical and unexplainable. We’re a tiny little rock moving around a gigantic star, which is itself dwarfed by other stars. There’s a point where you just have to be unstitched as a human being and lie down in the face of how messy it all is.
Why, of all the mythological creatures you could invent, did you decide to make centaurs such a central part of your story?
The germ of the short story was that I had a crush on somebody, and for a variety of reasons it could not come to pass. I was thinking about what it meant to desire, specifically things that you can’t have. What does that do to you as a human being? And because my mind works in way that it does, I was like, “Obviously this is like a human being falling in love with a centaur.” I wanted to create a mythology around centaurs through that sense of the forbidden being more enticing. And then as I started going deeper into the novel, maybe two years into writing it, I noticed how well centaurs worked as a metaphor for disability – both in terms of them being looked upon as monsters when they were initially born, and then the sense of how they exist in two spaces and nowhere at the same time. Half human, half animal – how do they create a life for themselves? Those ideas of isolation and desire bled into the grief of not knowing where you belong, which led so easily into being a narrative about disability. It was a wild ride writing this novel!
Did you ever get stuck on that ride?
If not for my editor Anne Collins, this book would never have seen the light of day. She was so patient with me, and really pushed the novel to be more than it needed to be. Between 2016 and 2019, I rewrote the novel six times, from beginning to end. It was hard – and there were moments, around the fourth or fifth draft, that even Anne, bless her, said, “I’m not sure as an editor what we need to do to fix this. I need to sit with it for a while.” Then I wrote Disfigured, my non-fiction book, from January to July of 2019, and I needed to write that first to really understand what The Centaur’s Wife ultimately needed to be about. I needed to figure some things out for myself as a disabled writer, and as a disabled person [Leduc has cerebral palsy], to understand what I was writing towards. After that, the final pieces slotted into place.
This book is hard to categorize. How do you feel about the “fantasy” label?
It doesn’t sit comfortably for me – just because to me that means high fantasy, and I don’t think I’m writing in the realm of Tolkien or C.S. Lewis or even Guy Gavriel Kay. For political reasons, I don’t like saying “magical realism,” either, because that’s clearly a genre that belongs to Latin America. I think “fabulism” is a term I enjoy more – that sense of things that can be real and not real at the same time.
The novel’s notion of the natural world turning on humans felt deeply unnerving. It really challenges that idea of Earth as a place that nurtures and sustains us.
Maybe this is from the perspective of someone who is disabled – walking in the forest is difficult for me in ways that it’s not for other people, because I always worry about tripping, for example – but it doesn’t seem like a leap of imagination for me to see the world as very much indifferent to us. It will continue on without us, and it’s not going to grieve over much if we’re not here. In the novel, that’s just kicked up a notch, and nature is actively hostile to us.
This is the first time Penguin Random House Canada has released all accessible formats of a book at the same time it was published in conventional formats. Did you push for that?
I did. In my work at the Festival for Literary Diversity, we work with the Centre for Equitable Literary Access (CELA) to ensure all the books are accessible for the festival. When I was writing Disfigured, I approached them to make sure that it would be accessible, not even thinking about the fact that it hadn’t actually happened simultaneously before in Canada. It’s such a huge inequity – we don’t think about the fact that 8 to 10 per cent of the population of Canada cannot access books at the same time as the rest of us. It’s a sense of segregation we don’t think about in mainstream publishing. When I knew I had this other book coming out, I connected the people at Penguin Random House and CELA right away. I just put everyone in the same virtual room, and then they did all the work of bringing all the accessible versions of the text into play. It’s something I really encourage other authors to advocate for.
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