Seesaw

Carmel Doohan

CB Editions

‘Spooky action at a distance’ is the oft-cited colloquial term that Albert Einstein gave to his concept of entanglement: a phenomenon in physics where particles that once were connected continue to affect each other when separated. Siobhan, the protagonist of Carmel Doohan’s sticky, discomforting novel Seesaw, cites the theory in relation to herself and her twin Sinead, whose lives and bodies drift gradually further apart, but are bound together with a supernatural—and eventually maddening—sense of violence. 

When we meet her, Siobhan has recently moved to Govanhill with her boyfriend Tom, their relationship seemingly on course to end. Siobhan retains one significant friendship from her time at art college but is largely lonesome, spending her time doing deep-dives on stories of twins, mimicry and doppelgängers. Although rarely in touch with her, she is preoccupied with Sinead and their savage connection; alluding to a central incident of shared madness and a hospitalisation that continues to plague her life and affect her relationships. 

The title alludes to a Christmas gift from Sinead to Siobhan: a wooden seesaw with two figures sitting astride, one of which Siobhan hacks off with a kitchen knife. Must one twin be destroyed so the other can rise up and thrive? Through Siobhan’s work at a shelter for refugees, and later at the ‘jungle’ in Calais, Doohan also poses her central zero-sum question to humanity at large, with a rare deftness and sly humour.

Doohan’s segmented prose smash-cuts between tenses and timelines, drawing connections between Siobhan’s past, present, and psychological preoccupations. The form of the novel takes on the fast-paced nature of its references, like it’s stayed up an hour too late—YouTube videos, Wikipedia entries, Google street view, ‘two clicks and all the information, with pictures, is mine.’ The sickening undertaste of the prose is palpable, but so is its miraculous logic. Wired and humming on a different frequency, Siobhan is able to make peculiar and frightening connections, all driven by the silent —and perhaps internal—influence of her twin. She is attracted to fleeting moments of animalistic nature, when fear and instinct take over.

The enigmatic razing of self that Siobhan is led towards feels inevitable, written in her DNA from the first time her sister kicked her in the womb. The end of Seesaw recalls the climax of Susanna Moore’s In The Cut—an influence it shares with many novels of harsh contemporary womanhood—but Doohan’s isn’t a typical example of this zeitgeisty genre. Its violence isn’t a nihilistic end in itself, but a multifaceted echo.

—Claire Biddles