The Harpy – Megan Hunter (2020) 194 pages

I really enjoyed Megan Hunter’s The End We Start From when I read it for Novella a Day in May back in 2019. I have a bias towards novels written by poets, as I always assume they will be precise, with inventive imagery. This was certainly my experience with The Harpy.

Lucy lives with her husband Jake in a rented house with their two sons Paddy and Ted. She has a job to pay the bills, giving up her PhD to write technical information in layman’s language. She isn’t especially resentful of this and her main focus running the house and raising their boys.

“That afternoon he was being kind to his little brother, his gentleness a relief like a blessing. Ted so keen at every moment to stay in his good light, the almost mystical clearness of it, like sunshine at the bottom of a swimming pool.”

Then she finds out but her husband has been having an affair with his older married colleague. She remembers the woman, Vanessa, from a party.

“A raised eyebrow, plucked to a wisp, the tail of a tiny animal. I notice that I felt sick; I notice this as you would notice a book fallen from a shelf: impartially at a distance.”

Lucy’s anger at Jakes betrayal is felt on a deeply visceral level.

“Something became untethered inside me, as I had often feared it would, one organ seeming to break free from the rest, left to float, uprooted, around my body.”

Her fury is such that the two of them make an unorthodox arrangement: Lucy will be able to hurt Jake three times, without any warning in advance.

“There were no kisses, but there was something else, something that seemed better: a promise, a plan. A way to make things right.”

The affair and the plan for retribution cause Lucy to question everything. Her anger and her need to punish seem to surprise her, but at the same time it feels like a return to something essential, including her childhood obsession with the mythical harpy.

“I had become one of those women. The ones I’d read about, who have slipped away from the world, who exist on their own plane of scorn.”

The Harpy is a powerful exploration of women’s roles, choices and conditioning in contemporary society. It demonstrates how close domestic violence can be, how fragile family can be, and how easily the identities of those within can shatter.