Weekly Reader: Losing Gemma by Katy Gardner; The Ever Changing Nature Between The Reader and The Book
By Julie Sara Porter
Bookworm Reviews
PopSugar Reading Challenge: A book featuring a protagonist in their 20's.
Spoilers (I can't stress this enough, BIG HUGE SPOILERS): I have a unique relationship with the novel, Losing Gemma by Katy Gardner. It was among the first books that I reviewed for the University of Missouri-St. Louis student newspaper, The Current and therefore one of the first books in which I reviewed for publication.
I still have the original review copy.
Because I read it so long ago at the age of 23-24, I was the same age as the deutragonists and felt like a contemporary. I was captivated by the adventures of Esther Waring and Gemma Harding, two college-age Englishwomen who long to flee from their lives in rural Stevenage and go backpacking in India. Like them, I was fascinated with the idea of international travel and often read enviously about students who worked abroad and participated in programs like Semester at Sea. I covered the concerts, lectures, and exhibits offered by UMSL's International Studies and longed to see these other countries for myself. Sure, I visited Italy and Greece in 1999 with Jefferson College's Educational Travel Group. Sure, I was an Air Force brat who lived in Germany and traveled cross country through the United States three times with my family, but I was thirsty for more.
That travel bug consumed me so much that when I first read Losing Gemma, I focused on the travel. I was captivated by how Gardner described every street, every forest, and every train station in India picturing the captivating setting in my head. I snorted with laughter as Esther and Gemma broke several basic traveler rules such as leaving their documents inside a locker and telling a total stranger about their travel plans instead of family members or the Embassy like all of the guidebooks and travel magazines tell you. I attributed that to the haste of travel and foolish naivety that Esther admits.
I understood the characters particularly the shy bookish Gemma being carried along by Esther, her more adventurous friend. I was Gemma, nervous and uncertain, but I wanted to be more like the bold active Esther. I wanted to be the girl who walked through Europe for a year, worked at various jobs to pay my way, and visited the places tourists never saw.
I was enchanted by the magical realism in which the duo and their eccentric new friend, Coral may have encounter a spiritual vision during their visit to Agun Mazir, a Muslim shrine. Then five years after her original trip to India, a more weathered sedate Esther, no longer the once brash intrepid traveler, returns and receives what could only be described as an experience akin to Enlightenment in learning the real purpose of her original journey. Looking for a spiritual identity and "comparison shopping" between faiths, this aspect of the book fascinated me as well.
Well that was almost 20 years ago. It is now 2020 and I am 42. I understand now that travel is not really what the book is about. Losing Gemma is still a good book, sort of. The aspects are still there: the travel, the spiritual journey, and interesting characters. Gemma and Esther are still there making the same mistakes and learning the same lessons. They didn't change.
What changed was me. I'm not the same college girl that I was when I reviewed the novel for the first time at The Current. I am no longer a contemporary. I am almost 20 years older than they are and now think of them like younger sisters or, dare I say it, daughters. I shake my head and roll my eyes in cynicism and irritation at the troubles that they endure, mostly that they bring on themselves because of their own thoughtless actions, reckless behavior, and egocentrisms. Their tour becomes less like a fulfilled goal and more like a journey of arrogance and assumption.
Admittedly, Esther realizes this herself. After all the opening paragraph explains, "This is the story of me and Gemma and how I lost her." Many times Esther calls herself out on her arrogance such as when Gemma wants to give money to a homeless girl and Esther warns her about that causing a decline in the country's economy citing an anthropology paper that she wrote in which she received an A. Five years later, when Esther returns to India, she sees homeless children and thinks of her youthful snobbery with shame.
She recalls the many locals who warn them not to go to Agun Mazir, which Esther slights as they go. Esther even pays no attention to her own common sense and instincts when after a fight, Esther leaves Gemma alone with Coral and then returns to find both girls gone and a body near the shrine.
Even the suggestion to go to Agun Mazir is one of recklessness. Instead of going to the usual touristy spots like the Taj Mahal or the beaches of Goa, Esther throws the travel book into the air and they will visit wherever the pages land on. Esther even admits, "I could have stopped it. I could have flipped a few pages and changed everything but in total ignorance. I let the book fly."
That is Esther's behavior throughout the book. She is youthful arrogance incarnate, the attitude one has in their early 20's fully grown but still immature. We read a few books, went to college, latched onto a cause and now we know everything about it. Come on, we've all been there. We knew everything and by the Gods, we expected the world to sit up and pay attention. Then, we got annoyed when it didn't.
There is nothing wrong with that passion and arrogance. It's there for a reason. It helps you understand the world and enables you to become an active participant in it.
There is also nothing wrong with backpacking travel. It helps open your eyes to another part of the world that you never would have seen.
Sometimes, those experiences can be channeled into activism or a career that inspires, leads, and learns about the ways to change the world. But that change must also come from within as well, understanding your role in the world and becoming more understanding of those around you.
That change never comes within Esther or rather it does, but too late. Instead of being a fully formed character, she is a symbol of that youthful energy: part of the world but not really understanding, accepting, or becoming involved in it. Instead she believes that visiting some out of the way local place, far from the tourist crowd for a few days, makes her a true citizen of the world. When all it does is just makes her another tourist.
Coral also becomes a symbol as well. She is a person who unlike Esther is more experienced about visiting India but she only accepts her superficial view of it. When we first meet her, she is running across the streets of Delhi, high, and we later learn that she stole Gemma's money belt. After befriending Esther and Gemma, Coral invites them to smoke marijuana and blathers on about "transbutation", "and letting your pranic energy" flow as someone who studies them without understanding what they mean. As they enter Agun Mazir, Coral wears fancy costumes and goes on about the spiritual energy within fire. She isn't interested in spirituality so much as she is interested in something new and different, something that shocks people. She is less like a budding guru and more like an excited kid playing dress up or a daredevil looking for the ultimate thrill.
Esther is right when she describes Coral as "getting off on Exotica" as is Gemma who at first is fascinated with Coral but then become irritated with "her elaborate costumes, frantic postures, tangled up bizarre thoughts, and foolish f#$@&d up fantasies about India." Coral becomes a stereotype and that's who she is supposed to be. If Esther is a symbol of the young tourist who studies a place or an ideal without really engaging with it, Coral is a symbol of the white tourist who is swept up into their own vision of what a place or experience is supposed to be like, perhaps seen through the lens of Hollywood films or books written by tourists. She really isn't interested in India because she is looking for Enlightenment or a sense of belonging. She is interested in India because it's cool and daring. She participates in rituals for the wrong reasons and she ends up paying the price for her assumption that she knows what she is doing.
Unlike the other two, Gemma is the most well rounded character. She is also a symbol of the soul who is sincerely looking for acceptance and belonging. However, there is a darkness in her journey as well as her final destination that cheapens that acceptance and makes one wonder how sincere she really is.
Esther often refers to Gemma in derogatory terms. She criticizes her friend's full figure, naivety, bookishness, and neediness. Esther empathizes with Gemma's sad childhood in which her father ran off with another woman and her depressed mother ignored her. Esther pities the young woman who was once the scholarly hope of their school but got stoned and failed her A Levels. Gemma was then rejected by universities so instead she stayed home and read all day while Esther got a Bachelor's in Anthropology from University of Sussex. Esther feels sorry for Gemma as she dates men out of her league including her latest, Steve, who is so far out of Gemma's league that Esther steals him. While Esther has grown to be annoyed by Gemma, in respect to their old friendship she remains her friend.
Once we enter Gemma's thoughts, we see that she's not as needy as she appears. She inwardly bad-mouths Esther and is full aware of Esther's romance with Steve. She laughs about how after months of hinting, she convinced Steve to get her a promise ring and manipulated Esther into inviting her to come to India. She is a sharper and stronger person than Esther gives her credit for and she is at first content to remain that way, carried along and inwardly snide but outwardly complacent.
When Gemma and Esther arrive in India, Gemma sees people like Zack, a guru whom she describes as "(her) angel." People who live without fear, she feels the sense of belonging that she always needed. Gemma's narration changes the focus from being a novel about a foolish and arrogant woman (Esther) who loses her best friend because of her foolishness and arrogance and instead becomes a novel about a lost and hopeless woman (Gemma) achieving maturity at the end of a spiritual journey. When Esther encounters Gemma five years later as the co-leader of a Buddhist ashram, stronger, braver, and better than she was, it should be a moment of triumph that she has achieved Enlightenment and is in a higher level spiritually. But is it a truly happy ending and is she really a better person?
First off there is Gemma's account of how she, Esther, and Coral parted ways. Her escape involves much deception and violence. She never feels remorse for any of it, considering it part of a higher plan. She also bears some responsibility for cutting ties off from friends and family without a word, considering those attachments as superficial. Third, she also hasn't changed much in her subtle manipulation. When she mentions that Zack runs the ashram, she can't resist adding that she lets him think he runs it.
Gemma is still an interesting character, but not a truly changed one. She is interested in what India did for her, and how it got her away from her family and moved her to becoming a leader in her own right. However, she hasn't truly let go of her personal attachments nor of her ego believing that the journey is all about her. She could come through her initial ego and become a better more enlightened leader. However, the darker possibility is that she sees the ashram followers as an extension of herself and that she has the makings of a cult with herself as the Goddess figure.
Losing Gemma is all about being in ones 20's and only half understanding the world and taking from it only what fits for you. It is about experimenting and finding one's path in life. It is about that arrogance of believing you know everything and assuming you are always right, and the shame when you learn that you are not. Above all it is about being in ones 30's and 40's and understanding that youth within oneself, laughing or crying about it, and accepting it as an inevitable part of growing into the person you were.
42 year old me accepts 23 year olds Gemma, Esther, and Julie. That being said, 42 year old me still wants to travel someday.
