The Nature of Fragile Things

The character who Sophie and the reader meet as Martin Hocking also goes by the alias of James Bigelow when he is posing as Belinda’s husband and Percy Grover when he weds Annabeth Bigelow, the woman he murders for her fortune. Logan thinks that Martin’s real name is Clyde Merriman, a sadist who tortured animals as a child and prepared a noose for his heartbroken sister to kill herself with when he was 16. When Clyde’s family of origin threw him out, he embarked on his journey of fooling “unsuspecting people into trusting him,” as he collected the birth and death certificates that would enable him to create false identities (332).

Although Sophie thinks that the earthquake and ensuing fire decimated this man, in a final twist the Epilogue shows him being tried 20 years later as Clayton Sharpe. Thus, the mystery of why “he is still using names that do not belong to him, and why he lies, and why he likes to hurt people” ensues (361). Martin’s survival of a fall, an earthquake, and a fire, largely intact with a “disturbingly attractive grin,” emphasizes his sinister charm and unparalleled adaptability (362).

Even before his crimes of polygamy and murder are revealed, Meissner presents Martin Hocking as an attractive enigma. From the outset, Sophie experiences his tall physique, immaculate clothing, and wavy golden hair as that of “royalty, like a Greek god” (14). The reference to a mythological deity indicates how impressive Sophie and other women find Martin, while hinting at something unreal about him. The description also alludes to the long mythological history of doomed relationships between gods and mortals. Martin’s eyes, which “look like they peer into [Sophie’s] very soul,” are an external manifestation of his ability to read people and gauge their deepest desires (14).

Despite this advantage, he completely lacks empathy and uses his penetrative powers to abuse and manipulate people. This is evident in his neglect of Kat. He leaves her languishing in too-small clothes and threatens her into silence by pretending that her mother died and telling her that it was her fault. Although he seeks to live a version of the American Dream by starting up from nothing, his method of amassing his wealth through marriage causes him to take advantage of women, who, as second-class citizens in a patriarchal society, do not have the same ease of autonomy as he does.

While wealth ostensibly motivates Martin, as he calculatingly seeks his victims by reading the obituaries of rich men in the newspapers, he is always on the run and therefore unable to enjoy the fruits of his labor. Kat and Sophie are the chief beneficiaries of the affluent San Francisco lifestyle he sets up for them. Instead, he gains his chief pleasure from fooling people, as he teases Sophie by recycling the name of the woman he has since married, Belinda, and passing her off as his cousin. When he is found out, and all his Bluebeard-like prohibitions of opening his secret desk have been violated, Martin acts in a similar way to this violent fairytale archetype by seeking to kill the two women who challenge his supremacy. At the end of the novel, Kat’s insistence that her real father is a “stranger” incapable of love indicates that he is a cold-hearted psychopath and an evil force that must be obliterated for others to thrive (364). Still, his motivation for leaving the clan of Sophie’s women alone for 20 years when he could have pursued and threatened them remains a mystery.

Martin’s daughter Kat is five when the reader meets her. She is traumatized into silence by the belief that her mother Candace is dead, and that this is somehow her fault. Kat shares Martin’s “tawny eyes […] bright and knowing, as though there is great knowledge behind them” and his ability to understand situations and gauge others’ feelings (24). Shamed into silence and discouraged by Martin’s neglect, silent Kat unwittingly becomes his accomplice, as her nature enables him to go about his dodgy ways largely unquestioned.

However, unlike Martin, she is sensitive and seeks connection and belonging. Precociously maternal, she is from the outset a miniature mother to her porcelain doll, which she holds and lavishes with the love that Martin will not give her. The news that there will be a real baby in the form of Sarah brings Kat out of her shell, as she speaks a few words of acknowledgment. Later, she pushes Martin down the stairs when he threatens the new life Kat already cherishes. Thus, even at the age of six, Kat shares Sophie’s solemn understanding that it is sometimes necessary to destroy forces that threaten new life.

While patriarchal laws dictate that a child needs to belong to a particular set of parents, Kat finds that she is happiest when she is surrounded by all the women who aspire to mother her. Her dream setup of having both Candace and Sophie at Lorelei Inn reflects her wish to live in a loving tribe, rather than in a traditional family structure. This relates to the key theme of Matriarchy and Female Solidarity. Even at the end of the novel, when Sophie has remarried and Kat has set up her own nuclear family unit, Kat believes that family is rooted in love rather than blood relation, and that the love of other people atones for the harm Martin has caused her.

Logan enters the text as Sophie’s interrogator on November 6, 1906, the day that he interviews her about Martin’s disappearance. The officialness of his status as a federal detective introduces the aura of serious crime to what superficially seems like a domestic narrative and a disappearance owing to an earthquake. From the outset, his inquiries implicate Sophie, drawing attention to how she waited a whole six weeks to report Martin’s disappearance to the police and introducing the suspicion of her motive for doing so. His intervention reminds readers that Sophie is an unreliable first-person narrator who refuses to share key aspects of her past. Logan encourages readers to pick up clues about the truth of Sophie’s origins, even as they become immersed in the narrative of the events that have occurred since Sophie’s arrival in San Francisco. This is explored in the key theme of Life on the Run: What Sophie and Martin have in Common.

However, when Logan’s interview with Sophie catches up with the narrative in Chapter 29, he begins to wear a more human face, as she notices his age, “a little older than me, perhaps thirty”; his appearance “reminds me a little of my brother Mason with his dark hair and eyes” (328). The reference to Sophie’s brother is both reassuring and ominous, as it alludes to the fact that she will finally have to face the truth of her origins. Logan continues to challenge her to the end, demanding that she tell the truth about her name and why she left Ireland.

However, Logan has his own history with Martin and those who perpetrate crimes like his. Sophie can see from the vein pulsing in his neck and the “slight sheen misting over his eyes” that he has also had his life ruined by an evil-doer, who killed his wife and son (354). The extra information he provides about Martin’s sadistic nature indicates that Martin is beyond redemption. Martin has become an obsession for Logan, who will spend his career trying to track him down. To Sophie, the difference between her and Logan is that “his loss was not vindicated by the forces of nature, as twice mine were,” and therefore he is propelled to seek out evil men for the rest of his life (354). This proves to be the case when he is present with Kat at her father’s trial 20 years later. Logan’s constancy and generosity in allowing Sophie to walk free, despite the fact that she contributed to the deaths of two husbands, gives her hope that there are some good men who can help rebuild a better world after periods of destruction.

Belinda, a “petite woman with strawberry blond hair,” lived a happy life raised by her father at the Loralei Inn and alongside her best friend Elliot Chapman (92). However, like Sophie, Belinda became depressed after her father’s death after a fall and was prone to the charms of an unreliable man, James Bigelow (Martin Hocking). While Belinda loved James, he married her to have access to the gold mine on her family plot.

Meissner presents Belinda as a woman at the same life-stage Sophie was when she fell for Colm. Consequently, Martin intuited that she needed attentiveness and sexual passion to be won over. While both Sophie and Belinda think that Martin/James is handsome, Belinda, who is on the brink of her sexual awakening, finds that she feels “hungry” and “alive” around him (108).

While Belinda was initially carried away with the romance of the handsome man who turned up to her inn as James, by the time readers meet her she is eight months pregnant and tired of her husband’s frequent absences. Her frustration leads her to throw off her besottedness and show the initiative she acquired as the manager of an inn, as she turns up to Polk Street to demand her husband’s whereabouts. Belinda’s devastation on learning the truth about Martin’s two identities, shown in the symptoms of fainting and premature labor, indicate the strength of her feeling for him. As Belinda grows to love Sophie, Kat, and her new baby Sarah, she learns to appreciate that true love is not the fleeting charms of romance; it is something more enduring, as dictated by the demands of Matriarchy and Female Solidarity. Belinda matures as a character, as she makes her inn a home for the women Martin has displaced and begins to return the love of Elliot, the man who always loved her.

Candace Hocking is the beautiful, blond Los Angeles heiress who Martin met and courted at a riding school. Candace’s marriage to Martin was opposed by her father, who saw him for who he was: a fortune hunter seeking her grandmother’s inheritance. Candace, however, saw the man Martin wanted her to see. She thought she needed someone “quiet and polite” who “didn’t strut about like a peacock,” and Martin understated his obvious physical charms to win her over (236). Candace thus saw Martin as a refreshing change from the other men who courted her, and his ability to make her feel exceptional caused her to make an exception for him in transgressing the taboo of premarital sex.

The adventure soon turned sour for Candace when she gave birth to two stillborn sons and fell into a depression from which she never fully emerged. Her story is important, as it causes Sophie to divulge the one of her own loss; Sophie sacrifices the secrecy she holds dear “in compassion […] in solidarity,” even though the two women are rivals for mothering Kat (238). Candace remained inconsolable, even after Kat’s birth, and was never able to be a proper mother to her daughter. She found that she “didn’t care” about anything and was unable to give her daughter the love she so needed (239). Her poor mental health led her to leave Kat and Martin and seek an adventure on Venice Midway, where she participated in a drug-fueled orgy and contracted tuberculosis. Candace contracting tuberculosis and returning to the care of her father symbolizes that, unlike Sophie, she has never been able to manage independence and adulthood responsibly. Thus, while she is Kat’s biological mother and will always have a special place in her life, Candace is less equipped for the job than Sophie. This is shown in Kat’s continued reticence around Candace. Only in the last months of her life, under Sophie’s influence, does Candace prioritize her daughter and learn to mother her. The matriarchal stronghold at the Loralei Inn enables her to ground herself and grow in love. Her love of the peach tree in Belinda’s garden symbolizes her new attitude, and this reverence passes on to Kat, who continues to foster a relationship with the tree after her mother’s death.

Elliot is a patient young man who loves Belinda even after her adventure with Martin. “Tall and slender, with curly reddish brown hair,” Elliot “is not handsome, but he has a kind face and gentle features” (206). His pleasant but unprepossessing appearance symbolizes how Belinda took him for granted, while she was dazzled by the more novel charms of James Bigelow. Belinda always saw Elliot as a friend and lacked sexual attraction to him, as “he had never made my heart pound or my gut ache with desire” (107).

While Elliot mistrusts James from the start, telling Belinda “there was something not quite right about him,” he does not gloat when he is proved right. On the contrary, he does all he can to get Belinda and Sophie back on their feet (107). Elliot is a redemptive male figure, as he becomes the women’s confidant and their collaborator in dealing with Martin’s disappearance. He plays an instrumental role in helping Belinda run the inn and escape her marriage to James, and he is rewarded when she returns his affections.

A staunch ally of Saoirse/Sophie throughout her life, Mam introduced her to the joyous type of mother-daughter relationship Saoirse wants to recreate with Kat.

Mam is the only one who knows the truth about how Colm died. She orchestrated the scheme to use deceased Sophie Whalen’s identity to offer Saoirse a new start. Mam accepted that her daughter should marry Colm McGough to fend off cold and hunger after Da’s death; however, she turns against the idea after Saoirse ends up in the hospital, and she urges her to leave him. Her repentance at allowing Saoirse to marry Colm is shown in her wish of a triumphant future for her daughter in America—one that will make up for everything that she has endured. In helping Saoirse escape, Mam endangers her own safety and standing in the village, and her actions reveal independence of mind and a love of her child over status.

Sophie’s father is a gentle man who adored learning and would have loved to become a university professor, but he settled on being a roofer when he could not afford schooling. Still, he was happy raising his four children and continued his education by becoming an autodidact, borrowing books from rich people and collecting “fancy words” in his word book (22). Although he had three sons, Saoirse/Sophie was his favorite child because of her love of learning. He aims to protect her, encouraging her to continue school and dissuading her from having sex before marriage because “once you’ve given a man your body […] he doesn’t need anything else from you” (342). Da’s book, which Sophie keeps after his death, symbolizes her eternal tie to him and her similar commitment to learning. She replicates her experiences with him as she uses the book to homeschool Kat.

Amid all her bad experiences with Colm and Martin, Da’s memory serves as a reminder to Sophie that there are good men in the world, and she meets upon such kindness when she finally marries a vineyard owner named Sam.

Colm McGough is a tall, handsome fisherman’s son and the friend of Sophie’s brother Mason. While Sophie finds him “congenial” and eager to laugh, there are early warning signs that he is dangerous and has double standards for men and women (341). For example, he is obsessed with the idea that Sophie should be pure, even though he does his best to persuade her to have premarital sex with him. When he proposes to her as a result of her refusal, it is as though he is testing her virtue. This sinister preoccupation occurs after they are married, and he beats her for returning another man’s greeting in a manner he finds suggestive. Colm establishes a reign of terror by getting angry “if I took too long making supper or if I had it ready before he was wanting to eat” (344). Here, Meissner’s reference to opposites indicates the unpredictable violence of Colm’s mood swings.

While Colm’s drowning makes Sophie think she is “free of him,” the forces of patriarchy in the village gather to protect his rights—and by extension those of the patriarchy itself—and force Sophie into the position of outlaw and runaway (348). Colm is a cruder foreshadowing of the more subtle psychopath Martin; however, they share the mutual wish to thrive at the expense of others and to indulge in cruelty for its own sake.