Anna Metcalfe discusses her Han Kang-inspired debut novel

"It’s a really extraordinary, inscrutable book, I must have read it 15 times now…” says Anna Metcalfe of Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, translated from Korean by Deborah Smith, which directly inspired her arresting and perfectly formed début novel Chrysalis. In Kang’s Man Booker International-winning novel, the central protagonist Yeong-hye undergoes a mysterious transformation which is relayed to the reader by three other characters— her husband, brother-in-law and sister—but not Yeong-hye herself.

Metcalfe, who teaches creative writing at the University of Birmingham, set her students a timed writing exercise in the classroom: to invent their own “recalcitrant or hard to pin down” protagonist and then describe that character through three different points of view in 20 minutes. She sat down to do the same exercise alongside her students, and Chrysalis was born. “I’ve really borrowed my whole structure from Han Kang, hopefully not in an exercise of plagiarism but more in literary adoration,” she says cheerfully, when we meet for tea near London Bridge.

Chrysalis tells of one unnamed woman’s self-transformation into an online phenomenon from the perspective of three other people: Elliot, who watches her obsessively in the gym; her mother Bella, who frets about the person her anxious child has grown into; and Susie, a former colleague and friend.

Elliot is the first narrator. “At the point that we meet Elliot, he is meeting her,” says Metcalfe. “So, as a reader, and for me as a writer, I got to look at her from the outside before I knew anything about her, as Elliot does.”

The gym setting is particularly apt, not only because the woman is intent on changing her body but also because, as Metcalfe observes: “[Gyms] are really strange places where people spend much longer than usual watching themselves, because there are mirrors everywhere, but also anxiously watching other people… it’s an interesting social environment.”

Over the course of the novel it becomes clear that the woman is preparing for the ‘the next phase’ of her life where she will leave those she knew behind

Character in flux

In the gym, the main character is physically transforming herself but not with the aim of losing weight or toning
up. Instead of working to take up less space in the world, she wants to take up more space; become bigger, stronger, more solid. The second and third narrators enable the reader to start to piece together the woman’s past. Metcalfe decided not to name her protagonist because “she’s rejected so many of her previous identities that a name would seem to pin her to a time that she didn’t belong to any more… it’s part of the erasure of her previous existence.”

Her artist mother Bella describes her relationship to the sometimes fearful and volatile child she sought to soothe, and her former colleague Susie bears witness to the protagonist’s toxic relationship with a man she met at work before she quits her job (and boyfriend) and embarks on her mysterious metamorphosis. But to what end?

Over the course of the novel it becomes clear that the woman is preparing for “the next phase” of her life where she will leave those who knew her behind, in favour of something else. The abandoned narrators watch the content that she creates and posts online: she is a wellness influencer of a sort and her strange videos are devoted to strength and stillness. “Variously all three narrators describe her as being made out of stone or carved from something, so it’s as if she becomes made of some natural material rather than a person. Something that’s more durable or more permanent than a person.”

Everything I write comes out very stripped back and then I fill it in. Maybe because I started writing short stories, everything is always very short and there’s not a lot of depth or texture, then the editing process often makes things longer rather than shorter

As her followers grow, she seems to offer those who watch her online a chance to leave their troubled, messy lives and relationships behind and pursue a more solitary and more perfect existence, as she has. But is this a path to wellness or narcissism?

“In trying to understand her through their perspectives, you slowly come to understand the narrators and their experiences. That form hopefully allows a reader to consider how the things that they look at—the things that they experience, the people that they see or encounter through their phones online—are forces that act upon them. To some extent, the things that you look at, or allow your attention to be consumed by, become constructive [or] destructive forces on yourself.”

Chrysalis unfolds in beautifully clear, sparse prose. “Everything I write comes out very stripped back and then I fill it in. Maybe because I started writing short stories, everything is always very short and there’s not a lot of depth or texture,” she says. “Then the editing process often makes things longer rather than shorter. I end up putting in detail rather than taking it out.”

Metcalfe was shortlisted for the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award in 2014 for “Number Three”, a story that later appeared in her first collection of short stories, Blind Water Pass, published by John Murray in 2016.

“Sometimes when you give readers loads of details, I feel like you give them a to-do list of things to imagine, whereas if you give them two details, their minds will fill in the rest. And they will feel more invested because of that, because they have co-created it with you.”

Living online and offline

As with Lauren Oyler’s Fake Accounts and Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This, Metcalfe’s début novel intelligently probes our interactions with others both online and offline. The author, who was born in 1987 on a British Army base in Germany to teacher parents, had her first social media accounts as a university student. Now, she says she uses social media “sparsely and anxiously”.

“It feels to me as though these platforms demand a certain kind of consistency, that you have to decide what kind of person you are on the internet and then ‘commit’ to being that person on the internet. Which totally doesn’t reflect my experience of being a person in the world!”