The Charm Buyers - Worldbuilding Through Theme

Lillian Howan's The Charm Buyers is a novel about truth and lies.  This dichotomy exists within the novel’s other dichotomies: beauty and ugliness, love and hate, secrets and honesty, money and poverty, fantasy and reality.  It is especially pertinent to the entire concept of charms, especially as they are presented in the novel: Do they actually work?  Or are they as reliable and honest as anyone and anything else in the world?

Part of the reason as to why these themes are so consistent throughout the novel is because Howan imbues them into the world she builds in this story.  Everything about Tahiti is based in these dichotomies.  The characters often talk about how many beautiful women there are in Tahiti, especially the women in Marc Antoine Chen’s family.  Harris even says, “Beauty is everything.  The reputation of the whole fucking island was built on beauty.  The sacred illusion” (13).  And yet, Marc is attracted to Marie-Laure, who is plain and yet—or possibly, because of this—is arguably the most honest character in the novel.

We see this, too, in the novel’s comparison between Tahiti and Huahine.  While Tahiti is the place where Marc grew rich through illegal means, all the while lying about what he did for a living and where he lived, Huahine is the place where Marc is forced to live through the realities of poverty.  At one point while he is living on Huahine, Marc says, “Aurore had talked about the past when there was no electricity and the night was starlight and moonlight, the simple life—pure shit.  There was nothing romantic about having nothing” (240).  Romanticism is also part of the novel’s themes, such romanticizing the beauty of Tahiti to appeal to tourists, another kind of lying.

I thought that the organization of the book also lent a lot to its worldbuilding.  The first section, Islands, deals primarily with the nature of an island: it is small, and most everyone knows each other.  As Marc says at the beginning of Chapter 2, “You could drive around the island of Tahiti in two ours, in a day, in two days… At the other extreme, you could visit every relative living around the island” (12).  This conveys a feeling of claustrophobia, especially because in this first section, we stay in the islands the entire time, as Marc does not leave for France until the end of the section.

The first section is also when Marc begins his affair with Marie-Laure and when he meets Aurore, the two foils of his romantic relationships.  Marie-Laure is his cousin, a representation of the familial and claustrophobic nature of the island—at one point, Marc humorously remarks while at a party, “The women were exquisitely beautiful, but I was related to almost all of them” (25)—whereas Aurore is someone that Marc has never met before.  This dichotomy begins in Islands because although Marie-Laure and Aurore are practically opposites, they both represent important aspects of the island.  Marie-Laure is familiar and familial, whereas Aurore is beautiful yet deceptive.  Marie-Laure represents the experience of Tahiti for its natives, whereas Aurore represents the experience of Tahiti for foreigners and tourists.  This shows the duality of the island experience.

The second section, Ghosts, begins with Marc’s father’s engagement celebration and his wedding.  Marc is expected to give a small speech at the engagement celebration, but he becomes sick at the thought of doing it and ducks out at the last second, already beginning to estrange himself from his family—as though he himself is becoming a ghost.  The way he describes returning to Tahiti from France makes him sound like a ghost: “I had come back to the place I had longed for to find it empty and different in a way that I couldn’t explain and that I couldn’t escape.  I had returned and had nowhere to go” (74). 

After his father’s wedding, Marc does finally encounter some ghosts.  He goes to get water from the spring for A-tai, his great-grandmother, and there are women there who say that they were there at the spring long before Marc, and when Marc gets his water, they and their pickup trick disappear.  Marc describes Tahiti as being “crowded with ghosts,” and this is true on many levels (85).  Tahiti is crowded with ancestors, family members long dead but still remembered and honored by their descendants.  It is also crowded with both foreigners like Aurore and natives who have left and returned like Marc.  In a way, they are both ghosts: unmoored from their homes and unable to find peace in any particular place, always wandering.

The Charm is, of course, the section where Marie-Laure falls ill, and Marc makes a trade with the mysterious shaman Mr. Lu: Marc’s hair for a cure for Marie-Laure.  Mr. Lu promises, though, that along with his hair, Marc will lose “everything” as Mr. Lu puts it (195).  This is the second fantastical thing to happen in the novel, after the ghosts; Mr. Lu takes a strand of Marc’s hair and burns it, then touches it to the healing bead, causing it to renew itself.  This display of magic seems like a fact, as presented in the book—though we are looking through Marc’s eyes, and it’s possible that his desperation to save Marie-Laure’s life caused him to believe Mr. Lu’s magical powers.

The section on charms also calls back to this quote near the beginning of the novel: “It was the only way the charm worked: as long as it was kept secret, something known only to you and no one else” (21).  Charms are intrinsically tied in with secrecy, and secrecy is what continually worms its way into—and sometimes damages—Marc’s life.  Marc’s profession, love affairs, and emotions are all secret.  He loses all of these after making the deal with Mr. Lu.

However, doubt about whether or not the magic worked continues into Chessboard, as Marc worries that although Marie-Laure woke up, she is not entirely healed.  He also begins to lose his money, but he is again not sure if this is a result of the magic or if it was bound to happen anyway.  The way of healing Marie-Laure itself was suspect: Mr. Lu instructed Marc to dissolve the bead into water and have Marie-Laure drink it, but instead Marc placed it into the sleeping Marie-Laure’s palm and let it dissolve.  Howan does a masterful job of making us doubt reality just as much as Marc does.

The other significance of Chessboard is that it deals with the falling out of Marc’s wealth, wealth that he acquired based on being an adept salesman, just like his father.  Becoming a good salesman requires dishonesty, which is already a large part of Marc’s life.  Because his father is a salesman, it is somewhat of a familial tradition—Marc even comments near the beginning of the novel that everyone on the island runs some kind of business.  When Marc loses his wealth, he loses his salesman capabilities, and therefore further estranges himself from his family and from Tahiti.

As described earlier, Huahine is where we learn the dichotomy between Huahine and Tahiti: romanticism and truth, money and poverty, etc.  In the final section, Night, Marc seems to accept the nature of his situation: how he has become a ghost trapped in his layers of secrecy and lies.  His future with Marie-Laure is uncertain, and at the end, he walks into the darkness.

By presenting us with these themes, especially those specific to each section of the novel, Howan creates a vivid setting.  I have never been to Tahiti, and yet through The Charm Buyers, I see it clearly, lies and all.