In Lettersgait by Sally Evans, every chapter begins with a sestina, so I thought I would write one in response. Except it’s not really a sestina, but it is a poem, of sorts. (quotes from Lettersgait are in italics)
… the river gave the garden more than any gardener could: drama, interest, and change’
There’s the river and the sea,
sources and carriers of movement, carriers of time.
If movement stopped, would time stop too?
History is lapped, like tides
against this multi-shored, ocean-encircled isle of ours.
There are vivid images of cliffs and smugglers’ coves
and a view out over the sea.
Ports wax and wane with ships.
History passes, the tide remains.
All the events, adventures, ocean-crossings,
ship-buildings and returning home -
land seen from afar, those chalk-white cliffs
that kick your heart, overlaid by other images,
of other lands, bare brown mountains,
with no trees, no vegetation, and above them
the flawless fabric of blue sky –
they have all sedimented, it would seem,
into our being, the lives of others, ancestors,
just needing, like an ancient pithos,
to be rubbed and cleaned, to be unsealed,
for all these images to be revealed.
Astonishing, to realise we hold the memories
of people we have never known perhaps,
within the cells of us. Rub, polish, listen –
and write down what we hear.
That’s what this book makes me think of –
the stories that our cells are made of.
And to think we thought we were just matter!
Skin, bone, nerve cells rushing with delight
to embrace each other, to relay such messages.
We are all of these as well.
Some are our own experiences, that we add to the history,
to the library of lived experience. Many of them are the stories
and the imagination our ancestors have given to us,
nestled in the column of our spine, and the curl
of fingers into palm.
Lettersgait spans generations, tells many stories. And it seems to me to tell the story of human consciousness, that constant river, parts of which are drawn out, shaped and moulded and turned into specific history. The stories, the memories, the imaginations - including some interpretations, guesswork, some conclusions, some quite wrong, about events told, handed down, not known though maybe hinted at - of the characters. What are the energies that flow through people, with their eddies of stories, yet continue on? – the tide remains.
You might even say that, despite our human conceit that we control our lives, we are carried by this tide, this ocean, that holds us all and links us all and without which we could do nothing. River movement, tidal movement, the flow of ocean currents.
Lettersgait begins with Nathaniel, one of the main characters, losing his memory, after an incident which has shocked him, though he can’t initially remember what it was. So we are confronted with this idea – without our memories who are we? Nathaniel finds a way out, retrieves his past and creates, in time, a positive future. His story intertwines with those of many other people and we move from one time to another, and to different geographical parts of this ocean-bordered island, sometimes in a magical realist craft.
You could say that it is brave to include sestinas, poems, in a prose novel because they cut across the narrative, they make the reader pause, think, concentrate. But I enjoyed them, I liked the shift of focus and consciousness, the ability of poetry to create a more expansive view. In a way they worked like a Greek chorus, giving an overview, or at least a different view, more aligned to tides, oceans, celestial Ages. And then, back into prose, we are back on the earth, in the everyday human affairs – driving, running a bookshop, a dress shop, dealing with teenage children, cooking for families and large groups of people, gardening, talking to friends.
There is great humour too especially in the post office scene where Nathaniel (a former teacher and now a homeless tramp) and Lachlan (an old eccentric novelist who lives alone in a large manor house) are faced with everyday bureaucracy, and how they deal with this.
Literary references are sprinkled through the text and I particularly like this one.
When Nathaniel turns up at his house looking like a tramp – which for a while he was – Lachlan calls him Estragon (from Waiting for Godot). His homehelp overhears this and relates it to the postmistress as Ester Gone. Oh, like Maud Gonne, the postmistress fires back, immediately.
I particularly like the river sequence, where Violet sees visions, and Lachlan’s experiences one stormy night, where he seems to see and hear the past, the ‘buccaneers’ in the smugglers’ caves, coming up the steps from the sea to the old priory. Lettersgait is an epic journey in time and consciousness, thought-provoking and fun, a real tour de force.
Lettersgait by Sally Evans available from Fiction Direct
(images are from my own selection of gardens, rivers and oceans in and around Scotland and Latvia.)
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