Ben Tufnell

Compelling and completely satisfying novel. Not a straightforward narrative, or truly a gothic novel, if one is looking for a linear plot line, but a complexly detailed exploration of liminality and transformation.

The novel opens with a ferocious storm, a boy home alone while is mother is away tending a dying grandfather, and the discovery of a drowned man on a beach. Then the novel shifts to the musings on art, metamorphosis, translation and myth by the now adult narrator, before returning to the stormy setting from the narrator's youth. The old man disappears, or perhaps he becomes a tree. The grandfather dies, and this reader wonders abut the emotional and psychological overlaps of these two stories.

Next we lean that the entire gothic story is found in an old journal uncovered from the narrator's childhood remnants. More musings on art, on myth and the transformation of humans into plants and plants into humans; also on the transformation of memory, how the wilder, more imaginative and more mythical impressions of childhood become subsumed under a more placid exterior that allows us to function in the world.

My impression is that the author is musing on the common thread between art, literature and the psyche as well as the way we use stories to provide meaning to our lives. In fact, it feels as he is attempting to use words and ideas in the same way an artist uses brushstrokes to build depth and meaning in a painting. Taking something that appears scattered and building it methodically into something that harbors hidden depths. The alternating sections, the jumping around between magical realism and practical reality, art, movies, literature, human interaction -- all of this is a rather deft exploration of the knotty bits that make up understanding. Fascinating and engrossing, a novel worth returning to.… (mehr)