I came To Douglas Bruton’s novel on the back of two rave reviews from Susan and Karen, readers whose opinions I trust implicitly. But rave reviews can be dangerous. I’ve known them to destroy a reading experience by creating the kind of expectations that few novels can fulfill. I already knew that the book comprised of three stories braided together, a chapter of each one before the rotation begins again. So I began to read the first story and it was fun in a light and delicious sort of way, but I thought… is this novel all it’s cracked up to be? I moved onto the next, and began to realize I was in the presence of a strange but powerful magic. By the time I started the third story, a mere 22 pages in, I was gripped, transported to that extraordinary utopia of fiction where life is more vivid and meaningful than ordinary reality. And at this point I let my head fall back against the sofa and I laughed in sheer delight. This is the thing about reading: discovering a new author who is going to be special to you just never gets old.
This is a historical novel, but an unusual one, based on true events which Bruton alters as he chooses to produce his fictions (and explains how he’s done so in an afterword). These are all first person narratives, for the most part colloquial and confessional. The first and most complex story – in that it’s told by a series of different narrators across a timeline of over 126 years – is that of the Wexford whale. We follow it from its floundering death off the coast of Ireland to its final resting place in the Natural History Museum. Along the way it will spend four decades boxed up in storerooms, an exhibit that on paper seems too costly and difficult to assemble, but which will become the treasured project of several men. When it finally takes up three-dimensional form, it weighs as much as a London bus, and yet is suspended from the ceiling as if swimming in the ocean. The whale’s vastness has the capacity to inspire, and its elusive song enchants all those who come close to it.
Then there’s Margaret, the maid of all work in the Dickenson household in Amherst, who obsessively takes the emotional temperature of her young mistress, Emily. Margaret is aware that Emily is in love with the woman destined to marry her brother, and she fears for her, whilst also finding herself caught up in the feverish excitement of romance. Eventually Margaret will understand that the love story she needs to find is her own, and that Emily’s greatest hopes are not in fact fixed on Susan Huntington, but on seeing her work in published form.
And then we have Ada Alice Pullen, a plucky and ambitious young woman determined to feed her siblings, who becomes the muse of Frederick Leighton. He loves Ada but touches her only through his art, and her love for him will remain always unrequited. However, her ambition to conquer the world is realised through Leighton’s friend, George Frederic Watts, who will use her as his model for the famous painting, Hope.
These three stories will all ultimately focus on the creation of a work of art – the displayed skeleton of a whale, a poem, a painting – and braiding them together creates unity and coherence despite how different these stories are from one another. Hope is the great overriding factor, uniting the artworks and their conditions of production, and it’s elaborated here with honesty and authenticity. Hope emerges from this book as a powerful offshoot of love – be it love for another person, or passion for a creative act or simply the love for humanity that informs all of our greatest achievements. It’s not wishful thinking. It’s a form of agency.
Douglas Bruton has the ability to write with lucid simplicity and yet produce beauty, depth and emotional affect. The atmosphere he creates is one of intense delicacy as he strings his chapters together, each a glowing bead of consciousness on a chain of fate. His prose does not weigh heavy on the mind, but has a gossamer quality, the whole book a web of storytelling that is light, elastic, and more powerful than it seems. We are led deep into the character’s emotional lives, while at the same time we trip lightly over the surface of events.
This is a book of deep feeling yet consistently a happy book, a hopeful book, even in its griefs, and I began to wonder: how on earth is he achieving this? Just as melancholy novels create alienated protagonists passing through places that ought to be populated but are not, like empty cafes, streets and railway stations, Bruton shows his characters in situations of plenitude and proximity. Take this moment in which Margaret’s attentive vigilance develops into something more, and yet still something loving and light:
‘I had taken to composing Miss Emily’s letters for myself, imagining what I might find tucked into the folds of paper if, like before, she had pinned it unsealed into the pocket of her dress, what she might have written or what I might write for her if she had to ask. It was a fancy of mine, nothing more.’
His characters are filled up to the brim with the things they love, be it the whale as an object of obsession or the artwork that consumes the life of its creator. This is the power of human consciousness in its most tender form to dissolve barriers, to transform, to enliven, as Leighton explains to his muse, Ada Pullen in his description of the painting he intends to create:
‘There is a lady sleeping in the woods and such a beauty she is that it can only be you […] into the picture wanders a youth, uncouth and loutish, and he gazes on the beauty that lies sleeping and he is – well, he is quite affected by the beauty of this woman, it fills him up and in an instant he is changed and made soft, and fine and good. It is a hopeful painting.’
And as his characters make genuine and meaningful connection, we watch them ascend to a higher plane of existence. Here’s an example, in the chapter written from the perspective of a new trustee of the Museum Board, who had heard of the Wexford Whale from a newspaper cutting his father had pinned up in his shed. When the government finally approves the plan for a Hall of Whales, and releases the necessary funds, this man visits his father.
‘I asked him then if he had ever seen a whale … He nodded then, which is not to say that he had seen any such thing for he nodded at everything that was said to him, such was the advance of his dementia. But he sang to me then, and he’d never done that before – not in words but in a deep humming song that came from somewhere inside him, rising up from somewhere deep, and his whole body trembled and there were tears on his cheek. Maybe he was singing whale songs.’
This is the world that Bruton creates for his readers, and it’s a beautiful and joyful place to be. I’m very curious now to read all his books, as I think the others are quite different, and I’m excited to see what else he can do.
