A book I've been circling for years, even before I joined Goodreads: depending what I heard about it, sometimes it sounded enticing and light (a charming, funny, Alice-like fantasy with intellectual depth) sometimes depressing (about an old lady in an oppressive nursing home). I was finally induced to read it by this recent interview with Olga Tokarczuk, in which she says it influenced her newly-translated Drive your Plow over the Bones of the Dead.
Some editions of The Hearing Trumpet, including the Virago Modern Classic, include a 1991 introduction by Helen Byatt. This contains material about crones and witches in surrealism and feminism, madness, boarding schools, occultism including Gurdjieff, the Grail and Robert Graves' [book:The White Goddess|820465] (a book I'm glad I read when I was younger, before I knew people rarely bother with it these days, as it's referenced in a surprising number of things) and vaguely Margaret-Murrayish ideas of wild pre-Christian matriarchal religion, equating maleness with Christianity and authoritarian sky-gods generally. This did not make me look forward to The Hearing Trumpet itself - it made me glad the book was short - but it was interesting to have my attention drawn to the ideas about modernity and religion while in the middle of Sarah Moss' Ghost Wall, which includes the idea that modernity is better for women, and soon after reading a friend's review - of yet another book - which pointed out the contradictions between feminisms.) By the end of the book, I thought there were topics the introduction had unjustly neglected, but more of that later. If I have read the newer introduction in the Penguin edition, by Ali Smith, it would have been years ago in a bookshop and I can't remember anything about it - I'd like to read it (again?) now.
In the novel, I was surprised how good, and how instantly likeable, the narrative voice is. Marian, 92, absolutely sounds like an old lady. (And like the author, she is an English expat in Mexico.) In the early part of the novel, it reads like a really good children's book, with delightful lines like "people under seventy and over seven are very unreliable if they are not cats" on nearly every page. Her existence seems idyllic, and so one inevitably feels it is unjust that her callous, image-obsessed son and daughter-in-law decide to put her in a home. (Even if one is an age at which peers consider homes for aged parents.) Although the home turns out to be architecturally adorable (and worthy of a surrealist art exhibition) and to have intriguing fellow-residents, the management are a new-age cult who continually invalidate and refuse to listen to the people in their care. Carrington portrays them with sufficient lightness of touch that they are ridiculous caricatures at least as much as monsters. Rather than making a big deal out of the 'reality' or otherwise of what Marian says - as many contemporary authors would, creating an unreliable narrator who may have dementia, or in children's fiction, in which a child hero needs to persuade at least one adult that something is real - she is a reliable narrator of her own reality, a reality which makes up pretty much all the book and which reads as a slipstream fantastical narrative. (She is always clear other than one passage near the beginning, in a stream of consciousness mode like disjointed thoughts from the edge of sleep). Even if a reader were to bring a cold and clinical attitude that most of what happens is in Marian's imagination, it would surely make one think about the amazing worlds that a person may contain.
The humour tapers off in the second half (or perhaps becomes darker and more subtle) as the narrative approaches the story-within-a-story, an account of a covertly occult 18th-century Spanish saint and abbess. It reads, minor historical inaccuracies and all, like an early-20th century horror tale. I think it was at the end of the story of Abbess Rosalinda, when Marian remarks "I had become affectionately attached to the intrepid and energetic Abbess. The fact that the snooping priest... had done his best to portray her in a pernicious light, hardly distorted the purity of her original image. She must have been a most remarkable woman" that I first thought 'what a twentieth-century book'. Perhaps it's because of a comment I read somewhere online recently that only from a century's 20s does the character of a century start to emerge (there are counter-arguments, but in English history, the late 30s of the 16th and 19th centuries fit) and sufficient distance is established to characterise the earlier century as a whole. Approbation of the Abbess disregards her own crimes and her disregard of those committed by others. I've seen it said elsewhere, with disgust, that sexual abuse, especially of boys, by male clergy was such an open secret that it had become a running joke in 20th century British literature, and one that should no longer be funny. Perhaps that's an especially 2010s sentiment - it's far too early to tell. But in the context of fantasy literature, it feels like this is another way in which this isn't just a very 1960s-1970s book, but encompasses ideas that ran through more decades either side: the lineage from the Golden Dawn through Gardnerian Wicca to the New Age; from Kellogg's sanatorium to dodgy hippie cults; elderly people talk of the First World War and have peculiar deference to aristocracy in a world of plastic wallpaper and electric fires with glowing fake logs, and on one level it's about social liberalisation and increased human rights, and the throwing off of a stuffy old order, the big Western narrative of the whole second half. (It still seems remarkable that Carrington apparently wrote this in the early 60s - if only she'd published it then, she'd have been so ahead of her time, and I suspect the book would have been better known. It's full of stuff which feels like end-60s burnout: indictment of cults and their leaders, jumping off tall buildings and dying under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs; apocalyptic tabloid scare of the time, a new ice age, also fictionalised with flair by Anna Kavan, as well as the playful, psychedelic exuberance of a couple of years earlier, and the principles of Szasz and Laing.)
There's quite a lot of upper-middle-class Englishness here (though Leonora, is rather remarkably, nothing at all to do with Dora Carrington of the Bloomsburies) but I'd love to hear more, well, anything, about The Hearing Trumpet in the context of Latin American art & lit. (Byatt describes Carmella's repeated mentions of firearms as masculine, but I thought them more likely to relate to the prevalence of revolutions, coups and armed rebels in the region.) I haven't read enough Latin American myself to say exactly what's relevant, but it does feel like there's something connectable in The Hearing Trumpet to the magic realism and tricksiness of the Boom.
The line-drawn illustrations in this edition, by the author's son, are in a style quite different from the cover painting (hers) and are not my sort of thing, but may appeal to fans of David Shrigley and Allie Brosh.
I've rated it 4 stars rather than 5, unlike many GR friends, because I didn't find the joy in it that makes a 5-star read (due to the setting) but it is absolutely a wonderful little book that deserves to be more widely read.
(read and reviewed September 2018; the review on Goodreads.)
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