Some people believe in a connected world in which every one thing is cognate with every other thing, the bell tolling for you, for me. In this kind of world, orders are revealed within our own order, our beginnings woven with other beginnings, endings with endings. In this way, life is seen to rhyme with itself. For a long time this was my own religion.Martin Sloane, simply put, is a perfect book; why did I resist reading it for so long? There's a mystery central to its plot, and coupled with the poet Michael Redhill's lyricism and insight, I was urgently and gently drawn along right up to an ending that left me in tears – not tears of sadness, but the tears that come from being touched deeply; from recognising, aha, that's right, that's how it is to live a life.
In 1984, Jolene Iolas was a university student in upstate New York, and after seeing (and being denied the right to purchase) a piece of art by the little-known Martin Sloane, she struck up a correspondence with the Irish-Canadian artist. Once they met, the two became May-December lovers; she acting as his muse and anchor for eight years, until the night he disappeared. Gotta go. While this – and its aftermath – is essentially the plot, Martin Sloane is about so much more: about art and memory and love and absence.
Firstly, I loved the art that Martin created: primarily dioramas made from found objects in small display cases; this was modern art that I could understand (unlike that described in The Blazing World or The Woman Upstairs), and as presented here, I would love to see a gallery show of these works. (As Martin and his art were based on the real-life Joseph Cornell, that's approximately possible.) And maybe it's just my literal mind at work, but it felt like genius to me that Martin's childhood was eventually revealed, spotlighting what events would have inspired each of his most famous pieces. In fact, so many of his childhood experiences involved capturing something within something else that his life's work felt inevitable: A fetus in a jar full of formaldehyde; a woodcock in a box trap; or this conversation with a little girl in the TB ward of a hospital after another boy died –
He was inside his mum once, she said, like she was reciting a nursery rhyme, and lived in a house. Everything is inside something else, even the air. But now that boy's in a box and he's in the ground. A worm will eat his eyes, and a bird will eat the worm, and then he'll be able to see his mum from the sky.That's how we recapture what we've lost, isn't it? By finding a way to put what we've loved into a box, even if it's just within ourselves. When Molly discovers that Martin's father had never seen one of his boxes, she states, “Well, at least he's in them. It's not a bad place for a person's soul to end up.” On its face, I found that to be a profound statement, but when later events reveal the irony of that exchange, it was elevated to genius.
Jolene, too, holds her memories in diorama-like imagery; ideas that could be preserved in shadow boxes if she had the skill to make them: A willow's roots search for underground streams “like someone reaching their hand down through your roof at night”; she remembers her time with Martin “as if I were walking by a window where someone I used to know was sitting, looking almost like their old self”; her childhood memories are a disconnected jumble of gardening gloves, dusty shag carpet, a banana-seated bicycle, and jackdaws “creaking in the air over gravestones”. She also laments what is lost to history, like the crumbling walls of a once awe-inspiring castle or the ancient gravestones she finds with their names eroded by wind and rain, “Their stories, with their scandals, their love affairs, their unexpected kindnesses, all of it gone”. Additional layers of meaning are added as Jolene retraces Martin's childhood in Ireland and discovers those things that he had remembered wrong, and those that he had invented.
If it's true as Martin says at one point that people get together in order to have a place outside of themselves to store their personal narratives, Martin Sloane perfectly demonstrates this. Characters are haunted by their childhoods, possessed by relationships, and in Molly's case, tortured by a (likely) misunderstanding. With this book, Redhill has created art on so many different levels, and in the end, has captured profound and abiding truths. A perfect novel; this is why I read.
