A gong sounds. The butler announces that dinner is served. The group proceeds to the dining room. But the woman remains standing at the window. She looks at Poussin’s painting through its reflection in the glass, its colours slightly dulled. As she studies the scene of the abducted Sabine women superimposed on the layered landscape outside — the woods emptied of a few more living beings after each hunt, the unsightly thickets that were burned, the peasants displaced by the construction of the house, the folly that was torn down after she herself, barely fifteen, was assaulted in its stony interior — as she contemplates all this, she understands, not for the first time, the true cost of all this beauty.
I think that the above passage perfectly captures the point of Christina Lai’s Landscapes: this imagined scenario — in which a woman sees the reflection of a celebrated painting that depicts the worst of human behaviour (Nicolas Poussin’s The Rape of the Sabine Women) overlaying the view of the idyllic landscape outside her manor house window — is dreamt up by the main character, Penelope, who, as an art historian and archivist living in a future England decimated by climate change, looks out the windows of the manor house she lives in (now used as a shelter for climate refugees) and wonders at the “true cost” of what she sees out there. Written as a series of Penelope’s diary entries as she and her partner prepare the dilapidated building for demolition — along with her archival notes on the last of the estate’s inventory, essays she has written on the depiction of male violence against women in art, and an intermittent third person omniscient narrative of her brother-in-law’s slow return to the family estate — this is more collage than straightforward novel; the plot is fairly thin. And as Penelope is the only character we really get to know — her partner and his brother are broadly painted as the good guy/the bad guy (as an expert on the paintings of J.M.W. Turner, Penelope identifies them from the start as the personifications of light and shadow, and I believe we are meant to see them more as types than people) — this really isn’t character driven. What Landscapes seems to intend is to give us a glimpse of a fairly grim future, and by overlaying it with the history of the depiction of violence against women in art (leading up to more recent responses by women artists), Lai is able to show the imbalanced power dynamics that have brought us to the brink; and that’s certainly worth exploring and archiving. This isn’t really an “enjoyable” read, but it is well crafted and gave me a lot to think about; that’s worth four stars any day.
It has been almost two years since it rained in this part of England. First came the floods, then came the droughts. Here at Mornington Hall, the one-thousand-acre parkland is parched, and the remaining leaves crumble between my fingers. Parts of the earth lie fractured, creating intricate webbing that spreads out like dark veins. I never thought I’d miss the cold, wet air on rainy days. We now count in millilitres, careful not to exceed the amount of water the government has allotted to the house. The small bottles Aidan and I pass between us are not only tools of survival, but also mementoes of a past that recedes further and further with each passing month.
The formerly great estate of Mornington Hall is crumbling: built with “sugar money” (ie, plantation slavery) and set in an artificially engineered idyllic landscape, the manor house has been unable to withstand earthquakes, high winds, and termite infestations; the man-made lake has dried up in the droughts; the non-native stands of trees have not survived the changing climate. It would seem that nature is fighting back against those who would presume power over it. Inside the manor’s remaining walls, Penelope works to archive the last of the estate’s possessions — most items of real value having been sold over the years to support their work as a nonprofit — and as she documents and packs the scrapbooks and postcards, she writes in her diary of her dread at seeing Julian once more: the brother she had been attracted to at first; the man who had once presumed to impose his power over her. Any tension in the plot comes from Penelope’s twin pressures: the clock ticking down on her time to complete the archive before she and Aidan must leave Mornington Hall, and the clock ticking down to her dreaded reunion with Julian. Meanwhile: Aidan is mostly absent (as an architect, he designs emergency refugee shelters) and Julian is a caricature of the filthy rich: buying out the entire first class carriage on a train so no one can presume to speak to him; literally brushing aside the poor and hungry so he can eat multi-course gourmet meals in several dome-covered city centres on his slow journey back to England.
As with the painting reflected in the window of the opening passage, this overlayering of images is a frequent motif: Penelope describes the uses of Claude glass and a stereoscope for her archive while Julian assesses the employment of holographic images to complete the facades of crumbling landmarks (like the Duomo in Florence) across Western Europe. And this overlayering effect is frequently tied with history and memory: the woman in the opening passage is forced to remember the assault she herself experienced in the past, Penelope literally saw a wash of red over everything in the aftermath of her own experience, and I believe that’s the ultimate point — the imbalance of power that leads to sexual assault is the same societal imbalance that once led to the depiction of rape as a popular artistic theme (were women clamouring for these scenes, or were they forced to concentrate on discussing technique in order to not look uncivilised?) and that’s the same societal power imbalance that has allowed for the rapacious few to despoil the Earth, unchallenged, for their personal gain; as we regard the changing landscapes outside our own windows, and overlay those sights with the history and memories we carry inside us, we have to wonder at the true cost of what we see.
When I was writing that long entry in February, I often thought of Louise Bourgeois, sculpting in her studio and transmuting emotions into physical form. Each sculpture was the chaos of memory made tangible. Art as a way of nullifying the past, of moving the self beyond pain. Once the work is done, it has served its purpose. Writing, too, is an exorcism. The past is negated through the act of transcribing words on the page, and the self re-emerges, alive in the here and now.
Writing, making art, bearing witness to reality through archiving ephemera: these seem to be the cure for the chaotic pull of memory; the appropriate response to power as we each decide what parts of our story we will memorialise, and which we will leave out. There’s so much more going on here than plot and setting and characters and Landscapes is a very worthwhile read: not least for the works of art it prompted me to look up and for what it all made me think about.
