Capsule review: the ghost of a varied celeste.
It's tempting to say that at the heart of Valerie Martin (winner of the Orange Prize for the short, powerful antebellum slave-owner's-wife/female slave novel Property, and author also of the longer, much less powerful Jekyll-and-Hyde reboot from the point of view of the maid, Mary Reilly) ... where was I? Oh yes: it's tempting to say (I say) that at the heart of Valerie Martin's new novel is the celebrated historical mystery of the Mary Celeste. But that's not quite right. The narrative does circle about that ship, so famously discovered floating near the Azores in 1872, unmanned and (to quote the infallible wikipedia) 'apparently abandoned -- one lifeboat was missing, along with its crew of eight and two passengers -- although the weather was fine and her crew were experienced and capable seamen.' But that's not really at the heart of this work. At its heart, really, is a sort of dream-image, or French-lieutenant's-woman-style visual rebus. A woman is haunted by the sea; she may have married a sea-captain, or have lost a loved-one to the waves. She may hear the voices of the dead, or only the waves and gulls and the occasional foghorn. Either way: she falls and hurts her ankle. And then the sea takes her, sinking her down in a weirdly erotic drowning. Martin builds her book around three such women, splitting the narrative between them in a manner slightly wrongfooting although not ankle-breakingly so.
The first section of the book 'A Disaster at Sea' predates the Mary Celeste by more than a decade. It starts 'the captain and his wife were asleep in each other's arms'. The wife here is Maria Gibbs, and she has accompanied her husband to sea for the first time aboard the Early Dawn. In bad weather another ship collides with them; Maria falls and breaks her ankle, then is washed overboard and drowns (her husband follows her).
The next section is 'The Green Book', the first-person narration of Sarah, cousin to the dead Maria. Sarah's sister Hannah sees Maria's ghost wandering, Wuthering Heights style 'outside her bedroom window, her hair and skirts dripping seawater. "She wants to come inside," Hannah told me' [14]. Their father, a preacher, is not sure what to do with his vision-gifted daughter; and Sarah is anxious she will fall into the clutches of the disreputable table-rapping séance-holding crowd on the East Coast. Sarah, meanwhile, enjoys a nicely-written courtship with a sea-captain called Benjamin Briggs; whom she marries. This is the same Benjamin Briggs who captained the Mary Celeste -- and the next section takes us to the reaction to the mysterious fate of that ship (Sarah and her small child Sophia had accompanied Benjamin on the voyage, and have vanished).
Now the novel introduces two new characters. One is Arthur Conan Doyle, on a voyage to Africa, and then later as the successful author of his fictionalised version of the (as he blithely mis-named the ship) 'Marie Celeste' ["J. Habakuk Jephson's Statement" Cornhill Magazine, 1884], which by fictionalising the mystery deepens and popularises it. The other is Phoebe Grant, an American journalist who investigates 'Spiritualist movement' frauds, and who reads the story. Some of the best writing in the novel comes as Grant meets and befriends a famous American clairvoyant, 'Violet Petra' (this is the pseudonym under which Hannah, from earlier in the novel, is working). Doyle's star rises, and Martin writes him as a slightly clunky, good-natured but unobservant fellow. He does not believe all the Spiritualist nonsense; but a séance with 'Violet Grant'/Hannah seems to put him in touch with his dead father. He persuades her to go to Europe. Alone on the S.S.Campania in 1894, Violet/Hannah suffers a series of well-written spooky experiences. She recalls how it was she ended up an old maid: the love of her life, Ned Bakersmith, chickened out of marriage when faced with the disapproval of his parents. Abandoned, she trips and hurts her ankle ('the heel of her left boot snagged in a fissure of stone and she came down on her hands, twisting her ankle cruelly', 226). With this memory sharp in her head, Biolet/Hannah sees the ghost of her drowned sister Sarah (from the Mary Celeste. Do try to keep up), follows her out onto the deck of the ship as it sails through nighttime fog -- and over the side, into the ocean. The book ends, as I stray into the more egregious of this review's spoilers, with an older Conan Doyle following Holmes-style clues to uncover the lost logbook of the Mary Celeste, which turns out to have been written by Sarah. Her husband drowns, and she is bereft, haunted by the ocean. She falls ('as the ship pitched, my feet went out from under me'). And then --
Now this is all very readable; and if the writing is sometimes rather, shall-we-say, fruity ('the full moon suspended like a porcelain disk drew a slender skein of white across the softly rustling blue-black meadow of the sea', 299) that's at least party justified by the fact that most of these segments are not only first-person narratives, but first-person narratives by highly-strung sensitive types with a passion for pre-Raphaelite poetry and Tennyson. The novel makes some play with ending mid-leap, as if it is a daring thing to do; but the fate of the Mary Celeste, or Martin's version of that fate, is easy enough to intuit (it's standard stuff: basically this) from the earlier sections. And that's the thing: dividing the novel between so many different kinds of narrative segment, and layering them in a slightly chopped-off manner, doesn't work as well as I'd like it to work. The problem, as with the more neatly layered but similarly recirculating Cloud Atlas (which may have been an inspiration for this novel) is that some of the segments are just better than others. The one where the aging Phoebe interviews washed-up Violet and realises that they have become friends almost without realising it is very powerful. The Conan Doyle ones were much less effective. The tone is a bit all over the place. Some of the nineteenth-century pastiche works, but the characters talk about sexual attraction and physical love in a very 21st-century manner. As I say: it's too varied, in the sense of intermittent, to pull off the proper celestial 'coming alive' thing. The mere ghost of a nearly Celeste.
One other note. To get the best of this novel I'd say you need to read it in conjunction with Doyle's famous story. Lucklily for you (a) it's a great story, and (b) it's available freely online. Martin plays some interesting intertextual games with this.
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