"Brother Matthew would have prescribed comfrey," she observed.
"And you are amused to find me doing the same?"
"Strangely enough, I think it is consoling. I have a great love of comfrey. And I loved Brother Matthew."
The Abbott felt at that moment that he was the true inheritor, not only of the defunct Brother Matthew's role on the island, but of all the arts and failings of Apollo.
John Fuller's Booker-shortlisted Flying To Nowhere (1983) is the sort of odd, charming little novel - or perhaps more accurately novella, since it's 105 pages long and quite large of print - that it almost seems a shame to say too much about it. It centres on a remote Welsh island, home to a community of monks, a bunch of women farmers, and a sacred well that attracts pilgrims on account of its supposed healing properties. When the healing miracles mysteriously dry up - to the extent that pilgrims increasingly seem not to be returning from the island at all, let alone going home cured - an ecclesiastical agent from the mainland named Vane is sent to investigate. He arrives "standing with one foot on the prow, like a clerk who supposes he is required to be a hero", and that's about the last time anything makes much sense.
Fuller is a poet, I gather, and that comes through in his novel's vivid imagery and gnomic dialogue; in many ways, Flying to Nowhere is less a story than a series of striking tableaux with captions. When the horse accompanying Vane on his boat panics during the landing, and ends up fatally injured on the treacherous coast, the episode is described through the almost inhumanly detached point-of-view of a young, rather pretentious and over-serious novice:
The hooves struggled to keep the body upright, but one leg was already broken from the jump and as the horse heaved, sank and scrambled among the slippery rocks other bones failed him. For a moment it seemed as if the glistening torso might try to move by itself in a series of wriggles and lunges, dragging with it the bunched and useless withers and fetlocks. One rear leg was flattened at an unusual angle from the knee; the other seemed caught between two rocks.
The passage seems set on dismembering the horse before it is even dead; while "horse" as a whole creature gets three verbs attached to it in quick-fire succession, most of the struggles and the suffering here are anatomised as the provinces of individual body parts (all carefully specified): hooves, torso, legs, bones, withers, fetlocks. The detachment of "unusual angle" and "seemed" is so lacking in apparent empathy that it borders on callous.
This is not a young man unaware of the physical. A few pages earlier, we are told of the novices' struggles with their monastic clothing ("The garments of meditation are not designed for the pace of prologue; they walked swiftly, though without urgency. At each step their garments were caught between their legs, tugging and chafing their calves"), and of our novice in particular reflecting on what he sees around him from within "the stifling privacy of his cowl". How stifling the enforced privacy of the monastery proves to be is one of the things the book explores; our novice is not unaware of the physical, but he is terrified of it, and utterly determined to ignore it at all costs.
Ranged against the self-denying, idealistic novices are the women of the island, who are practical and earthy to a - rather cliched, it must be said - fault. When we first meet them, they are engaged in hard physical labour in the fields the novices are walking through; their sweat is lovingly described. Later, one young woman is described as (in the semi-seclusion of her bed in a communal women's dormitory),
holding the flowers of her breasts and filling them in her mind like filling cupped hands with the heaviness of spring water, trickling cool through the fingers.
The imagery is arresting; I like the water's unexpected "heaviness", though not so much the flower-boobs, not least because how exactly do you "fill" a flower in a way that makes any enlightening metaphorical sense when applied to breasts? But it does feed in a wider, rather trying dichotomy of Earth-Mother-women set in contrast to airy-intellectual-men. The women, we're told, enjoy "cheerful shared activity" on account of "the female response to the seasons and to what fittingly belonged to them. It was an absolute virtue of the sex, tested and proved in the full round of life", because women are so natural! and earthy! and in naturally in touch with naturey earthy things while the men think Really Deep Thoughts! As I've noted here before, pedestalling half of humanity isn't much of an improvement over pillorying them, since the end effect is still a dehumanising denial of individuality, and while it might be argued that all this is an extension of the novel's themes about life, body, and spirit - and that it therefore is a deliberate expression of the male characters' rather aetiolated emotional development - the narrative tends to reinforce the view rather than challenge it.
But this is one area where the novel's brevity, and its opacity, work to its advantage; I was absorbed enough over the short page-count to keep the eye-rolling to a minimum, and be puzzled at what exactly Fuller is getting at. A couple of female characters have some wonderfully elliptical things to say, as in this dormitory conversation:
"Are you crumbling away too, Gweno?"
"No, no. It's leaving me pure and new and now I've died and got wings and I'm flying away. Can't you see?"
Her fingers moved in the moonlight, and their shadows moved in the rafters.
"Yes," came several voices. "We can see you flying away. Where are you flying to?"
"I'm flying to nowhere. I'm just becoming myself."
This exchange seems to suggest a combination of bodily and extra-bodily experience, something echoed elsewhere in one character's distinctly un-monastic musing that sex can be transcendant ("Remember that spending with women is a struggle from roots, an attempt to fly"), and in the central debate between Vane and the Abbot about miracles and the well. To call it a 'debate' is to overstate the case somewhat; the two men fence warily at intervals, and mostly manage to talk past rather than to each other. This is about as direct as it gets:
"I cannot arrange cures. Cures are not for sale."
"Are you saying that there are no cures?" asked Vane.
"Perhaps there have been cures, but I do not know in every case what has caused them."
"Dry and energetic" Vane wants straight answers and obedience, and the well back online; the distracted, doubting Abbot (unconvinced, as seen just above, by the well's miraculous properties) is busy secretly dissecting corpses to see if he can find "the private chamber of the spirit", and imagining the books on whose knowledge he has based so much of his identity dissolving back into their constitutent parts:
Could leather be cured of its curing? [...] He would lose first those books bound in vellum, for the bindings would turn back to stomachs and digest the contents. Or the shelves would grow into a hedge and keep out the hand that reached for knowledge.
More earthiness. Amid an increasingly (g)lowering atmosphere, as the investigation seems to hint more and more at foul play, Vane finds himself starting at shadows and wondering who he can trust. Having demanded a meal of meat, his doubts soon make him rue what he asked for:
a plate of meat produced in sly triumph [...] It was dark, sweet meat, three slices of it in a wooden dish, and Vane had wolfed it down as if he had not eaten for a fortnight. Now it lay uneasily on his stomach, like an animal twitching in a nightmare.
Fun, pretty, and full of dark hints. I liked.
~~Nic