Signs for Lost Children by Sarah Moss
Granta, 2015
Trade paperback, 357pp
*My own purchased copy.
[Warning: It's impossible to write about this book without spoiling some major plot points from the first two in the trilogy at the outset. If you haven't read those, would like to and care about being spoiled, then I recommend you get to them post-haste and leave anything past the second paragraph of this post well alone.]
I was listening to the most recent episode of The Readers podcast this morning while out walking with Juno. It wasn't the usual banter and chat; instead it was a recording of the Wellcome Book Prize blogger's brunch from last weekend, featuring four of the shortlisted authors and hosted by Simon from Savidge Reads. I think the shortlist is rich and intriguing - I'm hoping to read all the books this year - and the episode is well worth a listen, if only for Alex Pheby describing his perfect day writing with no trousers on. One shortlisted author who couldn't make the brunch was Sarah Moss, and her absence there reminded me of her absence here and of the fact that I haven't yet written about Signs for Lost Children, the third and final book in her Moberley trilogy.
Disclaimer: I loved this book. Almost from the first page I was interrupting Esther to a) read passages and b) tell her just how much I loved it. Moss has been among my favourite contemporary writers for the last few years, up there with the other esteemed Sarahs (Hall and Waters), and Signs is a powerful and poised end to the work she started with Night Waking and Bodies of Light. I'm almost 100% sure it will be on my best of 2016 list. This post is not so much so much a review as a flood of uncritical praise.
It begins almost exactly where Bodies of Light ended. It is 1879 and Alethea Moberley has just graduated with a medical degree at the top of her class. One of the first cohort of women to qualify in England, she has overcome enormous social and personal challenges to claim the epithet Dr. Now she faces another struggle: how is a woman to find employment in a world almost entirely hostile to female doctors? Her friend Annie has taken a job in a maternity hospital - a path of least resistance - but Ally is determined to work in psychiatry, a field of medicine where women comprise a disproportionate number of patients. Her letters of inquiry to asylums find no purchase. She has also recently married - a fact that makes her even more exotic; a married lady doctor! - and settled with her husband Tom Cavendish, a lighthouse engineer, in a little whitewashed cottage near Falmouth. Eventually she secures an unpaid volunteer position at the Truro Asylum, a poor reward for her long years of study but a start.
Then, just as life is beginning to settle into a happy rhythm, all is disturbed. Tom is commissioned to build lighthouses in Japan, an opportunity he can't miss, and sets sail for the better part of a year leaving Ally alone in an unfamiliar place. Left to herself, familiar demons fill the vacuum: the strict deprecating voice of her mother, the playful spectre of her dead sister, the disrespect and disdain of her professional peers. As Tom's absence lengthens Ally's self-control is sorely tested, her desire to hurt herself in order to make up for pain of others becomes overwhelming. Everywhere she looks, everywhere she goes, she is confronted with the powerful presence of her parents and her unhappy childhood. She looks through drawing room windows and sees her father's wallpaper designs on other people's walls; she hears her mother's admonishment in every hungry glance or dirty back street. She worries incessantly about how her own comfort, her own choice to light a fire in the winter or catch an omnibus in the rain, is an affront to the poverty of others. She falls back into the cycle of deprivation and despair that characterised her teenage years. She is thoroughly exhausted by it, but unable to escape: "Oh be quiet, she thinks. She bores herself, sometimes, with these spirals of guilt and obligation, with the waste of time and effort."
Meanwhile, in Japan, Tom is surrounded by stark and unlikely beauty. Travelling with a Japanese colleague Makoto, he is captivated by the apparent simplicity of traditional life, of the houses, the food, the rhythms of the day. Although he has always thought of himself as a wholly practical and unsentimental sort of man he is utterly seduced by an aesthetic of nature and poetry so different from his English upbringing. He finds the colonies of ex-pat diplomats and businessmen with their imported luxuries and tragic attempts to replicate English roast dinners utterly ridiculous. As Ally loses sight of herself back in Falmouth, he falls in love with a completely different way of living and begins to wonder whether his marriage, his English life, is a huge mistake.
The hallmark of Moss' writing is its sensuality, and a focus on the minutiae of experience. Like Bodies of Light, Signs is an observant novel, full of sight, smell, touch, of the sensation of being a body in context. Take this, for example, from the first page; Tom at his work desk while Ally is out buying fish for their supper:
The white cottage feels different in Ally's absence. Like a factory with the machines lying idle, like a ship becalmed. The papers on his desk breathe as the breeze off the river passes over them and he moves his fingers in the sun to see his shadow-hand thicken and elongate on the handwritten page... Shadows lengthen on the lawn as the cloud that has chilled the morning for the last few minutes passes across the sun and out over the water towards St Mawes. He holds up his hand in light strong enough to glow through his fingertips, to pass through the edges of himself.
Everything in the world of the novel is imbued with a spirit of its own, so that the simple acts of buying fish, taking a walk, lighting a fire are worthy of attention. It means that it is possible to fill both ordinary work-a-day activities and dramatic moments with the same radiant significance. Which is not to say that the book wears its meaning too heavily; the loveliness of the writing is punctuated with irony and humour:
...although she was late there were still great coffin-sized caskets of dead fish lying in the sun. Hundreds, she thought, maybe thousands, and even at the top a few tails flicking and silver faces mouthing outrage into the hot air. Some of the fish are still alive, she wanted to say to the men heaving wet nets around the stones, there is a medical emergency here.
Both beauty and ugliness are taken very seriously. An English collector has paid Tom to procure him a selection of Japanese art and textiles while he is away - a lucrative sideline - and Moss takes immense care describing the textures, colours and shapes of these objects. The reader is seduced just as Tom is seduced. At the same time the terrible cruelty and conditions that Ally witnesses at the asylum are given similar attention. Look, the book says, look at it all, the loveliness and the awfulness of the world deserve equal measure.
Ally has been taught to look longest and hardest at the awfulness, and to deny herself any loveliness while others suffer. Her mother's particular brand of self-abnegation, her hostility to comfort of any kind, is an extreme perversion of kindness. It has left Ally with an almost limitless capacity for self-denial, and has thoroughly repressed her id, "left her unable to say I am hungry or I am cold, left her without the first utterances of a child." The more suffering she sees, the more she believes that she deserves to suffer. It has left her on the knife edge of sanity and madness. She is conscious of how and why she thinks the ways she does and yet unable to stop herself from revisiting the same dire thoughts again and again. When she cuts or burns herself she recognises a symptom of illness. It is little wonder that she feels a sense of fellowship with her patients at the asylum, and that she is fascinated by the causes of their madness. She wonders, radically, if it is not the women she sees who are mad at all, but the environments in which they have grown-up, worked and lived. Who wouldn't go mad from a life of drudgery, violence, relentless motherhood, unrelieved boredom? It is the world that needs treating, she thinks, and then the women could get well. If Elizabeth Moberley hadn't been her mother; if Elizabeth's own mother hadn't been her mother, then maybe she wouldn't have been so completely estranged from love and pleasure.
Signs for Lost Children goes to some dark places, but it isn't a dark book. It is about the possibility of redemption. Unlike her male colleagues Ally isn't just interested in studying mental illness, or in controlling its symptoms: "It is not the taxonomy of madness that intrigues her but the possibility of individual salvation." She wants to make her patients better, and beyond that she wants to contribute to making a world in which they would never have become ill in the first place. This belief in the possibility of recovery, in a capacity to heal, is necessary for her own sake; the novel asks repeatedly, can Ally to live a full and well life after everything that has happened to her? While she treats her patients, Moss treats her. Although Signs is ostensibly about Ally and Tom equally - they get almost equal page time - it's inevitable, given the focus of the previous book, that the narrative cleaves closest to Ally. One of the strengths of Bodies of Light was that she emerged from a storyline about women's rights to education and self-determination not as a representative of Victorian repression but as herself. While other people were constantly trying to put her in the category of pioneer or diagnose her as a social menace, she was determinedly specific. Her story, her history, isn't a parable; although Moss has written a deeply political book it is the personal that dominates and stays with you.
At last I wanted to say that this is a big hearted story, a really kind book. On the one hand it's kind to the reader because right away in the opening prologue it reassures us that Ally is going to get a happy ending; and it's kind to it's characters because it always treats them with thoughtful compassion. Not sympathy as such, because some of them don't deserve that, but the compassion that is due to any creature in nature. And I should probably stop writing there, before this post turns into one garbled torrent of strangulated and undigested admiration. I'll finish with a passage from the book that has stayed with me for weeks, and that I think sums up the ambition and the enterprise of the Moberley books perfectly.
The craftsmen see the world differently, see the shapes of flowers and feathers and blades of grass built up from the tiniest elements - flickers - of light and colour. Such a mind must look at a bowl of tea, and see not only each brushstroke on the bowl's glaze but the fall of light on each rising particle of steam. Not only each brick or lighthouse but the speckles of grit in the clay, almost the currents of pressure and gravity coursing through each grain of cement. How could one endure a world seen in such detail, how could a mind hold the flight path of each mote of dust? He steps nearer to marvel at the stitching, at the eyes and fingers of the makers, the shading finer and more subtle than that of any bird, the light in the silk more mineral than animal. He had not thought that art could exceed its own subject. He wants to tell Ally, to hear her healer's voice reply that there is no point in any other kind.
~~Victoria~~