The Stars Are Not Yet Bells
Unreliable narrators are a tricky device. In The Stars Are Not Yet Bells, the protagonist, Elle Ranier, tells her story of moving from New York City in 1941 to a fictional island off the coast of Georgia called Lyra. She looks back on her life in snippets of clarity and lyric dreamscapes, parsing loyalty and love amidst a fading memory.
Elle falls in love with a broke con man, Gabriel, in 1940s New York. When Elle marries her father’s boss’s son, the wealthy Simon, she convinces Simon to take Gabriel with them to Lyra and give him a job at the off-shore mining operation, under the assumption that Gabriel is Elle’s cousin. Simon has his own secret, however: that he also takes male lovers. After Gabriel’s death in the water pursuing the mystical blue rocks of the mining operation, Elle tries to focus on the life in front of her: two children, and a marriage, just not to Gabriel.
I found it difficult to get into this book. The writing is fine, but too straightforward for the dreamy quality it tries to evoke in content. Like the mystical blue rocks Gabriel dies trying to obtain, I wanted there to be more to this book: more heft, more meaning. On the surface, this novel looks to be full of big questions, and the unreliable narrator promises unplanned secrets. But there is no mystery to be solved, no big change that we witness. It is, as the blue rocks end up being, mundane.
Others may find more poignancy in this tale than I, but in my humble opinion, the slow opening promises what the end cannot deliver.
