Everything the Light Touches
Pariat’s novel is layered through the voices of diverse narrators: the present-day Shai; Evelyn, an Edwardian with a passion for botany that is wholly scientific (and, as she is reminded, not quite ladylike); Goethe, travelling to Rome and beyond; and an interlude of Linnaeus amongst the Laplanders.
Made redundant, Shai boards a flight from Delhi, leaving behind an intermittent lover she cannot commit to. Evelyn embarks on a voyage to India, everyone assuming she is on a husband hunt. Goethe has quit Weimar without a word to Charlotte von Stein. Pariat’s prose is as lush as the terrain of north-east India, her book’s principal setting. All three protagonists are restless; as Shai says, ‘home, for me, has always been a place not to live in but to leave.’ The Eden Shai discovers, following a long trek to find an old nurse she refuses to accept is dying, is under threat from uranium mining, just as the India of Evelyn’s day was threatened by the colonialists. There is a pleasing symmetry in the lives of the two young women; both the modern Indian and the English Edwardian are privileged, yet in some senses Evelyn has the greater struggle. Both appear to reject the potential for love, yet both find it in ways that will enrich rather than compromise their respective journeys.
Pariat’s research is impressive. There are some stumbles: Goethe passes through Lugano on his way from Venice to Rome, a view from the bell-tower of St Mark’s takes in the beaches of the Lido, and a room number at Cambridge refers to a hall of residence built decades later. But a description of a message not written but woven is one of many delights, and ‘wood wide web’ [sic] refers to something essential and enduring in a way a technological innovation cannot emulate.
