A beguiling 19th-century botanist

~ The Signature of All Things, by Elizabeth Gilbert ~

Eat Pray Love, and its sequel, Committed, made Elizabeth Gilbert a celebrated author. Those were pleasant enough reads: warm and sincere, if a trifle too gushing; lively and entertaining, if a tad overly self-indulgent. Those books were, however, lightweights compared with Gilbert’s latest, The Signature of All Things. Now this, this is a book indeed! This is a book to be savoured!

In this 499-paged novel, the protagonist is one Alma Whittaker, who has a singular childhood and upbringing, highly unusual parents, and consequently, a very distinctive set of life experiences. Coupled with an exceptionally well developed intellect and tremendous strength of character, Alma is quite one of the most delightful of protagonists I have met in a long while. I would urge readers, do not for a moment, be put off or daunted by the length and heft of this novel – almost as soon as one starts and is absorbed into the excellent story-telling, one will already be wishing the novel could be even longer, and that one could stay with this character for many more pages. Alma begins her life with being intriguing, and she ends with being utterly beguiling. This is a character to admire, esteem, but never to fall in love with – because Alma herself would disdain such a sentiment – a character to grow deeply attached to and hugely enjoy championing.

The human relationships in this novel are beautifully teased out – one of Gilbert’s hallmark strengths – and the tremendous charm of these relationships is the way they are presented here – controlled, constrained, understated, with tremendous elegance of mind and manner, and yet also deeply felt, passionate, magnificently human. Gilbert has quite outdone herself in this novel.

For the larger part of her life, Alma is based in Philadelphia; she then has a year or so in Tahiti; and the rest of her life is spent in The Netherlands. This bald recitation however, does not remotely do justice to the way Gilbert embeds her story and characters within the sweeping context of the colonial times and many exchanges across lands and seas of the 19th and 20th centuries. The storytelling in this book is of the highest quality – well researched, detailed without ever being tedious, endlessly riveting, well-paced, engaging in every sentence.

I must just mention that there is one regrettable lapse in the otherwise well-sustained, high standard across so many hundreds of pages: in Tahiti, there is an episode where Alma interacts with a Tahitian man depicted as exceptionally handsome, beloved of his people, high achieving, a leader, an explorer, a pioneer, etc. Gilbert indulges unnecessarily, this reader opines, in detailing a sexual intercourse between these two characters which is unnecessary at best and offensive at worst, having too many orientalist overtones for either intellectual comfort or approbation. It is a sentimentality, perhaps even an self-indulgence, which jars the reader’s sensibilities, as well as being of little benefit to the depiction of either character, to the storyline, or to the quality of the writing. In art, the secret really is in knowing where to stop. And this novel is almost a masterpiece – but almost. That said, the lapse was a mere few sentences or paragraphs within such a magnificent achievement, The Signature of All Things.

I would unhesitatingly categorise this novel with the likes of Ann Patchett’s State of Wonder, and Tracy Chevalier’s Remarkable Creatures, not only in that writing tradition of depicting women scientists and discoverers, not only in that context of their quiet, courageous challenge of patriarchal constrains of that age, but perhaps more importantly, for having a protagonist who can more than hold her own amongst and be fully worthy of joining the illustrious Mary Anning and Marina Singh.

Gilbert’s novel sets out to write with a grand flourish, and it succeeds triumphantly. And where a grand flourish is performed truly well, it is a performance to unreservedly applaud.