~ Signs for Lost Children, by Sarah Moss ~
This is 1880, Falmouth, Cornwall, where two rather extraordinary people for their age and time live, Tom and Ally (Alethea). They are extraordinary people in their own right, and an extraordinary couple. Ally is a woman doctor, in a time when even women students are rare, and she has started working for the Truro Asylum after marrying Tom and coming to Cornwall. Tom travels for work to Japan, only 6 weeks after his marriage. Moss writes of the unique texture of the pain of parting and impending departure with such authenticity the reader can only imagine she is not stranger herself to such experiences:
She tries to smile for him but her eyes fill. Here it is, the beginning of their last evening. From this moment on, the minutes will slip away like stitches dropped from a knitting needle. Unravelling, irrecoverable.
p24
The story alternates chapters between Ally in Falmouth and Manchester, and Tom travelling through Japan. The parts of the book I personally loved best are those depicting Tom in Japan, his thoughtful interactions with a culture so alien from his own, his personal growth and development as a result.
He closes The Proceedings of the Asiatic Society of Japan. The writer of this article, a Scottish engineer, does not like the Japanese. They lie, he said, sometimes because it is the easiest way of getting what they want, and sometimes for no discernible reason. They are characterised by ‘complete indifference to time and to the exigencies of circumstance’. They imprison and enslave their women, and have no idea what to do with a cruet. He wonders if this man knew what to do with the Japanese equivalent, whatever it might be. However inscrutable the natives, it is the sort of thing it ought to be possible to learn. The sort of thing he will try to learn.
p4
This passage shows the prejudice and contempt so typical of how the West regarded the East, and endears Tom to the reader with his unusual take (for someone of his time and place) of wanting to learn the Japanese way rather than condemn them for their difference.
Meanwhile, in Cornwall, Ally is not lonely for Tom, but is rendered lonely by social isolation as a result of her being a pioneer of new gender roles. Mrs Cummings, the vicar’s wife, coming to call on Ally, is corrected at the start of her visit about her mistaken assumption that Ally is a qualified nurse rather than a doctor. At the end of the visit, she says, “Do you mean to say, Mrs Cavendish, that you are really a doctor? That you are qualified to practice? I have read, of course, of women students, but I had not thought – well, it is a surprising idea’” (59). Mrs Cummings is not the only one who persists in calling Ally Mrs Cavendish rather than Dr Moberley Cavendish.
Along with her societal battles for recognition of women as doctors, Ally’s mother is the bane of her life, and because of her mother, Ally fights so many internal demons and battles.
The Edinburgh Seven, the first women to achieve medical qualifications in Britain, were assaulted and menaced by their own colleagues and teachers. She will not be menaced by a nurse. Doubtless, says Mamma’s voice, the woman is underpaid, overworked, and wholly uneducated. Do not fancy yourself better than her because you have had such indulgence and opportunity as she cannot imagine.
p98
Throughout Ally’s life, her mother, and even the thoughts and memories of her mother, undermine Ally’s confidence and saps her happiness.
Moss’ writing is beautiful, one of the reading experiences to savour; e.g. when Ally sets off one morning in driving rain: “She pulls her scarf up over her hat, a pointless gesture towards conventional concerns”; the pointlessness of trying to stay dry understatedly but effectively underlining the pointlessness of conventional concerns.
There are beautiful passages of Tom’s interactions with the Japanese, and particularly his friend, guide and translator, Makoto. Although there is so much Tom finds completely alien to him, he is patient and respectful, understanding the need to subsume his own natural responses to the expectations of his host. When Makoto invites him to visit his parents’ home, although Tom wants only to complete his work and return to Ally, without diversion or loss of time, he accepts immediately and respectfully, understanding what an unusual and deep honour is being extended to him. Makoto is ceremonious, formal, correct, and very subtle. When Tom asked whether Makoto found the moors of England desolate, and explaining the word desolate to Makoto as ‘bare and unwelcoming’,
Makoto’s back straightens. “We were most kindly welcomed. Most generously.’ Oh Lord, Tom thinks, it is not possible, even when an Englishman and a Japanese man speak the same language it is not possible to talk. ‘As I have been here’ he replies, bowing”
p84
There is great delicacy in the way Tom sets out to learn what he does not know that he does not know.
But he is learning to tread carefully, to be indirect and trust what is not said. It is probable that he and Makoto have an understanding.
p92
Seeing Makoto’s grandmother, Tom has the empathy to think:
He can’t imagine what the old lady, who lived most of her life in Samurai times, must feel about his presence. How would his mother react if he brought home an African savage with a bone in his nose?
p100
Tom shows a growing understanding of a culture very different from his own and which his imagination had not previously encountered.
He does not see why, anyway, why Makoto should regret merely asking a question of his parents, asking permission, for how else is one to obtain an answer? (Perhaps not, perhaps in Japan there are ways of knowing how a question will be answered before it is asked, in which case the question is merely ritual, though it is increasingly clear that Japanese ritual is not mere.)
p132
“Without Japanese, it is difficult to interpret one’s experiences, especially in the countryside where everything seems so strange that one soon ceases to place much trust in one’s own judgement”
p165
Although Tom revels in discovering Japan and Japanese culture, and does not miss England or English culture, he misses and yearns for Ally in the months he is away, but he is also divided within himself at the same time: two days before leaving Japan for good, his cases are packed,
He is already a ghost, a man in the act of leaving. He sits on the wooden ledge in the earth-floored entrance and puts on his shoes, slides open the street door, and bolts it behind him. In three days’ time, these small acts will be memories. The stones under his feet now, the shuttered windows of this alley; the forested hills rising at the end of the street, will be only in his mind.
He does not want to go home.
p274
Moss captures so beautifully the strange in-between worlds many travellers must experience at the cusp of departure, how the mind knows at what is for now just daily things which seem so ordinary, at this stage take on extra weight, being at this point ephemeral, and soon will be as insubstantial as dreams or memories.
On the voyage home, Tom does not feel himself, and even behaves somewhat out-of-character in certain ways, being more garrulous for example, than is his wont, and doing other things he may no otherwise have done; six weeks stuck in a ship of fools returning him inexorably to a country he no longer likes and a marriage he cannot quite remember” p290. Being away for months, and out of touch with England, has changed Tom not insignificantly, possibly because he was always so open to being changed in the first place, as is evidenced by his being unusually and singularly open to Japanese difference and Japanese experiences.
The last quarter of the book is perhaps the weakest. The return and the struggle of the couple to reconnect are all plausible, but not properly developed – it feels glossed over, not unpacked with the delicacy and care the rest of the novel displayed. Nevertheless, it is a beautiful read overall, the passages of Tom in Japan were perhaps the most beautiful sections, luminous in the way the reader sees Japan of the 1880s through the eyes of an Englishman who is willingly falling in love with this very alien culture, with such open hearted appreciation.
I shall definitely be seeking out other Sarah Moss novels.
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