State of Grace

~ The High Mountains of Portugal, by Yann Martel ~

Right from the outset, it is clear this is going to be a book with many hidden gems, and massive charm. It starts with

Tomas decides to walk.

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This is Tomas living in Lisbon, Portugal, at the start of the 1900s. He is assistant curator at the National Museum of Ancient Art. Tomas is walking to his rich uncle’s house, but not walking as we know it – he is walking backwards. His beloved Dora (a servant in his uncle’s house) and little son, Gaspar, and Tomas’ father, all died within the space of a week.

To be so assailed by tragedy! Some people never laugh again. Others take to drink. My nephew, in his case, chose to walk backwards. It’s been a year. How long will this bizarre grieving last? 

What his uncle does not understand is that in walking backwards, his back to the world, his back to God, he is not grieving. He is objecting.

Because when everything cherished by you in life has been taken away, what else is there to do but object?” p12.

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Martell’s writing is full of these delicious nuances, distinctions, sensitivities. His paragraph on weeping is a case in point:

“How strange, this habit of weeping, Do animals weep? Surely they feel sadness- but do they express it with tears? He doubts it. He has never heard of a weeping cat or dog. Or of a weeping wild animal. It seems to be a uniquely human trait. He doesn’t see what purpose it serves. He weeps hard, even violently, and at the end of it, what? Desolate tiredness. A handkerchief soaked in tears and mucus. Red eyes for everyone to notice. And weeping is undignified. It lies beyond the tutorials of etiquette and remains a personal idiom, individual in its expression. The twist of face, quantity of tears, quality of sob, pitch of voice, volume of clamour, effect on the complexion, play of hands, the posture taken: One discovers weeping – one’s weeping personality – only upon weeping. It is a strange discovery, not only to others but to oneself” p49. 

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There are charming glimpses of a particularly Portuguese psyche, such as ‘saudade’, “that peculiar form of Portuguese melancholy”; along with the saying: tao docemente trieste quanto um rinoceronte, as sweetly sad as a rhinoceros” (p27), apparently inspired by the hounding to extinction of the Iberian rhinoceros, now and idiom for that particular texture of a feeling of loss. 

Tomas is on a mission. In his museum’s archives, he has come across the diary of one Father Ulisses, written from 1631-1635. In this diary, there is an account of an amazing crucifix, which in 1804, has records showing it was given to a church in the high mountains of Portugal (“that remote and isolated region to the very northwest of his country”p23) by the Lisbon diocese; moreover, given to a “fine old church” (p22) which had suffered a great fire, of which Tomas finds five. This novel is of his journey to discover the crucifix, by visiting these five churches. 

Tomas is given a car by his rich uncle, who unlike Tomas, is a devotee of these new machines. He provisions Tomas well for the journey, and the passage where he gives Tomas his first experience of riding in a car, and then expects Tomas to drive, and make this long journey all on his own, is hilarious. Tomas carries with him – without permission! – the diary of Father Ulisses, a testimony of the slaves in Sao Tome whom he was priest to, a Portuguese colony since the late 15^th century, dismissed by Uncle Martim:

“A miserable one. I stopped there once on my way to Angola. I thought I might invest in some cocoa plantations there. 

“It was an important place during the slave trade.” 

“Well, now it is a producer of bad chocolate.”

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Tomas wrestles mightily with learning to drive, and after a few days, thinks he should try to go a bit faster, in a higher gear.

The monster pounces forward to second gear. The road is disappearing under its wheels with such thunder that he feels it’s no longer the machine that is moving forward on the landscape but the landscape that is being pulled from underneath it, like that hazardous trick in which a tablecloth is yanked off a fully set table. The landscape vanishes with the same menacing understanding that the trick will only work if done at lightning speed. Whereas earlier he was afraid of going too fast, now he’s afraid of going too slowly – because if second gear malfunctions it won’t be just he who meets his end smashing into a telegraph pole, but the entire porcelain landscape that will crash with him. In this madness, he is a teacup rattling on a saucer, his eyes glinting like bone china glaze

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After many trials and tribulations, both comic and tragic, Tomas finds the crucifix, in a small town, and thus ends the first book, Homeless. This novel is divided into 3 distinct books, which weave together. Dr Eusebio Lozora is our protagonist of the 2^nd book, Homeward. Loroza is a pathologist, and now we are on the eve of the new year of 1939. His wife, Maria, apparently comes to his office where he is working late, and talks to him at length, bringing him many Agatha Christie novels which they both share a love for. After she leaves, Tomas is visited by another woman, who apparently brings her husband’s body in a suitcase, and to stretch reader credulity still more, prevails on him to perform an autopsy then and there, and the body turns out to be filled with curious objects, including a chimpanzee and a bear cub. Taking these objects out, the wife takes off her clothes, climbs into her husband’s corpse and Dr Lozora sews her into the body. It transpires that Dr Lozora’s wife has died, and even that visit and conversation could not have taken place. Before the autopsy, the woman, another Maria, Maria Dores Passos Castro, tells the pathologist her story, of her life in the village of Tuizelo, falling in love with her young husband, Rafael Castro, of many happy years together and finally, a golden child born to them, but a child that dies mysteriously one day – and of course the reader understand this is the child that Tomas ran over in his car, when the child must have climbed into the car’s engine compartment unbeknownst to him. There is a strong element of surrealism in this second section, Homeward, of magical realism in the unfolding of the narrative. 

The story comes full circles in the final section, Home, where at first there seems no connection between our protagonist, Canadian Ontario Senator Peter Tovy. Morover, there is another jump in time as well as in geography – now it is the early 1980s. Peter who has recently lost his wife, was on a senatorial visit Oklahoma, and by chance comes across a chimpanzee in a visit to a chimpanzee sanctuary, and impulsively buys this one chimp, Odo, who makes an instant connection with Peter. The story is truly charming of how Peter forges a relationship with Odo. He decides to make a clean break, leaving his city, job, home, what remains of his family, and to go to Portugal, where his parents were from. His parents emigrated when Peter was a toddler, and so Peter has no memories of Portugal and does not speak Portuguese.

He remembers, from long ago conversation with his parents, that this is what Portuguese sounds like, a slurred, mournful whisper.

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However, he knows his parents come from Tuizelo, and he intends to return there, driving with Odo from Lisbon, to the High Mountains of Portugal.  

Peter’s time in Tuizelo is charmed and idyllic, and Odo is the perfect companion. Then one day, while his son is paying him a visit after 2 years of his leaving Canada, Odo, rummaging around the hoarded rubbish in the abandoned first floor of their rented home, finds a suitcase which is the one which Maria Castro had filled with all the mysterious objects taken from the body of her husband. The suitcase contains the name of Rafael Castro, which Peter recognises as that of his grandfather Batista’s brother. Peter shows the family photo album to his landlady, Dona Amelia. She immediately recognises in his photos that of the golden child, the dead child.  

This is a marvellous read, where all the ends tie in beautifully, the three disparate narratives interlacing with great dexterity. It takes a masterful author to structure such a detailed and tightly woven narrative and to pace it so elegantly. The writing is deceptively slow paced, but a huge amount is packed into every page. The story seems to amble, and yet, the reader is deluged by information, effortlessly. The three protagonists, Tomas, Dr Lozora, and Peter, at first seem so completely unrelated – existing as they do in completely differently times, circles, totally unaware of the existence of one another. And yet, there is one common thread – all three have lost the partner/wife they were deeply attached to and particularly compatible with, and all were in stages of grieving, which shakes up their worlds and made them take unusual actions, which resulted in their lives intersecting so meaningfully and serendipitiously. Even all the side characters are fascinating and endearing. This is one of those rare reads where every page is a delight, every sentence a joy. The themes reiterate like familiar refrains running throughout the novel – the chimpanzee, linked to the crucifix, the bear cub, and of course, the rhinoceros too. Running powerfully as an undercurrent is the Catholic faith, which is a powerful force in the lives of many of the protagonists, and which imbues the narrative with a sense not necessarily of the religious, but the spiritual and the transcendent.  

I will not spoil the end of the novel for the reader, but be assured it ends luminously. Ben and Peter both see the crucifix with the elongated arms in the small church in Tuizelo, and watch Odo, both transfixed; Ben summing it up beautifully: “That’s a hell of a state of grace,” Ben says “(p328). This whole novel comes to the reader as precisely that – a state of grace.