In 2020, when the statue of slaver Edward Colston was toppled into Bristol harbour, the general public have been handled to weeks of confected outrage and faux-philosophising concerning the aesthetic, civic and social which means of sculpture. Across the edges of the reactionary tradition conflict nonsense have been occasional good-faith makes an attempt to grapple with how greatest to speak and take into consideration these massive, static objects that pepper what’s left of the general public realm. Lumps of stone and brass; usually representational, usually hagiographic, usually stately, usually decaying, and sometimes deeply, unnervingly unusual.
It’s exactly this sense of strangeness – of statues hovering someplace between structure and portray, and between repose and motion – that animates the most recent novel by the Irish artist and author Adrian Duncan. From its opening pages, The Attractive Inertia of the Earth dives into heady, knotty questions on temporality, the occupation of area, the relative finitude of life, the fantastic line between statement and devotion, and the futility of making an attempt to render the numinous utilizing solely chisel and stone. This, in case I’m not being clear, is a relentlessly high-minded and severe novel. The enjoyably preposterous title is just not a joke however an earnest indication of what’s at stake; the old-school, retro need to discover what, if something in any respect, life actually means.
The novel is the most recent instalment in a loosely linked sequence of works by Duncan which have explored the recollections and reflections of a bridge builder (A Sabbatical in Leipzig) and the tender meditations of a industrial building employee (Love Notes from a German Constructing Website). This time round, the main target is on restorative sculptor and stonemason John Molloy, who, over the course of 200 or so pages, falls in love with a fellow statue fanatic, relocates to Bologna, receives gnomic directions to wish for the expedient loss of life of an ailing pal after which stumbles throughout town in a semi-hallucinogenic haze searching for an appropriate church whereby he can confront the gaping void that separates him from a significant relationship with the divine.
All through, Duncan is especially involved with the qualities of sunshine: what it illuminates, what it casts into shadow, the methods through which it transforms and distorts the surfaces of the fabric world. In actual fact, so noticeably ample are the descriptions that it’s initially tempting to suppose them a stylistic tic, a obscure descriptive gesture within the custom of dangerous lyric poetry. It turns into clear, nonetheless, that within the relentless, accretive consideration Duncan pays to luminosity and its inverse, one thing much more fascinating is happening. The Attractive Inertia of the Earth is not only a novel about a sculptor, additionally it is a novel which self-consciously makes an attempt to reenact, or carry out, the method of sculpting. To this finish, the narrative voice continuously weighs the scene, checks it from numerous angles, considers the place its boundaries must be, how it might look lit by daylight or candlelight, and solely then … chip … a declaration is made and the guts of issues turns into nearly imperceptibly clearer. It makes for a deliberative and delicate studying expertise, revelatory within the truest sense of that phrase.
And it’s revelation the entire approach down. When Molloy finds love, he appears most snug conceiving of it as a barely chilly spatial association, a perform of the proximity of two delineated objects. An novice geologist, growing a taxonomy of rocks in his spare time, he expresses a need to know the “ore” of his associate, Bernadette, however appears prevented from doing so by his dedication to earthliness: his lack of ability to achieve past the world of stone and rock and towards the much less tactile realms of the transcendent. Even Molloy’s makes an attempt to wish are hampered by the intrusive thought that spiritual epiphanies is likely to be only a byproduct of architectural scale: that any awe one might really feel in a spot of worship is the results of an affordable engineering trick.
So when Bernadette asks Molloy, “How will you be on Earth on this approach?” – by which she means shorn of a relationship to God – she is voicing the central concern of the complete novel. What does it imply for Molloy to spend a life engaged within the preservation of stone figures, as if their destiny is just not finally the identical because the folks they depict, particularly to crumble away and be forgotten? And what does it imply for him to bestow the standard of consideration and care so painstakingly and reverently, with out conceiving of doing in order a essentially spiritual act? In spite of everything, embedded within the phrase spiritual – from religio – is a way of “re-binding”: to make complete that which has been rendered into components. To revive.
In its ethical and philosophical sincerity, Duncan’s writing has extra in frequent with authors comparable to Knut Hamsun or Peter Handke than with a lot fashionable fiction. It has been a while since I learn one thing so severe, so solemn and so nonetheless. However within the turning world, such stillness is exactly the purpose. And as Bernadette writes in an early letter to Molloy: “When did we cease believing within the life inside immobile issues?”
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