In the twilight hush of the fanciest restaurant in town, Paul Griffiths pulls out a tiny device that looks like a primitive cellphone and sinks it in his water glass. He’s trying to figure out where the water came from—here, Campbell River, a small coastal community in British Columbia, or somewhere else?
The instrument, an electrical conductivity meter, reveals the path the water took from its source to Griffiths’s glass by measuring the charged minerals picked up along the way.
“Twenty-two, 23, 24 …,” says Carol Ramsey, reading the display.
A server orbiting past the table stops midstride and stares.
“We’re just testing the conductivity of your water,” Ramsey says cheerfully.
Tom Nancollas trained as a building conservationist and fell in love with lighthouses, their heroic form and history – particularly the lonely rock lighthouses that aren’t built on coasts or islands but “appear to rise, mirage-like, straight out of the sea, their circular foundations often unseen”. His book isn’t a compendious overview but a selective and more personal account of eight particular rock lighthouses, in nine chapters. Each separate chapter, as well as addressing the particularity of one place and one history, tells a different part of the overall story – early efforts and failures, the changing design of the lights themselves, the life of the keepers. It’s a well made and well ordered book, in keeping with its subject.
Mortals cling to the hope that they will leave some permanent trace of themselves behind. They prefer to think that houses will not crumble and that works, on canvas or paper, will endure. The grandiose or tyrannical put up monuments; writers make sure their books are deposited in libraries; the multitude order gravestones and label photographs, though all this floats in impermanence too.
Two new books grapple with this paradox by considering phenomena that symbolise instability itself. In “The Library of Ice” Nancy Campbell, a young poet, embarks on a quest to understand the relationship between ice, which is now melting faster than ever, and the fleeting written and spoken word. In “The Waterless Sea” Christopher Pinney, an anthropologist at University College London, considers the history and meaning of mirages.
Take a deep breath before you plunge into this story; you’ll need a certain amount of patience, if you wish to keep afloat. With this, her debut novel, Arnold has won the inaugural Northern book prize, and I can see why: the work is original, ambitious and challenging, submerging the reader in the strangeness of an anomalous mind, an aqueous medium where language is refracted into mazes of shifting meanings.
Still, at a time when the country’s tectonic plates grind ever more fiercely against one another, this book is a reminder that little in its destiny is truly fixed. Like the mighty Mississippi, the American experiment continually overflows and reshapes its banks.
Ma has a marksman’s eye for the contradictions of his country and his generation, and the responsibilities and buried dreams they carry. His perceptiveness, combined with a genius for capturing people who come from all classes, occupations, backgrounds and beliefs; for identifying the fallibility, comedy and despair of living in absurd times, has allowed him to compassionately detail China’s complex inner lives. Censoring his novels and banning his name have been Beijing’s cynical response to Ma’s artistry, and to the human lives that the novelist cannot forget, even as the Chinese Dream envelops them.