We think we remember works of art rather well; and probably assume that the greater the work of art, and the more powerfully it strikes us, the more accurate our mental image of it must be. Maybe this is the case with professional art historians: I assume that they have – must have – a better visual memory than amateur art-lovers, and perhaps even artists. After all, literary critics in my experience have a better memory of books than most readers, and better even than that of many writers (and they have certainly read more than the average novelist, whose gaps are sometimes shocking). But memory is such a shifty and shifting process, constantly duping us. As far as it is possible to generalise, I think we misremember small pictures as being larger than they are, and large pictures as smaller. Also, what we are remembering is not just the painting itself but its effect on us; and some parts of it will inevitably remain fresher than others. At least, in this age of mass colour reproduction, we can always check our memories – or so we believe. In my early decades, going to an art gallery abroad always culminated in a good deal of time spent at the postcard carousels; and over the years I have accumulated a vast collection of cards which I can use to check my memory. This ‘check’ can only be partial, however: there is the question of size (how accurately can and do we scale the image up?) and also of colour fidelity. I have a friend who, when she first started looking at art, would never buy a postcard of a painting she admired, for fear that the original would be supplanted in her memory. This was properly high-minded, but in practice, she reported, her remembered images were still subject to normal deterioration.
All, essentially, are merchandise, designed to entice enthusiasts of whatever pop-culture license they’re tied to. Usually, that’s a franchise of some kind—one that commands a loyal audience and for which a branded recipe book doesn’t look out of place next to shelves of T-shirts, plushies, hoodies, action figures, coffee-table books, board games, and everything else publishers release to the baying delight of eager fans. But the best of them are extensions of the worlds on which they’re based, letting readers engage with their favorite fiction in a new way by getting a little physically closer to it.
In one way Laing’s book is an account of restoring the garden to its glory days. This gives her the chance to write such glorious, looping sentences as “I cut back thickets of honeysuckle and discovered astrantia, known as melancholy gentleman for its stiff Elizabethan ruffs and odd, pinkish-green livery”. But just at the point where she seems in danger of disappearing into a private dreamscape, Laing pulls up sharply to remind us that a garden, no matter how seemingly paradisical, can never be a failsafe sanctuary from the brutish world. It always arrives tangled in the political, economic and social conditions of its own making.
How do you quiet a warring soul? Every one of Sarah Perry’s novels has grappled lavishly with this question. Fate v free will; doubt v certainty; science v God. The metaphysical battleground is Perry’s literary terrain. She cannot seem to escape its gravitational pull, nor the estuarine mud of her home county. And so it seems only fitting that the Essex author’s new novel, Enlightenment, is a tale of orbits, collisions and other cosmic ellipses: inescapable loops.