But now, in retrospect, it’s all got this annoying, undeniable sparkle. I wrote myself into so many problems, but on the back of my marked-up memory I have found a wisdom in the postscript: these are the problems you used to dream of having. Like the cabin by the beach, this bad year of bad writing and desperate reinvention was its own type of dream come true, too.
What I didn’t know about was the other 70-odd square miles of the Mendip Hills, all craggy outcrops, dry-stone walls, waterfalls and dizzyingly beautiful views. After I moved, the weekly walks I eventually started doing with my two kids took us to this part of Somerset again and again. And they still do, not least in the winter. The scenery is, of course, not nearly as spectacular as the landscape I’d left behind, but replete with its own charms: faint echoes of the Lakes and Yorkshire Dales, and walks that perfectly suit the cold months. Here, a proper outing can be done without being overly arduous, and if the weather doesn’t turn too hostile, a day outside can deliver a lovely cosiness: the landscape is friendly and comforting, rather than challenging.
Where Plato invites us to consider the liberating power of truth, and Huxley and Wallace celebrate the value of altered perception, Moore asks what it means to exist in a reality shaped by stories, symbols, and the occult.
Morante’s work reminds us of this: of the way in which we’re all—men and women, left and right, powerful and powerless—little fascists, exactly because we’re hungry and small. So despite the talking dogs and the fairy-tale castles, Morante’s novels are relentless in telling the truth. She is ready to show us a reality we’d rather not face: that the grand vision is often false, that all our stories are shaped by others.