Readings for September 18, 2022

I’m back in grad school for the fall term, my second semester as I work toward a master’s in English. That means I am reading a lot for school, but not so much other fun stuff to share with you. One of my classes is entirely about reading James Joyce’s Ulysses all term, and it’s great, but a century-old masterpiece is not really a fresh recommendation. My Old English class is going very well, and if you’re curious about that I’d recommend The Word Hord: Daily Life in Old English by Hana Videen. I picked it up a while ago; it’s not a text for class, and it’s very readable and fun.

I read Spear, a new take on Arthurian legends by Nicola Griffith, who wrote one of my all-time favorite novels, Hild. Spear is short and fun and solidly grounded in early Arthurian myth and scholarship. Griffith’s affinity for research is one of the reasons I love both of these books.

I tried to read a couple of books on mathematics, but one had a design flaw in that that text explanations were not anywhere near the diagrams and equations being described. I got tired of flipping pages and searching very quickly and gave up. The other was highly narrative and well written, but I could only take the repeated references to “savage” and “primitive” peoples for so long before I gave up on that book too.

So here is a review of Seven Steeples by Sara Baume. My copy is due back to the library today, so I might as well send it off before my ebook is snatched from my ereader. Enjoy! Take care of your brains!

There are many good reasons to read a book where nothing much happens. If your own life has a lot happening, a quiet book can offset the chaos. If your own life doesn’t have a lot happening, a quiet book can show you that this is fine instead of boring. You may have just finished reading a thick tome with ideas as heavy as its physical presence or a trilogy of action-packed fantasy novels, and now you’re looking for a palate cleanser. A sorbet of a book. These are all great reasons to pick up a slender novel, one of less than 200 pages, of low stakes and lovely descriptions.

You might also want to pick up a book like this to interrogate what you think of when you think of a novel. A quiet book without much conflict or character growth or narrative arc will challenge your expectations for story. You’ll find yourself caring about what happens to, say, the two humans and two dogs that occupy the pages of Seven Steeples by Sara Baume. But you won’t find high school English’s greatest thematic hits: no man versus man or man versus god to be found. Maybe a touch of man versus nature, but it’s not so much adversarial as it is a quiet cohabitation. Neither side is really fighting each the enemy, or anything else, in this book.

Bell and Sigh, a human man and woman, leave the city and spend seven years living in a small house by the sea in Ireland. It’s set in the modern day; there are occasional references to mobile phones and the internet. The pandemic hovers at the edges of the last chapter. But this book does not proceed at the pace of modern life. The reader takes every walk along with Bell and Sigh and their dogs, Pip and Voss. (“They were not climbers or cragsmen or even hikers. They were dog walkers, at best.”) Baume notes the encroachment of mold and mice, the changing of the seasons, the deterioration and replacement of the impromptu mailboxes.

In a novel like this—a type that my friend John Walker (among others) called a poetic novel—not much happens, except that quite a lot happens on a smaller scale:

There would be so much more. And they would see it as soon as practically nothing had continued to happen for a slightly longer time.

One thing that is hampering my ability to share quotations from this novel with you is the unpredictability of electronic text. I cannot know how you are reading this—on your phone, on your tablet or laptop, on a massive gaming monitor. Do you have the screen zoomed way in, or do you prefer tiny type? It matters in Seven Steeples because it is a poetic novel or a long prose poem, as some reviewers have called it. There are line breaks used for effect and meaning, but I’m not sure how to make those line breaks work for everyone in this newsletter. I read this as an ebook from the library, and the line breaks there were imperfect because, again, it’s electronic ink. My choice of font and margins is different from another reader’s, and the ebook does its best to accommodate Baume’s line breaks. If you decide to read this book, I recommend a paper copy. However, the language Baume uses is the entire point of reading this work, so I will solider on with this imperfect and unpredictable electronic format.

Seven Steeples releases the reader from the habit of expecting a three- or four-act structure. The reader learns to appreciate the small payoff with every phrase and paragraph rather than waiting for a massive finale and resulting denouement. This novel has small surprises but no big twists; it does not consider that spoilers might even be possible. It will not diminish your appreciation for this book one tiny bit. The writing fosters appreciation for the intimate rather than setting the reader up for the ever bigger, the ever more fantastical, the ever louder.

Seven Steeples does not get loud, even during massive storms. Compare, for example this passage by Baume:

As the loose gutter loosened, its flapping grew louder. As the weather worsened, its flap-rate increased. It battered like a stressed heart. It didn’t wake them. The house was a ship. They sailed clean through the worsening nights, drifting on the dead sea of their mattress, limbs retracted beneath the lapping duvet. By then they were deaf to the ship and its wind symphonies; to the full range of its tones—of panic, of taunting, of mirth, of the sequence that sounded like a wolf whistle, and of the whistle that seemed to end in a question mark.

and the imagery in Ted Hughes’s poem “Wind,” where “This house has been far out at sea all night” and “the skyline a grimace,/At any second to bang and vanish with a flap.” Bell and Sigh hear their house like an animalistic wolf whistle, while for Hughes the house “Rang like some fine green goblet in the note/That any second would shatter it.”

Since Seven Steeples takes place at the edge of Ireland, readers might expect this to be a novel of nature writing, and it is, but not in the way of most nature writing. It’s domestic, it’s bounded, and it’s nearby. Nature is not something that Bell and Sigh must travel to for Adventures; it is in the house, eating the wires, and easily if ironically baited with pink mouse-shaped candy. It is in the ocean and then at the end of the fishing line. It is puddles in the road and escaped cows as much as it is the mountain that can be seen from the window but that remains, for seven years, unclimbed.

Here is the undaunted mouse in the house:

The mouse worked hard through its fourth, fifth and sixth nights, refusing to be discouraged by groggy human voices and the flicker of electric lights, by the occasional earthquake of angry thumping.

Here is the spider in the bathtub:

To the spider, the tub was a snowy fjord, a glacial valley—vast, unmarred, arresting. It knew this was an unsafe place. Still it could not quell a desire to summit the tub’s outer edge. Each time it was blinded by a white glare, and lost its footing, all eight of its footings, and skied.

And here is a lengthier passage that might change your mind about common robins forever:

A robin had claimed ownership of the fuchsia hedge that ran half the length of the east side of the driveway. It scaled the apical branch each dawn, and no matter the severity of the wind, it gripped on with its claws and trilled a melodious warning song—a beautiful, convoluted ballad about the murderous vengeance that would be exacted upon any bird who dared to trespass. The robin of the driveway had murdered in the past. It was prepared for murder.

The humans, the dogs, the house, the landscape, all meld together by the end, some more literally than others. There are hints throughout that Bell and Sigh abandoned their lives in the city completely. Baume is aware that they have made a choice, and that this choice is not without its drawbacks. Bell and Sigh are very happy to live on the edge of this island, and Baume knows it sounds idyllic to be away from a regular life, but she also knows it involves sacrifices the majority of people cannot make, like leaving behind friends and family forever. Bell and Sigh note the annual arrival and departure of the families on holiday who have second homes nearby, filled with a hundred unused things that duplicate the hundred unused things they have at home. They are not jealous and they do not interact with these summer people.

Baume leads the reader through the first flush of this idyllic existence to its cloistered conclusion in two elegant sentences about checking email:

In the beginning, they might have met a week’s worth of missed messages at once. But as time passed, a week yielded no messages at all, then a month, a year—only the tiny, white hand with its index finger lifted, as if checking the wind direction. They forgot their passwords, as they had forgotten the numbers of their old bus routes, and the numbers of their old houses and old streets, and the names of the old pubs where they used to meet, and of their old friends.

Not that Bell and Sigh are isolated or completely alone. They’re friendly with the farmer who lives in the nearest house, and they bring him a Christmas gift. They still use the internet sometimes. They try to watch TV, but they get terrible reception. They garden and fish, but they also take more trips to the grocery store than they intend to because they make lists and then don’t look at them once they get to the store.

Seven Steeples, like the people in it, is not so secluded as to be out of touch with the rest of the world. But it chooses carefully which tendrils to reach out and which friends to latch onto, however lightly. You can choose to allow Baume, her characters, and their dogs latch onto you for an afternoon or a weekend, depending on how quickly you choose to read this poetic novel. The result, in the best case, is to find the small glimmers of poetry in any life, even if it’s not lived in a small house on the coast of Ireland.

If you purchase any books from the Bookshop.com affiliate links in this email, I will receive a small commission.