Review by Peter Reason
Four people, their lives widely separated by time and geography, set out on journeys away from home, journeys that might well be seen as secular pilgrimages. Their four stories are told in turn in the first half of the book, then picked up and taken forward in the second half but in reverse order. Their travels don’t actually intersect, but the narratives touch on each other indirectly and gently, and through the book their experiences echo and mutually resonate.
Shai is a young woman living a directionless life in modern Delhi. On losing her office job, she travels home to a small town in Meghalaya, the far northeast of India. But she cannot settle back into old relationships with family and friends. “I’m a white dwarf, I tell myself. A dead star. Exhausted of everything life-giving, heavy not just with the weight of the past, but also the sense that nothing lies beyond…” When she hears that Oiñ, the beloved nanny of her childhood, is ill, Shai decides to travel to her remote village to see her. After a long and challenging journey, she settles into the village, still feeling out of place, welcomed by some, resented by others. She feels most content as she learns to sow, water, and care for growing vegetables.
The reader meets Evie as she is boarding a large steamship at Tilbury, about to leave Edwardian England for India. As we travel with her to Marseille, Port Said, Suez, Aden, and Calcutta, we also learn of her studies of botany at Cambridge in the very early days of the admission of women students. It was an awkward experience. She wants to study plants – “As long for as long as I can remember, I have had questions about the natural world” – having explored gardens and woodlands with her Grandma Grace and stored boxes of seeds and piles of pressed leaves under her bed. When she gets to Cambridge she is disabused of the idea that her enthusiasms have any relationship with scientific botany. She rebels against both the institutional misogyny and the narrowness of the analytic curriculum, often “undecided between tears and fury” – for Grandma has urged her “never to yield to a life without wonder”. In time, she finds comfort and kinship in the fledgling Goethean Science Society, dedicated to a different vision of science; and with Agnes, an older research student who has found her way to do her science by keeping out of the way of the men in power. We leave the first part of Evie’s story as she finds her way in the expat community in Calcutta. But is she there to find a husband, like most young women; or for adventure and plant discovery – or, just possibly, both?
The polymath Johann Wolfgang von Goethe is the third character, known here as Johann Philipp Möller, the name Goethe used for his travels in Italy. Goethe, or Möller, is out at the crack of dawn, catching the post chaise out of Karlsbad en route for Rome, without taking leave of his employer, the Duke of Saxe-Weimar, his maybe lover, Charlotte, or his friends. He is leaving his responsible life in the employ of the Duke and as the famous author of The Sorrows of Young Werther. Doing so abruptly and surreptitiously seems to be the only way he can break free.
Goethe is today most commonly known as a hugely influential figure in German literature. Less well known is his contribution to an alternative, holistic way of doing science which gives greater attention to form and organic development than to identifying and naming the parts. This scientific work, Goethe believes, is more important than all his poetry. During his time in Italy he develops the observations and ideas that led to the publication of his first scientific work, The Morphology of Plants. This is one of the few explicit links between the stories: we have already learned that Goethe is Evie’s intellectual hero.
Janice Pariat has researched Goethe’s time in Italy drawing on contemporary letters and other documentation. His experiences in Rome and Sicily are told through his conversations with the intellectual community there. While she tells this as fiction rather than biography, I enjoyed getting a feel of Goethe the man as well as Goethe the dominating intellectual figure. And since I know quite a bit about Goethean Science from my colleagues at Schumacher College (which is also where Pariat learned of Goethe as scientist) I can affirm that the portrayal of Goethe’s holistic perspective – summarized in his statement, “Hold back your theories! Let the phenomena speak for themselves!” – is an excellent introduction for the layperson.
Pariat’s account of Carl [Linnaeus, the great botanical systematiser] is the shortest; it is again based on historical research and on Linnaeus’ own writing. His perspective, and how it runs counter to Evie and Goethe’s, is presented in poetic form, for example in Lady of the Snows, which dissects the eponymous plant into its parts: leaflets, calx, petals, stamen, pistils… describing each in number and appearance; and in How to be a True Botanist:
This much is clear–
have a real understanding of botany,
and know how to name all plants
with intelligible names.The natural method – of classification, …
is the true beginning and the end…
of what is needed in botany.
One might almost hear Johann tut in disagreement and Evie scream in protest.
In the second part, these narratives are picked up, starting with Goethe’s achievements and disappointments in Rome; then Evie’s adventures – even more adventurous that she might have hoped; and Shai’s entanglement with family life while Oiñ gradually fades away, and local politics as villagers confront choices between tradition and development and the potential extraction of uranium ore from their land. This reversed ordering of the narratives is a wonderfully engaging device, mixing the shared themes rather than following a temporal order. It may also test the reader’s attention and memory, particularly in remembering all the secondary characters’ names.
Maybe as the journeys and lives unfold, the reader will wonder how the disparate strands will come together. They will learn that there is no grand denouement, just a subtle echoing of themes and threads: the many ways of seeing, the human relationship with the more-than-human world, wholes and parts, travel as a way of seeing differently, colonialism and extraction; relationships with elders, and between the individual and their historical circumstance.
Everything the Light Touches is delightful and enjoyable to read with engaging and likeable characters, touchingly elegant writing and dialogue. It is a book which, at the end, invites a quiet contemplation.
Peter Reason is currently engaged in a series of experiential co-operative inquiries exploring living cosmos panpsychism: He has been regularly sitting with the River Avon and with invocation and ceremony addressing River as a community of sentient beings: “If I call to the world as sentient being, what response may I receive?” He is writing about this inquiry in at Learning How Land Speaks. He also edits Objects&Lives, short writing and imagery reflecting on household and personal objects that hold value through the memories they hold and their associations with family and cultural history. His online presence is at peterreason.net.
Janice Pariat, Everything the Light Touches (The Borough Press, 2022). Everything the Light Touches, 978-0008500313, 512pp., paperback (2023).
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