When did we stop believing in the life in motionless things? The question is posed in a post-scriptum to an email Bernadette Basagni, an Italian sociologist, sends to John Molloy, an Irish restorative sculptor. Molloy, who is employed as a subcontractor for the Board of Works, overseeing small restoration programmes, agrees to take part in an EU project that brings him into the arms of Bernadette and a new life in Italy.
What is clear, in this latest novel, is that the essential liveliness of things is something the author of Love Notes from a German Building Site (2019), A Sabbatical in Leipzig (2020) and Midfield Dynamo (2021) has never stopped believing in. To read Adrian Duncan is to leave the two-dimensional world of the page or the image and find yourself entering an immersive 3D world of objects – both natural and constructed – which contain, structure and inform much of our waking lives.
Rather than being backdrop or simple decor, the built environment or the underlying geology of the landscape, becomes a creative, living force in Duncan’s fiction, giving his writing an utterly distinctive voice in contemporary Irish literature.
Working with Bernadette in Germany, on a study of the statue of the Romantic writers Achim and Bettina von Arnim, shades into an initiation into the emotional life of statues through not only the narrative glimpses into the lovesick toils of the work’s maker but also the meticulous capture of the changing light and mood in the space surrounding the Teutonic power couple.
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A description of an overland train trip to Bologna is scrupulously alert in noting down the details of everyday life crowding into the traveller’s view before the account gives full rein to the lyric clarity of Duncan’s prose: “Canting lines of shivering silver saplings swerve down out and across a giant stretch of wind-whipped green, leading to a road, and, beyond it, a lemoning embankment that unfurls into the foothills of the mountain.”
Duncan is particularly adept at offering an intensely vivid, physical description of Molloy’s wandering through the places of worship of the Emilia-Romagna capital
Believing there is life in motionless things can, of course, get you into trouble. When the hero’s mother sees a statue of the Virgin Mary speaking to her in a grotto outside the local church, she becomes not a celebrity but a pariah. At the insistence of the parish priest, she is sent to a psychiatric hospital in Dublin to “get over these hallucinations”, which signals the beginning of her slow, mental collapse and the ostracism of the family.
Her son’s fascination with stone sculptures and the beguiling power of the object world is an oblique homage to a broken world of belief that he is helpless to restore. Molloy notes that stone “like glass is strong when compressed, but is quite fragile and prone to rupture when pulled apart or suddenly struck”. The book is peppered with technical descriptions of igneous (basalt, granite), sedimentary (limestone) and metamorphic (hornfels, gneiss, marble) rocks, and a constant in their profile is the “breaking pattern” (fissile, brittle, fractal, columnar).
As the book’s protagonist moves into his mid-50s, the breaking patterns in his own life become more apparent, its hints of fragility and moments of rupture. The news of the impending death of Anna – a much-loved colleague from days working on sites in Ireland and with whom he had studied in Utrecht – precipitates a crisis that provides some of the most memorable pages in the novel.
Seeking some acceptable form of prayer to accompany Anna in her final hours, he embarks on an odyssey through the churches of Bologna where he has visions of parrots, lemur monkeys and St Cecilia before finally being ejected on to the early morning streets of the city by an outraged cleric. Duncan is particularly adept at offering an intensely vivid, physical description of Molloy’s wandering through the places of worship of the Emilia-Romagna capital while keeping in sight the profound emotional disorientation of a man who comes to mourn not only the loss of his friend but also his irretrievably blighted childhood.
From Anna, on her last visit to see him in Bologna, he hears an important confession. She felt that the restoration work she had been engaged in all her life was little more than a futile attempt to keep disintegration at bay: “We spent our time, us fools, holding up waves of stones that only ever wanted to crash.”
The Gorgeous Inertia of the Earth is a moving tribute to making, in all its forms – not least that of writing. But this captivating fiction is also a testimony to the devastating powers of unmaking, of how the living subject constantly has to resist the unenviable condition of the motionless thing.
Michael Cronin is professor of French at Trinity College Dublin
