In The Signature of All Things, Elizabeth Gilbert returns to fiction, inserting her inimitable voice into an enthralling story of love, adventure and discovery.
MY THOUGHTS:
This is a wonderful sweeping epic across time and place that spans almost the entire nineteenth century as well as the life of its main character, for Alma Whittaker was born in January 1800 and grows up to figure out the theory of natural selection long before Charles Darwin ever published his groundbreaking book.
The first part of the story introduces Alma's colourful, larger-than-life family. Her father, Henry Whittaker, is a pharmaceutical importer/exporter millionaire who got his start in life as a cheeky teenager stealing plants from the great Sir Joseph Banks at Kew Gardens. Her mother, Beatrix van Devender, is the brainy, austere and demanding daughter of a Dutch garden curator who could see Henry's potential. Later they adopt another little girl to be Alma's sister; the stunningly beautiful and compliant Prudence, who's no academic at heart. Prudence contrasts with Alma's physically plain, scrappy, cerebral brilliance. Needless to say both girls suffer by the family arrangement, in matters of the heart as well as self-esteem.
To distract herself from disappointment and lack of fulfillment, Alma decides to become the foremost world expert on mosses. To focus on something so tiny, quiet and unobtrusive does her good. She concludes that mosses are intelligent, hardy, modest and dignified, even though they're overlooked and trodden on. All these are attributes she believes they share with her. Despite her brilliant research, Alma's study brings her no recognition beyond the few souls in the world who care about mosses! This emphasis on painstaking work solely for its own sake is super soothing to read. I doubt I could muster up sustaining interest in bryology itself, but reading about Alma Whittaker's passion for it is truly a joy.
The significance of the novel's title becomes evident when Alma meets the younger man she falls passionately in love with. The gorgeous Ambrose Pike is a botanical artist of extraordinary genius who produces lifelike paintings of orchids, homing in on their very essence. He is fascinated by spiritual and mystical topics to the extent that he aspires to tap into the angelic realm while still alive. Ambrose respects the work of sixteenth century botanist Jacob Boehme who believed that God has hidden clues for the benefit of mortals within the earth's botany. In other words, the signature of all things is to be found within flowers, leaves and trees.
To say that this couple suffer from conflict of interests is a vast understatement. From the outset, Alma gets nowhere when she tries to fathom all the theories Ambrose is on about with the aid of her razor sharp reason and intellect. He even says, 'I am touched that you are trying to understand through rational thought that which cannot be understood at all.' But the full brunt of their misunderstanding is something that emerges only after they tie the knot. (The awkwardness is something that must be read to be believed, so be prepared to blush in sympathy for both of them.)
Alma's quest to understand the true nature of her husband in retrospect as well as she understands mosses leads her to Tahiti, which she knows as the resting place of so many great explorers of the previous century. From there she moves on to Amsterdam, the birthplace of her maternal relatives. Elizabeth Gilbert's prose is so beautiful and unexpected, I was quite willing to keep turning any amount of pages just to see whatever epiphany Alma has next.
The main one is pretty big! What I love about Alma's own personal natural selection theory is her reluctance to publish, because the actions of people in her live have helped give her a niggling conviction that something is incomplete. Although survival of the fittest makes sense across a broad spectrum of nature, she cannot account for the pesky existence of human sacrifice and altruism. Of course Alma waits too long for evidence of something that can never be pinned down and examined beneath the microscope. Charles Darwin beats her to the finish line, but I love Alma's gracious acknowledgment that his 'On the Origin of Species' is a far more eloquent masterpiece than anything she would have put forth, so he was the man who was born to change the world's way of thinking. (Even though he doesn't account for the problem of altruism either.)
As to the answer to Alma's question, along with the existence of human emotions, ethics and love, Gilbert only has her characters echo debates which are still raging to this day. What more can she do? She's written an ambitious, probing story, but it's a huge ask to expect her to present a neat solution which would please all readers. Personally, I thrilled to the speech that Alfred Russell Wallace (a real life scientist) put forth when Alma finally got to meet him.
Wallace says,
'I will tell you why we have these extraordinary minds and souls. We have them because there is a supreme intelligence in the universe which wishes for communion with us. This supreme intelligence longs to be known. It calls out to us. It draws us close to its mystery and it grants us these remarkable minds in order that we try to reach for it. It wants us to find it. It wants union with us more than anything.'
Alma calls it a beautiful theory which comes as close to answering her question as anything has, but points out that it's still answering a mystery with another mystery. And she still seeks answers from empirical science as she was born to do.
I'm giving this novel 5 stars not because it addresses these questions and doubts to everyone's satisfaction (which it can't), but because my interest in Alma's story never once flagged. The sense of curiosity, energy and innovation which characterised the nineteenth century comes through clearly, and each character comes across as a living, breathing creation, including many of the botanical ones.
It's probably fair to add a tip that this novel gets steamy at times. Not steamy enough for poor Alma, but perhaps too steamy for some readers. But I think Elizabeth Gilbert is one of the authors of the 21st century whose work I'll always look out for.
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