lost paradise

The Painter of Silence, by Georgina Harding

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A sick and emaciated man collapses on the steps of a Romanian hospital in the town of Iași. He is deaf and mute and (we learn) has been since birth so is unable to communicate with anyone. A nurse named Safta recognises him as Augustin—Tinu for short—who shared her childhood on her parents’ estate Poiana. Although Tinu was the cook’s son and Safta the cherished daughter, they had a special bond. She encourages him to draw, as he did as a child, but at first he refuses.

It is the early 1950s and Stalin’s Russian holds the country in its grey and relentless grip. Yet, in trying to get through to Tinu, Safta begins to talk of their golden childhood, something she has refused to even think about for years.

She talks and talks, as do others who, unlike her, seem freed by knowing that he does not hear what they are saying. The theme of communication winds through the book. There is much that we, like Tinu, must intuit. Safta, too, must discern how best to help Tinu when he is released from the hospital.

Place and the social environment are important aspects of the story. The settings are described only briefly, yet come alive in the imagination. Here is the Poiana of their childhood:

The house at Poiana was imposing at first glance. There was its whiteness, the long neoclassical front, the pedimented porch and ranks of green-shuttered windows. It looked larger than it was because it was only one room deep. If a person came up the drive and looked in he might see right through the glimmer of glass to the garden beyond.

It was a place that light passed through, the light of successive windows thrown onto fine parquet floors in rooms that opened one on  to another, the doors of the rooms always open – save when great and irritated effort was made to close them during the coldest stretches of winter – since this was a house which people moved through freely, like the light: family, servants, visitors, villagers, who came on errands or to make a request or seek advice, the children of the house and the children of the servants. 

This is the novel I have been waiting for. Hoping for. It is quiet and asks much of the reader as it unfolds.

It is not that the language is gorgeous, though each sentence is remarkable in its elegant simplicity. It is not that the plot is thrilling, though terrible things happen and people must learn to live with them and with their own actions. It is not that the characters entertain us or steal our hearts, though we cannot help but walk with them as they move through a world that has changed beyond recognition. Yet it is a balm.

World Wars I and II destroyed a way of life that had seemed as though it would last forever. In England, it was the Victorian/Edwardian age, the age of empire; in Romania, it was the age of its birth as a relatively democratic constitutional monarchy. Romania had only become a country in 1859, gaining independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1878. Siding with the Entente Powers in WWI, Romania grew and prospered during the inter-war period, a time of wealth and privilege for the great families and stability for those who served them. Initially neutral in WWII, Romania eventually allied with Germany and Austria-Hungary to protect themselves from Russia.

That war (WWII) is mostly offstage in Harding’s story. Tinu notices the refugees and later the troops before he is himself apprehended. He does not understand why these things are happening, why everything keeps changing. Far away in Iași Safta resolutely puts one foot in front of another, keeping her head down, working as a nurse. It is only when Tinu turns up that she begins to allow memories of her childhood to emerge and to reckon with all she has lost.

We may not all be suffering through a world war or see our country invaded by Stalin’s Russia, but we all understand loss. Eventually, we all experience what Jane Smiley called the Age of Grief. We all have lost paradises of some sort or another and have things we cannot speak of, except perhaps to someone who cannot hear.

I have always felt our civilisation to be tenuous and had nightmares about its eventual rupture. Perhaps that is a legacy of growing up in the shadow of the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Perhaps all of us, no matter when we were born, carry a secret store of anxiety. Harding’s story places a gentle hand on that wound and reassures me that I’m not alone. It asks me to remember what has been lost, cherish what is beautiful, and watch out for one other.

Have you read a novel that you didn’t know you were looking for?

The Dutch House, by Ann Patchett

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Like Patchett’s previous novel Commonwealth, this is a story about the effects of a divorce, bonds between siblings, and coming to terms with the past.

Maeve and Danny Conroy are the siblings, whose mother Elna left  when they were 10 and 3 to help the poor in India. Danny is the narrator, so all he knows is the story he was told: that she hated her life in the Dutch House, partly because it was a fabulous and gaudy mansion with a pool and landscapes grounds, and partly because her husband, real estate developer and landlord Cyril Conroy, bought it as a surprise for her in 1946, at a time when Elna thought they were dirt poor.

The house came fully furnished, with a servant named Fiona, quickly nicknamed Fluffy and joined by two sisters Jocelyn and Sandy. These three women are the ones to raise the children after their mother left, until Fluffy is dismissed for striking Danny. In many ways Maeve took over as Danny’s mother, cementing a lifelong bond between them. Then Cyril marries a young fortune-hunter named Andrea who comes with two little daughters.

Such is the setup, with the wicked stepmother taking over the house and gradually forcing Danny and Maeve out. One of the most poignant scenes for me centered on Maeve’s room, the nicest bedroom according to Danny, with a window seat overlooking the back garden. Patchett gives just enough detail for the reader to make the room her own and grieve with Maeve when she leaves it.

Patchett’s use of detail also works well in summoning a vision of the Dutch House: certain ornaments, some furniture on the landing, a ceiling, a ballroom on the third floor. This pastiche gives the reader a framework for envisioning the place and remembering what takes place there. The portrait of Maeve (shown on the cover of the book) gathers layers of meaning as we go through the story.

Much of the middle of the book dragged, as we learn about Danny’s life after leaving the Dutch House, his marriage and children, his work. Danny is not very emotionally aware, which sometimes made me wish Maeve were narrating the book. She’s a far more interesting character.

When the two are together, Danny visiting her in Pennsylvania, they park across the street from the Dutch House to talk about the past. In a burst of insight Danny says, “like swallows, like salmon, we were the helpless captives of our migratory patterns. We pretended that what we had lost was the house, not our mother, not our father.”

Sandy says it best, explaining why she returns to the house near the end: “The ghosts are what I come for.”

I wanted to like this book. I’m a sucker for stories about lost paradises and enchanted houses (let me tell you about mine . . . ). What I liked best about it was Tom Hanks as narrator. His distinctive voice, reassuring and trustworthy carried me over the somewhat boring stretches and the underdeveloped secondary characters.

Thinking of it as a fairy tale helped me over the unlikely plot points. As Danny notes, how does a man who doesn’t even own a char buy a mansion? Not to mention Elna leaving to work with Mother Teresa in Calcutta only a few years after the nun founded the Missionaries of Charity. And the wicked stepmother.

Patchett is an accomplished writer, so I trust that sentence by sentence the writing is good, even without Tom Hanks bringing it to life. The book has received a lot of praise and many good reviews. I’m not sure I would have finished it if I’d been reading a print book, but I’m glad I made it to the end. There’s the painting on the cover, the still somewhat mysterious and contradictory Maeve, and the lost paradise.

What story about motherless children who are also poor little rich kids have you read?