'Seven Steeples' by Sara Baume has been as engaging and weird as her other books. In it two young people meet and bond, and go to live at the foot of a remote mountain in a tatty little cottage. And there they stay, never venturing further than the village and the beach, their routines forming such a deep groove in their existence that there can be no diverting from them. I don't feel like I got to know them well, felt more like a fly on the wall, or an alien, watching but not understanding their behaviour. There was no crisis to break them out. I kept expecting one of the dogs to die or a calamitous fire or something. But as I have reflected before books where nothing much happens are ok too. It is a quiet mediation on life. And in some places read like poetry, with disruptive line breaks. Conversations are reported but neither of them speaks aloud, and the house, slowly, disintegrates around them. It's all about the writing. I love authors who are all about the writing.
"Although it surpassed the full spread of its surroundings, the high, rocky land was not strictly the right shape to be called a mountain. From sea level it appeared mountain-like, but the house itself had been built on a sharp hill above the scabrous shoreline. From the perspective of the driveway where they stood, the facing outcrop appeared to be more a ridge or bluff - blunt but tall, inhospitable.
Gently and unspectacularly it ascended from the Atlantic, as if it had accumulated its stature over centuries. As if, over centuries, it had steadily flattened itself upwards.
It was the shape of a prehistoric bank,
a drove of smoke, an obliterating wave,
a mud and rock and foliage barrier,
impeding, protecting." (p.11)
Here the scene is set for the general atmosphere of the place:
"For seven decades, the mountain had watched as new tenants moved in and out again, leaving behind the props and shrapnel of their passing. There was a laundry pole, a breeze block, a tyre swing, a partially rotted pallet. There was the orphaned fixture of an old satellite dish, and a marginally newer satellite dish.
The house had always remained unpainted - raw grey plaster except for the sea-facing gable, which was smattered with mustard-coloured lichen - an abstract mural painted by
fungal hyphae, airborne nitrates,
and time." (p.16)
On arrival they announce an intention to climb the mountain, but ...
"It remained unclimbed as the batteries inside the carbon-monoxide detector ran flat, and then the smoke alarm - as the former ceased to blink, and the latter commenced to chirp,
once every sixty second, out in the dark hall -
like a supermarket checkout, or an orphaned chick." (p.64)
They don't just leave behind their old lives, they separate themselves utterly, turning inwards towards each other:
"They talked about the bits and pieces of family they left behind, back in their autonomous lives. They wondered aloud, in intricate detail, whether or not to face down the embarrassment of having lost touch in the first place, and get in touch again.
They settled it, as had become their habit, by doing nothing." (p.84)
As time goes on their lives become smaller, they walk the same path, eat the same food, have the same conversations, play the same games:
"During the overlong evenings, they played Connect 4.
Their set was missing several of the yellow counters and two of the red. When they first started playing, the absent counters made no difference, but as they practices and improved, the games started to drag on and exhaust the supply of the set's parts, and so they cut duplicate counters out of thick card, painted them yellow and red, but still there came a point at which no game could ever be finished; at which they were both able to foresee every coming move. The blue board, standing erect, would fill up until there wasn't a single slot left empty, even though neither of them had won." (p.224)
"Indoors they tackled the potted plant situation for the second time in six years. They laid old newspapers down across the oriental rug. Laboriously they uprooted and rehomed the descendants of their first generation of succulents, cacti, geraniums and spider ivies.
At last they were forced to abandon the idea that each pot should be mounted upon a pedestal of some form. There wasn't a square inch of vacant surface left inside the rooms of the house - not the narrow ledges jointing bathtub to wall, not the flat heaps of book heaps, not a sliver of windowsill. They resorted to the floor, plugging the gaps of bare lino between the rug islands with the chipped dishes and bowls that cupped the homemade pots. Almost immediately the plants drifted from their allotted spots, encroaching upon the islands themselves.
What once had been empty space was then root, leaf, stem and prickles.
What had once been lifeless floor undulated. (p.196-7)
"Many reusable shopping bags - of canvas, jute and hessian, of recycled plastic bottles, tyres and string - had been hung on the hooks on the back of the kitchen door, so many that, by then, it would only open wide enough to admit a single body at a time.
They would queue to enter the kitchen from the living room, the living room from the kitchen.
Every item of food, with the exception of their own potatoes, had been carried into the house in one of those reusable bags, mostly the several closest to the front. The layer of bags at the very back, squashed against the timber of the door, remained untouched. There was still a flake of the skin of a red onion inside one, some dry earth inside another, a few strands of hair from an ear of corn." (p.234)
I found myself frustrated by their passivity, but that is the point. They choose not to not make choices. They lean in to each other. There are lots of lovely descriptions of the natural environment too. A book heavy on atmosphere, weather, tiny details of life. A book to be absorbed by.
It is due back at the library and I fear they may issue fines ... but also, someone else wants this book.
Stay safe. Be kind.
