Pieces of Light: A Novel
by Adam ThorpeCarroll & Graf, 488 pp., $25.95
Mask and face; passion and counterfeit; man and god: The mystery of two-in-one is at the heart of ritual, religious sacrifice, and theatre. It is also the heart of the chilling and lyrical novel Pieces of Light. Beautifully layered, dense as a fugue or a jungle, Pieces of Light recalls A. S. Byatt in its careful interweaving of mythological and anthropological motifs within the plot of a lively modern thriller. No wonder this novel, Thorpe’s third, earned a strong critical response from the British press in 1998.
Pieces of Light is written in four parts. The first is a memoir of narrator Hugh Arkwright’s paradisaical early years as the only white child in deep West Africa, where the air is thick with humidity and spirits to propitiate. But at age seven, Hugh is expelled from Eden and sent to school in England, where he spends holidays with a peculiar uncle obsessed with spiritualism and faux-Celtic ritual.
The novel’s second section is a journal written by the 70-year-old Hugh, now a theatre director notorious for his return to the Elizabethan acting style of fixed, mask-like gesture. “Snatched lunch with Linus F.,” writes Hugh, “who asked me if my actors were literally possessed. Of course, I replied, but they also know it and control it. Without technique, they would either look ridiculous or go mad.” Prophetic words, for Hugh has returned to his childhood town of Ulverton to deal with the disposal of his uncle’s mansion; as he digs through archeological layers of his past, Hugh is driven to a nervous breakdown. In the third section, he reveals his horrific discoveries in the letters he writes his dead mother from a mental hospital. The novel’s last section is composed of letters Hugh’s mother wrote from Africa before his birth.
“Hamlet — still green and fresh after eight weeks,” Hugh writes in his journal of a recent production, and echoes of that play abound here, especially in the narrator’s fraught relationship with his beloved mother and hated “Nuncle,” who usurps not a throne but the one true love of Hugh’s life. “I plucked up the courage to ask [his uncle] why, if he never came to church, he had a cross in his study,” Hugh recalls. “”It reminds me of something very important,’ he said. “Love and forgiveness,’ I suggested. “No. It reminds me that the gods only want your nearest and dearest'” — a disturbing précis of this passionate, intricate, and unsettling novel.
This article appears in January 28 • 2000.