To write fiction about artwork is notoriously arduous. Inventing dangerous artwork is simple, a superb parlour sport, however to think about a profitable artist it’s important to create a physique of labor that justifies their success, and that’s a totally different matter. In Hagstone, Irish critic and essayist Sinéad Gleeson’s first novel, that is carried out deftly and convincingly. The e-book centres on Nell, an artist residing and dealing on an island a half day’s journey from the Irish mainland. Her work consists of sand sculptures and sound items; underwater statues; a hypothetical undertaking involving a lighthouse – all of which, as Gleeson explains in an afterword, have been impressed by the work of actual artists. This plausibility is significant as a result of it underpins Nell’s character: we’ve to imagine in her work to imagine in her, and in her option to put this work on the centre of her life. The results of Gleeson’s care is a novel about artwork which, splendidly, doesn’t romanticise it. Nell’s work seems each very important and mundane; often transcendent; typically exhausting.
Gleeson is superb, too, on the realities of this life. There’s its gruelling physicality – “Looping wires across the bushes, hoping branches would take the load of the audio system. The potential for electrocution” – and the limitless quest for money. “All of it circles again to cash ultimately,” Gleeson writes. Some concepts are by no means transformed to actuality. “Grimly filling out kinds, hawking the work in funding drives.” Nell dietary supplements her revenue by cleansing, and by giving guided excursions. She’s regarded by the island’s male inhabitants as “not spouse materials … Thank fuck for that”, however regardless of her insistence that she’s who she needs to be, her isolation is uneasy. It’s the value of being an artist, maybe – however ought to or not it’s? To query the private value of creating artwork isn’t, Gleeson suggests, the similar as questioning its worth.
In different respects, although typically lovely and by no means lower than readable, Hagstone is much less profitable. Of its different characters, whereas Nell’s on-off lover Cleary is tender, Maman, the founding father of a reclusive all-female commune, by no means absolutely coalesces. The motivations of each appear, at instances, opaque sufficient to be muddy. Cleary is invested in a relationship with Nell – “Nell senses he’s all in, after only a week” – after which, all of the sudden, he isn’t. Maman needs one of the best for the ladies below her care, however probably she doesn’t, and that is much less a thriller than it’s an unclarity. Nobody, least of all of the reader, appears to know what her agenda is, and this by no means fairly resolves; however for her to have the sort of creepiness she would have wanted to justify her half within the novel’s climax would have meant sacrificing ethical nuance.
A semi-supernatural sound, “a phenomena that plagues the island, with no warning or sample … [and] triggers different unexplained happenings” comes at pivotal moments; however though intriguing, it’s by no means central sufficient to really feel justified as a plot machine. In consequence the novel’s closing third, the place storytelling involves the fore, is underpowered. Plot feels imposed somewhat than rising from the actions of its members – a disgrace, because it implies that Nell’s closing selection, which could in any other case replicate backwards, requiring us to reexamine our responses to the novel’s provocations, lands too softly.
Gleeson’s earlier e-book, the nonfiction Constellations, was stylistically allusive – concepts have been launched and reintroduced, given the area to resonate. A research of feminine embodiment, it was by turns lyrical and livid, much less involved in drawing conclusions than in mapping territory.
Hagstone is at its finest when following an identical path. Early on we’re advised that Nell misplaced a cleansing job after she stood outdoors a vacation let watching its inhabitants having intercourse; later she lurks outdoors Cleary’s window. Questions are raised in regards to the relationship between artwork and voyeurism. At what level does a commentator grow to be an intruder, an observer a creep? The discomfort provoked by Nell’s actions is each highly effective and fascinating. Later, a useless whale is washed ashore. Nell takes pictures of its corpse and sends them to an absent Cleary as an alternative of nudes. Once more, Gleeson’s writing comes into its personal – there’s which means right here, definitely, however the reader should do the work of discovering it and, in doing so, take into account their very own preconceptions.
Remembering a critic who had, she thought, misunderstood her work, Nell says that “all she needed, all that she requested of an viewers was for them to be current, or curious”. There’s so much in Hagstone to be current for, and far to be interested in – however it additionally felt to me somewhat like two books blended collectively: one fashionable gothic; one a novel of concepts. Individually, Gleeson could be greater than able to writing both of them. I’m unsure many individuals may do each without delay.
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