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player ready...The romance of the archive is a puzzling genre. A.S. Byatt’s “Possession,” in which archival research unearths a Victorian love scandal and causes modern-day entanglements, is exemplary; brilliant, but hardly reflective of the prosaic realities of the reading room, where one can spend hundreds of hours enlivened chiefly by the sound of an air conditioner thumping to life.
In the muffled environment of the research library, even the most minuscule discoveries feel like revelations; nevertheless, its best balladeers know to leaven their historiography with a high-stakes story in the present tense.Canadian author Aislinn Hunter’s second novel, “The World Before Us,” attempts to do just that. Jane Standen, archivist for a moribund museum of Victorian curiosities, is researching the fate of a nameless girl who disappeared from a lunatic asylum in 1877. Jane is drawn to the mystery both because of a suspected link to the founder of the Chester Museum, where she works, and also because there’s a missing girl in her own past: a 5-year-old who vanished when Jane, then 15, was babysitting her. Still, 20 years later, the incident paralyzes the adult Jane with guilt. Filling out Jane’s resume of past tragedies is a neglectful musician father, an overachieving mother from an aristocratic family, and the hint, never confirmed, that Jane may have been abused by the vanished girl’s father, on whom she had a schoolgirl crush. Meanwhile, Jane’s research into the asylum attracts a bevy of ghosts, presumably former inmates, who watch and comment on her progress like a demented Greek chorus.
Hunter is an award-winning poet, and the ghosts deliver their observations in a first-person plural that is often hypnotically beautiful. They also have a habit of interrupting Jane’s story just as it is getting interesting with their musings on history and the nature of existence: “Look around you: everywhere life forces wanting to get out, things unintentionally contained, baskets of energy. One of us believes we are like atoms with no centre; the one who likes clocks says we are lost time. Another believes we are poems, another thinks we are dreams meant to sort useless information, another thinks we are like sheets set out on the summer line, holding fists of air. We all believe we are Here.” And so on.
Though musical and occasionally compelling, such frequent and lengthy interruptions can’t help but distract from the subdued present-day plot, in which the most acute moment of conflict is when a woman slaps a man, then runs away to do research on her own without leaving a note. The cast of historical characters Jane is researching, though fascinating — an asylum full of lunatics, an eminent Victorian collector and his philandering wife, a sadistic electroshock therapist — similarly suffer from the book’s dreamy diffuseness. New mysteries surface but are swirled away, sometimes never to be seen again.
For Hunter, this dance of deferred revelation is surely deliberate; as the chorus of ghosts informs us, “History is shifty; it looks out for itself, moves when you least expect it.” However, there is something a bit disingenuous about the determination to dodge determinacy, which verges itself on a kind of naivete. The best historical fiction — say, Hilary Mantel’s “Wolf Hall” — neither hides its relationship to the archive, nor underestimates its readers’ skepticism toward historical reconstruction. Nevertheless, it illuminates. There is something frustrating about being presented with unsolvable mysteries, seemingly invented for the sake of unsettling long-outdated beliefs in our ability to view our own past objectively. The danger of refusing to try, however, is a kind of solipsistic collapse in which the ghosts of history are doomed forever to revolve around us: “We watch Jane watching herself, watching the girl she was before we met her.”
That is not to say there are not real pleasures to be had in “The World Before Us.” Hunter’s vocabulary for describing the natural and man-made world rivals Byatt’s for breadth and dazzling specificity; her novel is a curiosity cabinet of gorgeous descriptions, from flocks of taxidermied hummingbirds to landscapes of “nattering grasses” and “pollarded oaks.” Wherever possible, Hunter eschews genus for species, mere birds for throstles and passerines, giving the prose an appealing Victorian chewiness. Fertilized by this richly decaying past, Jane gets her inch or two of growth in the end, as we all do, by moving on.
Amy Gentry is a writer living in Austin, Texas. She has a doctorate degree in English and writes a weekly style column called The Good Eye.
“The World Before Us”
By Aislinn Hunter, Hogarth, 354 pages, $26