| Yesterday I read Martin Corrick’s By Chance. I loved this book. There is so much here in just 229 pages, so much for me to think about for a long time. I have to think about how Corrick presents words: words are a key character in this book. The narrator, James Bolsover, is a man enthralled by words and the power of words to create order out of chaos. He believes that words and the names we give to things, the list we put things on and the definitions we give them, help us through the muddle of existing. The power of words. He uses words to create understanding, both of difficult technical issues (he is an engineer) and of the really big questions, like tragedy (Bolsover struggles to define it), seduction (and desire: Bolsover struggles more) and culpability (the biggest struggle of all for our Bolsover: how much is anything our fault? Too much in some ways, too little, in others). Bolsover uses words most charmingly when he creates a beautiful, fictional place to allow his wife to bloom, much as she creates a garden to allow her flowers space and light and air to bloom. But what happens when words fail? Perhaps that is the definition of tragedy.
I have to think about Bolsover’s question, early in the book, “If fiction is not concerned to understand, what is its subject? Is its purpose merely to pass the time?“ No, the purpose of great writing — and reading great books — is most definitely to understand. Corrick is clearly a man of words and a righteous preacher for their power. I believe in the power of a great writer to cobble together words and deliver to us, the readers, a new way of seeing and hearing and understanding. I believe in the power of writers to bring things together, to mesh (borrowing a word used in By Chance at different points) different ways of looking at something into a cohesive and yet unique and distinct way of looking at everything. That is why I began this year of reading: to be a glutton and get everything out of reading that I can….and to find a way out of the windowless room of sorrow where I sometimes find myself, the room where my sister died. “I want…, I want… ” writes poet Jane Hirshfield in her poem “Lake and Maple” and Corrick delivers. Corrick delivers what readers want with every beautiful sentence and each fully rounded thought, in his completely articulated vision and his perfectly realized (and very real) characters, and even in the half-wisps of this and that he throws out via Bolsover’s roving thoughts, wisps that add up in the end to a conclusion reached well before poor old Bolsover climbs the hill. Words alone are not enough, though. Here enters “chance.” Corrick shows us that the opposite of tragedy is the chance occurrence of a human reaching understanding through words: we reach glory, grace, peace, through understanding. Corrick writes of the birds having wings, and using them to fly, that is why they have wings. And we have emotions and understanding; we have hearts to feel and brains to read with, and that is how we fly. I have to think about the plot twist that Corrick pitches at us. I don’t love twists generally. Nor did I find this twist necessary: Bolsover would have gotten to his bench on the hill overlooking the ocean regardless. His questions and his searchings for the way to fix things runs up against the absolutely unfixable fact of death. Afterwards he feels guilt, twist or not twist. It is human, frailly and beautifully so, to feel guilt when someone dies. Guilt that we did not do enough for them when they were alive, guilt that we did not fight hard enough for their survival or that we fought the wrong way, guilt that we are still alive and desiring and wanting more life. Twist or no twist, Bolsover reaches his conclusion on the hill by chance but not really: there is no chance that such a thinker as he is could not reach the conclusion that he does. Corrick writes so beautifully and convincingly and easily, like the best poetry really, that I could take his plot twist and like it too. More to think about: my response to By Chance. I am not sure that what I struggled through and came away with is the same experience as others have had and will have in reading this marvelous and carefully built book. We all bring our personal stories to a book we are reading. Martin Corrick’s narrator and his circling thoughts resonated with me so much, and will ring true with any reader who has ever thought about the big stuff. And who hasn’t? And who has not reached a certain age without knowing sorrow and guilt and pain? The cycling of questions, the desire to know and understand and above all, to fix; the love and guilt and sorrow, I have been through it and know the horror of what cannot be fixed and the way the world continues on: earth and universe don’t care about one “tragedy” or mistake or loss or failure. But Martin Corrick does, and his book helps us all. To understand and to fly. |
