Lark and Termite by Jayne Anne Phillips is a lyrical myth of a novel, poetic in its writing, Faulknerian in its characters and plot, and powerful in its story. The story is a weaving back and forth of the connections of love, blood, and death that bind a soldier, his child, his wife, her daughter, and her sister, and of the responsibility that comes with connection.  The twisted lines of sanguinity and love — which child is whose child, who loves whom, who cares for whom — intersect with questions of war and death — who is killing whom, for what is the war carried out — and underlying all is the question of responsibility. From the most complicated of relationships (and there are a lot of those in this novel) to the unforeseen meeting of a soldier and two civilians in a dark and bloody tunnel, the human need to connect is underscored by the implicit agreement of the stronger to take care of the weaker.

There is a strong whiff of the supernatural and the unexplainable in the novel, including a shadowy social worker who steps in to provide what Lark needs to take care of her half-brother Termite; the blue ribbon of connection that exists over time and space between Termite and his father; and images of the orange cat and the tunnel of darkness, one in Korea, one in West Virginia. Lark herself, born out of a triangle of love, is almost a supernatural force of bravery and will, with her unbound patience, her gift for understanding Termite, her will to care for him no matter what, and her ability to see love where and when it appears.

Lark and Termite has great beauty and power as a story about love and death.  But there is a distance that comes with making characters that are meant to stand in for ideas of virtue, of sacrifice, of loss, or of abuse.  There is a cost to creating characters that are stranger or bigger than life: Phillips’ characters are unreal, untouchable, and unknowable.  It is interesting that the scenes that moved me most were the scenes of death, not love.  Phillips is almost operatic in her love scenes, but brutally attuned to real details in her scenes of death and loss. I cried when a character died because of Phillips’ acute details, both physical and mental, of the awareness, fear, and acceptance that accompanies the end of life. The plot that works in such a labyrinthine way to connect the love and death scenes of the novel is also on an operatic scale beyond reality but it works to convey both the strength and the invisibility of the bonds that tie, and of responsibility that can be evaded, but not denied.

Lark and Termite may not have characters drawn from a recognizable reality nor a plot that could stand up to cold-eyed scrutiny but I assume Phillips did not want to write a novel of realistic fiction, anyway.  What she has created with Lark and Termite is  a beautiful realization of her ambitions to explain the responsibility that comes with creating life, and with taking it away again.  She has reached deep in to the ether of the time and space-defying connections of blood and family, love and death and war, to create a haunting myth that is, in the end, an exaltation of life.