Another Green World

I’ve just finished Elizabeth Hand’s “Mortal Love”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0061051705/henryfarrell-20, which I recommend very highly; it’s the best novel she’s ever written. Her earlier work is sometimes extraordinary (if you can find a copy of _Winterlong_, buy it without hesitating) but it’s never quite under control – one has the impression of an artist struggling with her materials and every once in a while being overwhelmed by them. She’s overcome this in her recent shorter work – in particular “Cleopatra Brimstone,” and “The Least Trumps”:http://www.conjunctions.com/njarchive.htm. Both these stories have a technical mastery that was only sporadically present in her early work. They’re acute and sharp.

_Mortal Love_ repeats this success at novel length. It has a wealth of materials – Richard Dadd (lightly disguised), Pre-Raphaelites, “Henry Darger”:http://www.elizabethhand.com/darger.htm style outsider art – but handles them with style, grace and economy.

There are some splendid sketches of Victorian aesthetes and their world – a garrulous and malicious Swinburne, and a formidable, oracular Lady Wilde:

bq. “I refer to your genius. If you do not have one, Mr Comstock, you will fail. If you do find one, it will devour you. It will destroy you, but in that case we will have your paintings to remind us of you in the event we want to be reminded.”

bq. She seemed to consider this extremely unlikely.

The novel has the virtue of presenting these individuals as they conceivably might have appeared to themselves. Pre-Raphaelite art, far from being trite Arthurian kitsch, is dangerous and infused with sex. Just as “The Least Trumps” riffs on John Crowley’s _Little, Big_, so _Mortal Love_ borrows a central image (the green woman, who contains worlds within herself) from Mike Harrison’s short story, “Anima”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1892389339/henryfarrell-20 (‘Whatever lives here loves us. I know it does. But it only loves us once’). Yet the book isn’t in any sense derivative; it argues with this material and transforms it. Hand presents us with a “muse”:http://www.elizabethhand.com/beckoning.htm who has her own, barely comprehensible motivations, who does not properly know herself, but who is endlessly fascinated with the traces that humans leave in the world through their art. _Mortal Love_ ends not only with an apotheosis, but with two more intimate forms of transcendence – a once-mediocre writer who finds his art without losing himself, and an immortal who proves to have once been capable of creating art because of her loss and her fall. It’s an important book.