"Dark Water" by Elizabeth Lowry

Set in the middle of the 1800s, a young doctor is working as assistant surgeon, Hiram Carver, the narrator, on a US naval ship and becomes fascinated by one of the officers, William Borden, who, on a previous voyage, survived months adrift in the Pacific in a small boat following a mutiny. The doctor subsequently takes a job in a Lunatic Asylum where he developing understanding of the relationship between lunacy and sanity is challenged by his growing knowledge of what happened on that small boat.

This is modern Gothic. Jerrold Hogle, in Gothic Fiction, states that “A Gothic tale usually takes place (at least some of the time) in an antiquated or seemingly antiquated space" in this case the Asylum, in which "are hidden some secrets from the past (sometimes the recent past) that haunt the characters". Dark Water contains supernatural events: the Hero of the mutiny is presented in some ways as a god or a priest demanding sacrifices, for example when a sailor is flogged on a becalmed ship at which point the wind begins to blow. The finale takes place on a cliff edge, the liminal space between land and sea, and the doctor has a vision of a mysterious bird. The subject of madness is, of course, archetypal Gothic. And there are times when the writing becomes as purple as traditional Gothic:

• "It was the sparrow that fell, dead, to the ground. It was the caterpillar sleeping in its chrysalis and the fish hatching in the cusp of the wave. It was the worm curled around the rose ... It was the rock and the wave that smashed the rock." (p 444)
• "I plummeted into the sea's dark embrace, and sank. It was cold, and it was not. It was hot, and it was not. It was precisely as hot and cold as my own blood." (p 446)

I detected notes of Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre.

The structure of the book is interesting. My edition was 464 pages long. The first part (64 pages, about 14%) is set on board the ship. The next 44 pages (9%) deals with the new job at the Asylum. So we are nearly one quarter of the way through when ship and Asylum intersect. During the next 194 (40%) pages there is a 40 page (9%) interlude during which we learn what happened on the small boat in the Pacific. The next section (another 10%) deals with Carver unscrupulously making progress in his career before we reach the denouement, again nearly a quarter of the book, which contains Borden's 35 page story of his life.  I found this pattern slightly arrhythmic. My reading surged forward at some points and dawdled at others. Some of the sub-plots concerning patients seemed to distract rather than to contribute to the plot.

There were moments of great writing though. There were some wonderful descriptions:

• "An orange moon lolled on the mizzenmast" (p 6)
• "The horizon was swagged with clouds that piled up overhead in a rolling mass, its black bole split by a purple artery trailing ghoulish light like blood from a wound." (p 32)
• "My eyeballs stung from the wine I'd drunk the night before." (p 81)
• "She was dressed for worship in a skirt like the puddle on a butcher's block" (p 155)As well as being a great way of saying 'red' this is a lovely bit of pathetic fallacy, linking church to butchery and so continuing the theme of sacrifice.

There were some profound insights:

• "That's what wanting is. The looking for what you cannot have." (p 27)
• "You can't command before you have learned obedience." (p 27)
• "Here we are, piloting a wood-shaving over an abyss. Is there a better definition of madness?" (p 60)
• "These laws have been passed by our legislators. Are we wiser or better than they are? .... Shouldn't we be? Our legislators have been elected by us." (p 79)
• "I have sometimes wondered if wealth itself - and its first cousin, social importance - shouldn't be recognized as infectious agents, so productive are they of distorted cognition, particularly of delusional feelings of merit." (p 103)

An interesting reinterpretation of the Gothic genre with themes of madness and sacrifice.

October 2018; 464 pages