Book Review: Signature of All Things

 


I was not a fan of Eat, Pray, Love. Well, let me be honest. I was a huge fan of "Eat" but "Pray, Love" got a bit much for me. Too much self-expose and precious prose.

So it was with some surprise that I found myself completely blown away by Gilbert's recent novel (her first fiction since 2000), The Signature of All Things: A Novel.


Now THIS is a book! No cutesy gimmick, no ironic authorial voicing, no sweet and contrived denouement. Just good solid plotting, wonderful characters, rich setting and careful, but submerged, research, and the tremendous act of imagination that makes reading a novel more fun than sitting around having a conversation with oneself!

I loved this book. I loved the botany, the liveliness of the ideas, the wonderful characters, and Alma herself. Set in the 19th Century, it felt like a 19th Century novel in its Dickensian richness and scope, and full and fleshly omniscient narrator.

A perfect anecdote to winter blues, the book is both a journey of the mind and a journey of the globe, evoking the steamy intensity of 19th Century scientific inquiry (Joseph Banks and Alfred Russell Wallace make actual appearances as characters, and Darwin and Linnaeus are in pages), as well as an homage to the sea faring literature of exploration a la Horatio Hornblower and Master and Commander that I also dearly love.

IF I were creating a mini-course on botany and evolutionary biology in literature, I would include this book, the stories of Andrea Barrett (Ship Fever: Stories and Servants of the Map: Stories, and Simon Mawer's Mendel's Dwarf


And as a nascent, extremely amateur botanical watercolorist, I love that one of the characters is a genius botanical artist and that drawings throughout the book as well as the endpapers contain botanical prints. Worth leaving the Kindle in the drawer for this one.

Gilbert spent three years reading botanical works as well as visiting botanical gardens in preparation for this book, and it shows. Following up a mega-seller memoir with a solid work of fiction is no mean feat and I think we have a serious novelist in the house.