The Still Point -- Amy Sackville

I got this book from the British Library.  It won the John Llewellyn Rhys prize last year, which does not surprise me.  For a debut novel, it is breathtaking in scope, with an admirable richness of language and imagery.

The theme of the story is the vast cold space of the Arctic.  This is a many-layered story with two parallel lives running together, a hundred years apart, both lives frustratingly unresolved for a considerable length of time.  The span of the story is one day from sunrise to sunset and explores the complexity of marriage in both its extremes of adventurousness and stillness. 

The story begins as we observe Julia just in the process of awakening to a new day, in bed with her husband Simon.  Back against back, feet touching feet and with knees bent, 'they form an uneven outline of an urn.'  With this start, we get an aerial view of the lives in whose stories we are going to engross ourselves in.  This middle-aged couple toss and turn through the night, dreaming the same thing -- the pervading chill of the Arctic.  To Julia still point refers to the top of the world where she could stand while the globe spun beneath her.  But while the Arctic means a vast space filled with blues and whites and indigos and calm to Julia, it is a place of darkness and silence and death to her husband who does not understand it in the same way that she does and is irked at the way its very idea has taken ahold of his wife.

“It is not fixed,” muses Simon, “it isn’t still at all…the still point wobbles…There is no great rod in space, holding her steady through her middle”. 

First envisioned as a short story, it eventually expanded into this refreshing and enthralling parallel tale of a doomed love story and a crumbling marriage, separated by a hundred years.  Julia has always relived the story of her great grand uncle Edward's failed Arctic expedition from which he never returned home, leaving his young bride Emily Mackly a widow, never knowing what exactly had happened to him, and believing for the longest time -- having lived sixty years with no news whatsoever -- that he was still wandering in the vast coldness at the top of the world, seeking a way home to her.  She lives with her sister and brother-in-law the remainder of her life, mourning and holding a deep unhappy secret of her own.

This colourful story is passed down the generation to Julia and her sister Miranda (the more practical one of the two), narrated by Aunt Helen who had heard it from Emily herself.  Julia hugs this romantic version of the brief marriage and lengthy widowhood to her heart wherever she goes.  Her own marriage now is developing cracks.  Simon and Julia have moved to the old house owned by Aunt Helen and which holds the relics of this old story.  Simon has been through a disturbing experience that he fears might upset the balance between him and his wife.  And Julia's obsession is only causing them to drift further apart.

Julia is aware of something being amiss between them but chooses to put it aside for matters that are more pressing to her.  We watch her through the day as she sorts out the old stuff in the attic, boxes that belonged to Edward that had been eventually been returned when his body was discovered, thus reliving her favorite story once more.  She does, at some point, realize the futility of her obsession with Edward and Emily, a story that is a hundred years old.

What use is it all, after all; what purpose in disturbing the dust?  These relics and facts and guesses cannot come near to the sum of the man she is seeking.  They are not the man that strides through her dreams, and they are nothing like the Edward that Emily remembered.

Julia comes across the old diaries that contain Edward's entries, right up to the time when he had to finally admit defeat:.  But even these cannot add anything more to what she already knows:

She knows the story so well that she cannot remember the last time she read it first hand.

But relive it all she does, in the vivid colors of her imagination.  The story has resided in her for so long that it is now second nature to her and the characters are held in a reverent exaltation in her mind.  She imagines entire scenes of that fateful expedition that claims Edward's life.

Just as it is almost impossible on a day such as this one to magine the need of a woollen sweater or a blazing fire, so after many months in the north and weeks of walking in the cutting wind, Edward could not now imagine heat... The snow, blown by cross winds, was scalloped and smoothened and ruffled like icing in striations of shadowed blue... Sastrugi - The Russian taught him the word, shaped with a knife ... It was beautiful, he thought, as they stood in despair looking out at the sculpted surface.  Like an ocean in arrest.  Crests and flats, the light trapped in hollows, elsewhere deep blue shadows pooling, or a roseate rainbow in a translucent arc of ice; in places the snow curved over itself, a wave in teh moment before breaking, creating a cave that he longed to curl into.

The mounting difficulties become evident as Edward's team continues on its course of doom, becoming a part of their everyday lives, while the old habits of the civilized world fade away in the background.  They take heart in self-imposed routines that help them keep track of passing time:

Ritual meets bodily needs, but the mind and spirit, too, survive by it.  When there is no land below, just the false cruel floes that shift underfoot and drag the traveller back to where they came from, so that nothing is sure, and when, too, the division of days is lost in the relentless light, so that the world itself seems to have foregone the cycles that once seemed so sure, a man needs this... As they rested, they imagined the rituals of home ... and these imaginings, too, were a ritual, to remind themselves they were not animals - a ritual indulged in as they whiled away the sunlit evening hours picking lice from their furs like monkeys.

In the midst of this cleaning up of old relics and stories, Julia is aware of the state of her own marriage and faces it with trepidation.  She does small favors for her husband, such as relocating his prized butterfly collection -- butterflies was how they met in the first place -- to a more visible area in the house, so that it could command his attention.

The day progresses, but is not done yet.  She expects her cousin for tea, he having promised to visit her.  His arrival brings an unexpected and  shocking revelation, something that will upset the delicate threads of the romantic story she has cherished all her life, a surprise that will make her look at herself differently and to crush all idealistic ideas of romance from her mind.  In the process, Julia and Simon, enveloped in their separate problems that eventually find some resolution, turn to each other for some comfort and reassurance, and the day ends on a much better note than it had started with.

I love this book.  It is so beautifully written.  The prose is colorful and unhurried, and the story is easily visualized.  It's almost as if the narrator is gently and carefully pulling aside the curtains and giving us a privileged glimpse into the lives of these people without their knowing it.  Love and sorrow, betrayal and forgiveness, self-discovery, loneliness and waiting, are all woven together in this one eventful day and the result is something elegant and precious.  I shall return to this book often over the years, just to recapture the glow it has left me with.  A masterpiece.