|
|
 |
| |
Tracy Chevalier, above, combines the real and the imagined in her story of a little-known 19th-century fossil-hunter. |
Chevalier’s remarkable fossil pearl
Tracy Chevalier’s latest novel reimagines the scientific discoveries of a poor Dorset woman who was written out of history, writes Piers Plowright
Remarkable Creatures.
By Tracy Chevalier. Harper Collins £15.99
SHE'S done it again – the woman who brought us the girl with Vermeer’s pearl earring and the family that lived next door to William Blake in Lambeth has turned her attention to the Dorset woman who got there before the scientists in Jane Austen’s England.
Tracy Chevalier’s gift for joining history and romance, the real and the imagined, the great and the small, is remarkable. And it shouldn’t work.
That great spy of the human heart, Henry James, thought all such literary crossovers were doomed to failure: “You may multiply the little facts that can be got from pictures and documents, relics and prints, as much as you like” but, in the end, he wrote, “it’s all humbug!”
In other words,
the trouble with embroidering a story round known facts and real people is that the true bits make the untrue bits sound silly.
And there are plenty of examples to prove James’s point, from medieval bodice-rippers to unconvincing recreations of Georgian romance and politics.
Chevalier’s talent is to take a real situation that encloses a mystery and run with it. Who is the girl in Vermeer’s haunting picture and what is she thinking? What would happen if you introduced a country family looking for work into the political ferment of late 18th-century London and bumped them up against the eccentric William Blake? How did an uneducated Lyme Regis woman discover things that the brightest scientific minds were still searching for and why was she subsequently written out of history? Or almost.
Mary Anning – the subject of the Highgate-based author’s latest novel Remarkable Creatures – was one of two surviving children of a West Country carpenter and cabinet-maker who died of tuberculosis at 44, leaving his children to survive by hunting for fossils in the cliffs of Lyme Regis and selling them to tourists.
Mary, already the survivor of a direct hit by lightning in 1800 when she was 15 months old, showed an uncanny aptitude for discovery. She found a complete skeleton of an ichthyosaur when she was 12 and then a procession of prehistoric creatures that jumped her out of commerce and put her in touch with the leading British and French geologists and paleontologists of the day.
It was they, in the end, who got the glory and, as John Fowles noted in The French Lieutenant’s Woman: “Though many scientists of the day gratefully used her finds to establish their own reputation, not one native type bears the name anningi”.
Fastening on to this “unfinished” story, Chevalier has given Mary Anning a second family, the Philpot sisters, genteel, unmarried, and, in Elizabeth, the older sister, an accomplice and rival in exploration and love, as well as a way of jumping the class and sex barriers of the time.
The story is told from the viewpoints of the two women, in their very different styles.
Famous people float by: Jane Austen, glimpsed at the Lyme Regis Assembly Rooms, which she is known to have visited (she was, incidentally, a real-life and dissatisfied customer of Mary Anning’s dad – Charles Lyell, the geologist and Darwin’s mentor, and Baron Cuvier, the leading French zoologist).
But this book is no mere procession of facts and well-known names.
The warmth and energy of the main characters, real and unreal, set against the background drama of evolution in which Mary Anning plays such a big part, keep the reader turning the pages like a fossil hunter in pursuit of another revelation.
Mary Anning did get some recognition after her death – a stained glass window in the church of St Michael
the Archangel in Lyme Regis pays tribute to her “usefulness in furthering the science of geology, her benevolence of heart and integrity of life”.
But it is Chevalier’s own tribute that now makes those words live for 21st century readers.
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
