Tom's Two Cents: The Signature of All Things

 

Elizabeth Gilbert's novel, the first to follow her phenomenally successful memoir "Eat, Pray, Love," is, with the exception of Part Four, as different from that work as one can imagine, so fans of EPL, be forewarned!  Except for Part Four (which I will eventually deal with) don't expect many similarities.  The heroine of "Signature" is a brilliant but unattractive female botanist (yes, I said botanist!) who was born at the turn of the 19th (yes, I said 19th!) century and lives into her nineties, writing a thesis on the evolution of mosses (yes, I said mosses!) that almost precedes but certainly correlates with the publication of Darwin's "Origin of Species."  In its broadest sense this is a work that celebrates the intellect, particularly the female intellect, which was pretty much kept under wraps in the field of science, until Madame Curie won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1901.

 Well, you may be saying, then what is this?  I would say, with a certain amount of hesitation, that, except for Part Four (yes, I WILL get to it shortly!) this is not a mainstream novel, that it even has certain literary and historical (definitely) aspirations, that for the most part it is extremely well researched and well written.  That said, it is still a bit of a puzzle to me because by the end of Part Three and certainly in Part Four it becomes another novel, one about a woman's desperate love of something, i.e. someONE, other than knowledge.  And as such it virtually falls into the category of a "love/romance unfulfilled" romance novel.  It's almost as if Elizabeth Gilbert's publisher, the highly respected Viking, said to her: "Elizabeth, this is a great story, but you've got to sex it up."  And so, without much rhyme or reason, she did!

Now a few specifics about the novel itself:  This is not a plot or event driven work. It relies primarily on its characters (some are terrifically delineated, others not) and its ideas, of which there are so many to chew on that the work in its total sense is not easily digestible.  For a non-scientist like myself, there is also so much scientific detail that at times I was exhausted, yet never compelled to stop reading.  This is without question a tribute to the skills of the author, who creates a totally unforgettable character in her heroine, Alma, and an equally unforgettable one in Roger, the dog. (I am reminded of what Turgenev said about Tolstoy, that he could get into the mind of a horse!)  Alma, her mother Beatrix, her rascally but shrewd father, the wonderful maid Hanneke (not since Margaret Mitchell's Mammy have I encountered such a fine characterization), all these are superbly drawn.  But at intervals there are characters so perplexing, i. e. Prudence, Ambrose, the Tahitian Adonis/Jesus, called Tomorrow Morning (yes, that is his name not translated but borrowed from Tahitian sound) that they seem more symbolic than real.

As to Part IV, the next to last of five major sections of this book, I would say that though Gilbert is too fine an author to deliberately appeal to prurient interests, that is precisely what she manages to do for those whose interest may be prurient.  Also, since the title of this section is "The Consequences of Missions," one cannot help but wonder about the possible implicit criticism of 19th century missionaries in the South Seas.  Regardless of that, this part (and only this part) reads like a leftover section of EPL, except for its being 150 years earlier, and could almost have been omitted without any deliberate injury to the story.  Alma's trip to primitive Tahiti adds very little to her overall journey into the world of mosses (the cave of brilliant mosses that she finds there could surely have been transferred elsewhere!) and it certainly does not resolve the questions revolving around her strange relationship with her husband Ambrose, who at times believes himself to be an angel or an emissary to angels.  Plausible?  Not here-- this is a book about a scientist, who despite temptations, never wavers from her belief in factual reality.

The book is beautifully presented with botanical endpapers and lovely drawings in black and white between the individual parts.  It is dedicated to Elizabeth Gilbert's grandmother, who may well have been the model for its heroine, Alma Whittaker.  If so, she must have been quite a woman indeed!