Connect the Plots

On the day of a solar eclipse in New Zealand in 1988, teenager Laura Pearse leaves home to watch the event, then meet a friend for tennis. She never meets the friend; she never returns home. Her own eclipse is total. But her presence permeates this novel--as a ghost, a photograph, a memory, a symbol.

Ten years later, medievalist Patrick Mercer drives his car off a bridge in a suburb of London and ends up comatose in a hospital bed. He dreams of lecturing to a gaggle of animals on the uses of parchment. A little later, Colette, a college girl in New Zealand, begins to receive notes from “The Friends of Patrick Mercer” asking for letters that can be read to the comatose patient. She has no idea who this man might be.

Meanwhile, Ruth and Malcolm Pearse try to put their lives back together after the disappearance of their daughter. They have a second child. They move into a new home.

This is how Catherine Chidgey’s second novel, “The Strength of the Sun,” proceeds apace: Pieces of the story unspool, we backtrack and move forward in increments. All of these characters are connected, but the pattern is obscure until the final chapters. Some of these puzzles are explained in the course of the telling; some are left for the reader to sort out through inference and deduction. Like Sherlock Holmes, we need to sift the available evidence.

Chidgey writes: “Stories survive. Details survive. The colour of a jacket, threads of a conversation or song, the aroma of a meal--such details can survive years. But Colette had no recollection of Patrick, despite searching her memories of overseas again and again.... How could he have left no impression? How could there be no trace?” The phrase “Every contact leaves a trace” recurs throughout the novel, in exactly those words, in different places, different contexts. It sometimes refers to Patrick’s medieval books, which have been handled for centuries, or to lives that have been brushed past in transit or in line in a supermarket--all are somehow changed.

The melancholy that pervades this well-crafted tale is lightened with humor. As a child, Patrick had burned down the family home with a magnifying glass. Colette recalls her lopsided affair with her boyfriend while they backpacked through Europe. Ruth Pearse decides that she needs a vacation on the spur of the moment, disappearing one day, leaving a curt but reassuring note for nanny Colette and husband Malcolm.

Coming out of his coma, “Patrick thought of all the parchment manuscripts in the museum, all the books made of skin rather than paper: the bibles and breviaries and books of hours and herbals, the romances and bestiaries, the psalters, the passionales. He wondered what would happen if every one was unclasped and left to revert to its animal form. He imagined painted goats springing from the shelves; rustling, reconstituted sheep wandering the manuscripts room; deer and calves and squirrels and hares filling the museum corridors.”

The characters in this book spring from the pages; they yearn, puzzle, remember. They search for connections to make sense of their losses, their lives, past and present. None of it is neatly tied up or nailed down by the final pages, but we are left with a sense of continuation, of growth, a sense of life as a collection of preludes and sequels, of mysteries and discoveries.

In the middle of her puzzlings, Colette is alone in the Pearses’ former home, where she rents a room: “Colette shut the curtains and pulled the covers up under her chin. This is an old house, she told herself. They are old windows. Glass was a liquid, she recalled, and if left for long enough it sank and thickened, and played tricks on the eye ....” Likewise this eloquent, elliptical novel.