Customer Reviews

The Chymical Wedding (Picador Books)

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It was a brief comment (surprisingly, a review of a different book) that caused me to seek Lindsay Clarke's *The Chymical Wedding;* so, during a recent trip to England, I haunted the bookstores. My wife grew frustrated ("This is a vacation!") and I grew frustrated ("Where is this danged book?!") but frustration became success, and then pleasure.

Based solely on the (English edition's) cover art and blurbs, I thought this novel would include some measure of the fantastic, of magic. There is magic, but it is in author Lindsay Clarke's prose - limpid, lambent, poetic - and in his wonderful, bewitching tale.

Clarke's conflation of poetry, magic, alchemy, relationships (strong and closely bound; failed and lacking the ties that bind), and time (as expressed via the parallel stories, and the demi-bridge between them that aging and reclusive Edward Nesbit manifests) simply fascinates the reader. Protagonist Alex Darken (clever name!) intrigues: the success he enjoys as poet is insufficient to overcome his failings as teacher, as husband, as person. His maladroit handling of his life leads him to `take a retreat,' the better to reassess the shambles. Once ensconced in Pigthle (the name of the rented cottage), he goes out for a walk and espies Edward and Laura, and then meets the town locals; there went his planned retreat from life...

I dare you to click on the link above and read the sample pages; I dare you to stop reading. I clicked the link, and found myself once again enchanted, bewitched, and down from the shelf came the novel to savor once again its heady brew. Highest recommendation.

If, as I was, you were put off by the synopsis of The Chymical Wedding, don't be. Normally I never read a book with the word "obsessive" in the blurb, and for those of you who don't either, I'd like to set the record straight. Lindsay Clarke's The Chymical Wedding is one of the best novels I have ever read. It may contain obessions, dark sides, self-centred fathers and tormented ministers but the mood of the novel is completely at odds with this description. It sits light to life. It's capable of encompassing all the vagaries of human existence in the way that the best nineteenth century novels did (I'm thinking particularly of Middlemarch). It deals with some very dark topics, true, but it's wistful, rather than tormented, and in a way that is very English. Of course it tells a story -- two stories, which are woven together compellingly. The characters in the present have to try to unravel what happened to people in the same place a hundred years ago. (If you liked Josephine Tey's The Daughter of Time, or are a fan of Penelope Lively, then you'll like this bit.) The Chymical Wedding has some pertinent things to say about the difficulties of being a man (or indeed human) in the late twentieth century. It looks at some aspects of the occult without the credulousness of the New Age movement, and finds them to occupy a very necessary, and long-forgotten place in our culture. They have been neglected to the detriment of our collective mental health. But, best of all, it has an effect at a very deep level. It tugs at you, as life tugs at Alex Darken, makes you sit up and take notice. The whole book is suffused with a greenish, golden light, which will stay with you long after you put it down.

Simply put, this is a wonderful book -- a thrilling intellectual romance whose complexity is used to reveal that when all is (literally) said and done, what lasts is what is simple and true. Readers of John Fowles, Umberto Eco, Toni Morrison, and even Ray Bradbury and Arthur C. Clarke will enjoy "The Chymical Wedding" immensely. Profoundly moving and deserving of a very wide audience.

A wonderful book: a thrilling intellectual romance and a serious meditation on the nature of love. Far and away the best of the strange spate of parallel-lives historical romances of the past several years. Readers of Fowles, Eco, Morrison, and even Bradbury and Arthur Clarke will enjoy "The Chymical Wedding" immensely. Profoundly moving, quite unforgettable.

I am so grateful to have a friend that passed this book on to me when she found a copy in a used bookstore. It is among the best works I have read. Lindsay Clarke has crafted a tightly woven bewitching story that draws the reader in from the start. The characters are engaging for both their strengths and their foibles, making them both real and complete. And their respective evolving quests, both within themselves and with the world around them, are so common to us all that the reader will probably see something of him/herself in all of the characters. I know little of alchemy but came away from the book wanting to read more on the topic, as well as embarking on a search for more of Mr. Clarke's novels. Never in my experience has a work of fiction prompted such simple but transformative revelations of consciousness - shifts in thought and perspective that come from the spell of the tale itself, not the preachings of either the author or one of the characters. By all means, read it!

When William Faulkner was asked what 20th Century American novelist he admired the most, he answered Thomas Wolfe, "Because he risked so much." The same might be said of this overwritten, hermetic, mystical whirligig of a novel penned by Clarke. He risks much and fails on so many accounts, but, at its best, the novel is a heart-rending, portentous risk. The novel involves two intertwining stories, one from the Victorian era, one contemporary (i.e. late 20th Century). Clarke does much better with the Victorian era. Indeed, I rather wish he had contented himself with the one era. He writes so much more poetically and fluently in this setting, and the characters involved are much more believable and threshed-out. Edwin Frere has a light footfall which "startles the air" and Louisa contemplates his face as ineffably sad, "sad as the sound of a cello on a rainy afternoon." The contemporary setting and characters are shadowy and trite by comparison and, more to the point, the whole mise-en-scène is annoyingly reminiscent of that in John Fowles' novel, The Magus, to which this half of The Chymical Wedding owes far too great a debt.

But, despite the litany of faults I find with this novel, it is a rarity; And despite the drawn out, ridiculous, papered-over, Hollywood/Hermetic ending - serving as representative of everything wrong with the book - it is worth the reading of it and stumbling across the pearls amidst the off-putting gobs of Hermetical paste because of its treatment of relations between the sexes. This particularly obtains in the Victorian section of the book. It is - how to phrase it - healthily unsettling for the modern mind (deluged as it is daily with multifarious meaningless imagery) to come across the passionate intensity in these gentle retiring souls and the extremes to which love takes them.

So, with many reservations, I recommend this book as a salubrious shock to the getting and spending modern sensibility, which Clarke pulls off adroitly in the best parts of the interlinked narratives:

"We wander through experience like dreamers, and what should be obvious at once too often becomes so only when the harm is done. We know it, and we forget it; then we wake in shock."

May the reader be woken in shock!

This book has stayed in my mind for years. It creates a strong atmosphere of light, darkness, and personal adventure, set in familiar places, with magic, strange things happening all the time on both a human and larger than human scale.

I just wanted to add another comment on this extraordinary book. I highly recommend it, and hope that you take it upon yourself to invest.

If you read this book, be prepared to change your life.

Lindsay Clarke's dull and overlong novel The Chymical Wedding starts off innocently enough, as a kind of poor man's Possession with hints of The French Lieutenant's Woman and, of course, alchemy, thrown in. For the first 150 pages, it is a reasonably well-written (although Clarke's increasingly purple prose begins to grate as the story progresses) exploration of the lives of six people in two periods of time as they attempt to discover the secrets of alchemy and make sense of their own troubled hearts. Before long, however, the book begins to drag. The (never particularly interesting) characters devolve into nothing more than the author's mouthpieces, spouting dense and muddled proclamations about symbolism, truth and love. Pretty soon, every conversation starts with a character making some senseless declaration, then wandering off on a tangent without explaining themselves.

For a book obsessed with the power of symbols and mysteries, The Chymical Wedding is surprisingly unsubtle. Towards the beginning of the book two women discuss Anne Bronte's The Tenant of Wildefell Hall, one of them declaring that no matter how ill-treated she is, the book's heroine has no right to leave her husband. Sure enough, 100 pages later, this woman leaves her own long-suffering and kind husband. The obvious comparison is bad enough, but Clarke feels the need to draw the readers' attention to it by making the other woman note the comparison herself. As for mystery, when it comes to the modern characters, they can't seem to wait to bare their every neurosis and disfunction on the page, leaving nothing to the reader's imagination. A man whose marriage has broken up is dealt a Tarot card bearing the image of a tower collapsing after a lightning strike. The symbolism is clear, but Clarke feels pressed to write an entire chapter in which the man's psyche is explored in connection to this card. Nor is this the only instance in which he prefers to tell rather than show - most of The Chymical Wedding seems to consist of excerpts from a tract on the merits of a non-rational approach to life and the limits of thought and reason, in which the characters and the story are lost.

Towards the end of the book, I was reading merely out of a sense of obligation. I didn't care about the dull characters and their dull lives. I knew what would happen and was none too pleased with Clarke's glacial pace of approaching the obvious and unexciting events that would bring the story to its merciful close. The Chymical Wedding is clearly meant to be a treatise first and a novel second, and so it fails on both counts. It is strange that a novel so concerned with the importance of imagination and feeling - with their superiority over reason, in fact - should contain so little of both.