Leonora Carrington's THE HEARING TRUMPET

Houses are really bodies. We connect ourselves with walls, roofs, and objects just as we hang on to our livers, skeletons, flesh and bloodstream. I am no beauty, no mirror is necessary to assure me of this absolute fact. Nevertheless I have a death grip on this haggard frame as if it were the limpid body of Venus herself.

Did you dig One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest but kind of wish you could read it gender-flipped? Did you adore the television series Waiting for God but wish you could actually observe all of Tom Ballard's tall tales but as directed by someone like Lindsay Anderson? Leonora Carrington, my new other favorite sculptor-turned novelist, whom I might end up loving even more than sculptor-turned-novelist B. Catling, has you covered and then some.

I do not invoke Ken Kesey's masterpiece, nor my very favorite Britcom* at all lightly, as we'll see.

The text at the beginning of this post is an early declaration from our heroine, Mrs. Marian Leatherby, who has lived some 15 years with her son, daughter-in-law, grandson, two cats and a red hen and spent her days swapping tall tales with her best friend, Carmella, and sucking violet-flavored lozenges on Carmella's porch -- until one day, the very day Carmella gives her the titular hearing trumpet as a gift, Marian learns via the eavesdropping superpowers it gives her that her family considers her not only a burden but as a disgusting one** and is plotting to send her to live in an institution.

In her beastly family's defense, Marian is given to flights of fancy, very vivid and detailed ones in which she hallucinates entire chapters of her old life that blend almost seamlessly, from her point of view, into present conflicts. She freely admits this herself, telling us early on that "Sleeping and waking are not quite as distinctive as they used to be, I often mix them up." This establishes right away that we're in unreliable narrator territory for what's to come. And oh, what's to come.

The Lightshome (at least that's what I think they called it; ahh, audiobooks!) Home for Senile Old Ladies is a very unusual institution, to say the least. Run by a husband and wife team very much in the Big Nurse role (though not as effective), and rejoicing in the surname of Gambit. Dr. Gambit. Mrs. Gambit. Bahahahaha!), the place has just eight residents when Marian comes to be the ninth. With two exceptions, each resident lives in her own "bungalow" but these quarters are not just cute little houses. No, they are cute little houses in very fanciful forms: a boot, meaning there is at least one Little Old Lady Who Lives in a Shoe, a birthday cake, a cuckoo clock, and Marian herself comes to live in what sounds at first like a lighthouse but might actually be a watchtower, the first floor of which is a masterpiece of trompe-l'œil, appearing to be chock full of useful furniture including a bookcase full of books, but only actually offering a single plain chair. This feels like foreshadowing about something or other that will happen later, but I guess it's just there for the sake of being weird, but that's okay, Leonora Carrington, last of the original Surrealists, can be just as weird as she wants, especially when...

Especially when her story is being narrated by the great Dame Jane Elizabeth Ailwên Phillips, aka Siân Phillips, aka Livia from I, Claudius and Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohaim in David Lynch's Dune, that Siân Phillips and of course I had no business being surprised she could be this flat-out funny but oh my goodness, is she flat-out funny, even if the best wit has a menacing undertone that might not have been what Carrington intended but then again, Siân Phillips saw something in there that made her think of menace and I sure as hell ain't gonna argue with a lady packing a gom jabbar, are you?

Anyway. Marian is quickly embroiled in all kinds of weird little intrigues as she gets to know her fellow residents and the weird regime under which they live. Lightshome is not an expensive place in which to warehouse your unwanted elderly, and part of why is that the residents must help out with the kitchen and gardening work to keep the place going, and must also subject themselves to a weird experiment in spiritual discipline in the form of what Dr. Gambit and his wife (whose permanent strenuous yet unfriendly smile has earned her the nickname of Rachel Rictus behind her back) refer to as The Work. We don't see a lot of this, except at meals, when the ladies are required to listen to one of Dr. Gambit's bizarre lectures about the need for self-regulation and continued effort towards one's moral betterment. For instance, Marian, Dr. Gambit quickly notes, eats way too much cauliflower and this gluttony -- for a vegetable most people have to make an effort to acquire a taste for -- is a great impediment to her spiritual development, as is her tendency not to take "The Movements"*** seriously.

Quickly, Marian finds an escape from Dr. Gambit's hectoring in the form of contemplating a strange image on the wall in the dining room, of a nun who is either blind in one eye or winking at the viewer. As the story unfolds, Marian creates a whole backstory for "The Winking Abbess" only to find that it's true, down to the sonorous and elaborate Spanish name Marian dreamed up for this person. We get a full minisode in the novel's middle that is devoted to this story, which involves witchcraft, impersonation, cross dressing, attempted robbery, Templars and the Holy Grail, all delightfully and breathlessly told via a chronicle a resident smuggles to Marian, which purports to quote directly from period sources of unimpeachable accuracy and is clearly the part that Phillips best enjoyed narrating to us because WOW.

And things get even weirder. Apocalyptically so. Murders occur. Hunger strikes, too. And suddenly there's a new Ice Age?

And I haven't even gotten around to Marian's friend Carmella, who keeps coming up with hare-brained schemes to break Marian out of Lightshome, which she and Marian convinced themselves would be indistinguishable from a penitentiary complete with vicious police dogs, barred windows and hard labor. First Carmella is going to land a helicopter (which she will win in a lottery) and whisk Marian away to safety; later in letters she appears to have decided that it is best to dig a tunnel from her home to the institution's grounds and sneak Marian out that way -- and apparently actually starts digging it, because how else explain how she [REDACTED] and [REDACTED] and can suddenly afford to [REDACTED] and hire a [REDACTED] to [REDACTED]?

Nor can I even begin to describe Marian's fellow residents, each of whom has her own set of quirks and pecadillos and petty grievances and delusions, all of which prove to be at least somewhat germaine to the novel's denouement which involves the Holy Grail again, with these residents being chosen not only to survive an environmental apocalypse that was predicted in a series of riddles they had to solve before getting to meet a secret extra resident but also to restore the Holy Grail to the original Mother Goddess whose earthly avatar is none other than The Winking Abbess.

All this in not quite seven hours of listening (or about 200 pages), which felt far too short; as I mentioned a few times on Twitter, this is a book I very much wanted to savor slowly but compulsively could not stop listening to and it's going to be hard to top for my favorite read of this silly second year of 2020 And Some Months and yes, I know it's only January, but really, I'm not sure that this isn't my favorite read of this stupid decade, maybe even this excreble century. Yeah. It's that great.

*Yes, I love it even more than Blackadder. Because Graham Crowden. And also Stephanie Cole.

**Not that we're shown any evidence that she is in any way disgusting, apart from sporting a bit of a little grey beard because she's stopped plucking her Old Lady Whiskers; still sound of body, of clean and regular habits, not given to outbursts or intrusions. She is given to elaborate flights of fancy involving vivid and improbable memories of her past, but her primary sin appears to be that she is old, doesn't like the television her grandson has introduced to the home, and doesn't like her daughter-in-law very much.

***These, as described, made me wonder hard whether Brit Marling or another of her co-creators of The OA is a fan of this novel. Which means yes, I kept waiting for the Movements to turn out to be intended to open some kind of portal and, honestly, given the strange way this novel ends, they could have had that effect? Or maybe something else did it? Who knows?