A novel about a couple that pushes against traditional expectations, moving with their dogs to the Irish countryside where they embed themselves in nature and make attempts to disappear from society.
... glacially beautiful ... I am almost certain it’s a ghost story, but it’s a novel that gives up its secrets warily ... I believe this novel will mean profoundly different things to different readers, because its own presiding spirit is surely Elizabeth Bishop, who worked so carefully at keeping feeling unspoken under the surface of her poetry, only revealing the heart through the physical world: she understood that emotion would shine out through detail, through specific, close observation. As if in tribute, Baume offers up an astonishing prose poem that keeps close religiously and lovingly to the physical throughout ... Bell, the female character, has a habit of 'touching things to draw blessedness out of them', and this is absolutely what Baume is doing throughout ... haunting and dreamlike and wonderful to read ... powerfully recalls the middle act of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, that heart-stoppingly moving depiction of time passing through an empty house, of loss accumulating ... At the novel’s end, Baume finally sends her protagonists up the mountain they live on, a climb they’ve been meaning to get round to for seven years. Looking back at their house with them, I felt I was given a revelation of what had been going on all this time – but what I saw will be very different from how the story looks in the eyes of others. That is the magic and the brilliance of this haunting, fathomlessly sad book.
Where a conventional novel might linger in the newness of the union, the strangeness of the move, most of the action in Seven Steeples is summarised in a matter of pages, the messy business of character and back story dispensed with in one striking sentence...It takes a writer of quality and courage to make narrative choices like this. Fans of Baume will know her to be both ... There is something both idyllic and apocalyptic about the scenario, which is ably rendered through an objective, unemotive tone, enlivened by Baume’s ethereal prose. The narrative style is unintrusive, a camera lens panning the surrounding world and recording the wonders of nature, before contrasting this with the clutter that can fill up a life; Marie Kondo meets literary fiction ... The lack of a plot, as such, will undoubtedly not appeal to some readers. But in another way, if plot is the causal chain that connects characters and events, then Seven Steeples is nothing but plot, which is to say the delineation of the daily life of a couple who have chosen to escape from society ... Baume is an original, and Seven Steeples is a unique book that asks the reader to think about the possibility of a world of one’s own.
Decay and neglect are the constant themes, and the descriptions are gorgeous. Line by line, Seven Steeples is one of the most beautiful novels I have ever read. But what’s strange is the utter lack of subtext. Usually, landscape indirectly illustrates the interior life of the characters and furthers the drama. But in Seven Steeples, there is absolutely no conflict between these two characters. By the end, Bell and Sigh have become one, 'a sole life,' undifferentiated. And though we are told that 'Bell and Sigh had been thoroughly infected by each other’s way of speaking. … By their seventh year, they spoke in a dialect of their own unconscious creation,' we never hear an exchange of dialogue between them ... Ultimately, the author seems to have fallen into a dangerous trap: being caught by an idea ... It’s just not true that two people can become one, and the novel feels limited by this conceit, which has the effect of shutting out the reader entirely. We know the minutiae of these lives in absolutely exquisite physical detail, but only in physical detail ... Baume’s descriptions of landscape are lovelier than I can express; you simply have to read them yourself. She is a poet who elevates the novel, on a linear level, to something higher. But I wish all these descriptions could have been anchored in drama and activated to mirror interior lives. Instead, they are beautiful, subtextless nothings. In that way, too, in lacking sustained drama, the author is a poet.
