Mortal Love

There is a twinge of terror in the heart of any good fairy tale - a touch of awe, or a sense of how small we really are in the face of the unknown, tiny mortal creatures huddled together in the dark. Hand captures this feeling better than anyone, and it lends a delicious, haunting edge to this story about the pleasures and perils of courting the muse. ( )

A part of me would rather not talk about MORTAL LOVE.

The books I love the most sometimes render me incoherent. This incoherent state generally goes hand in hand with verbosity--I have tons to say, but I don’t know exactly how I want to say it.

This is sort of like that, but upside down. I loved MORTAL LOVE and am sure I could say tons about it in as incoherent a fashion as one might wish, but I rather want to keep it for me.

I’ve obviously chosen to ignore this impulse (spurred on, of course, but a The People Need To Know mentality), but I felt you should know where I stand.

Okay. Let’s get on with this.

Even though MORTAL LOVE came with a highly respected friend's seal of approval, I found the first chapter so confusing, and so devoid of a thread I could follow through to a satisfying story, that it looked like dark days ahead. I braced myself to abandon it by Chapter Three, after which point I would conveniently forget to mention I had ever tried to read it.

I was in love with it by page 20.

The People Magazine review excerpted on the cover calls MORTAL LOVE "a delightful waking dream;" as accurate a descriptor as I could hope for, with the caveat that the reviewer clearly shares my somewhat unconventional definition of "delightful." The novel is often dark, often wretched, often disturbing. Delightful if you’re up for that sort of thing; depressing if you’re not.

The waking dream bit, though, needs no qualifier. The story is dreamlike in the extreme, merging one scene with the next as smoothly as water flowing over polished stones. It provides few concrete answers, yet it’s never confusing or opaque. Hand spells little out, but the book’s structure encourages the reader to make every connection she needs. We know exactly what’s going on, despite the lack of overt confirmation.

MORTAL LOVE is a book about madness and art and intercourse between worlds (in all senses of the word). Like all the best dreams, it’s wild and dangerous and barely controlled, with a bizarre and vivid story at its heart.

It spans centuries, commenting on art and the soul and the very nature of creation.

It’s rich and strange; grounded and ethereal.

It reminded me of THE VINTNER’S LUCK, and of THE NIGHT CIRCUS.

It made me want to create.

It has me halfway convinced I should have asked more from it, but I’m not sure what else it could have given me without undermining itself.

It refuses to get out of my head.

I think you should read it, sooner rather than later.

(This review originally appeared on my blog, Stella Matutina.) ( )

Elizabeth Hand is one of my favorite writers, and this is my favorite of her novels. Mortal Love is about a muse, whose name changes depending on the time and to who she appears, but whose eyes are always very bright green, and the men who are taken under her spell. Probably the thing I like best about this novel is its nimbleness and balance. Hand is equally comfortable writing in Victorian London as she is in a bohemian and ramshackle mansion on the coast of Maine in the 1970s. This is a powerful novel of romantic and artistic obsession. It is terrifying and sensual and wise. ( )

Three narrative threads intertwine in this dark fantasy of artistic inspiration and madness. In late Victorian-era London, young American painter Radborne Comstock meets and becomes obsessed with the beautiful Evienne Upstone, an auburn-haired and green-eyed artist’s model who has already served as the muse for several other artists and who has driven many of the insane by virtue of her sheer beauty and otherworldly presence. Decades later, Comstock’s grandson Valentine views his grandfather’s paintings of Evienne and is in turn inspired to create intricately detailed artworks in which a red-haired, green-eyed woman is at the same time a lush fairytale landscape. Valentine’s obsession with the woman…whom he named Vernoraxia…drives him, too, to the edge of madness and he ends up medicated and numbed. In contemporary London, American writer Daniel Rowlands is researching the legend of lovers Tristan and Iseult and ends up caught in the spell of Larkin Meade, a red-haired, green-eyed woman whose strange passion leaves him deranged and obsessed.

Parallels and emotional resonances shared between the three narratives suggest that, somehow, Evienne and Larkin are the same woman, or the same being—a muse, perhaps, or a force of nature too strong for mere mortals to love without madness but whom artists and writers are compelled to render imperfectly over and over in painting, poetry, and legend.

Rich, evocative, lyrical, and vibrant, “Mortal Love” wonderfully captures the exquisite lunacy of artistic expression and the urge to create. Authentic period detail and references to real-life artists combine with lushly poetic language to captivate readers much as the mysterious red-haired muse about whom Hand writes captivates artists. ( )

A book that seems to be trying to emulate John Crowley (more “Love & Sleep” than “Aegypt”). Fairly successful, though it is confusing. It jumps back and forth across three generations, and the guy in each time frame seems to be very much the same, though he’s “mortal” and there’s no reason for him to be a clone, far as I can tell. It seems more a case of the writer not sufficiently separating each. The characters are undifferentiated, as though she can only write about one kind of hero/main character guy. Maybe there was a point to that which I’m missing…whatever. Kept me reading, but I don’t think I’ll search out more of her stuff. ( )