A pedantic approach hurts ambitious work
David Macfarlane’s characters talk about sculpture — a lot
It’s difficult to write about the artistic experience, to find words to capture artists’ passion for their craft, the many steps and stages of a complicated process.
Sculpture — its history, methods and possibilities — plays a major role in David Macfarlane’s latest novel. The Figures of Beauty is an ambitious, meticulously researched work, spanning continents and centuries.
Macfarlane, a columnist for the Toronto Star whose 1999 novel, Summer Gone, was longlisted for the Giller Prize, is a skilled stylist. In The Figures of Beauty, he is at his best when he describes the Italian countryside and its ordinary inhabitants.
He gives us the fictional Tuscan town of Pietrabella with its “terracotta pots on deep sills; a lion’s head fountain, green with age … a narrow, laundry-hung street,” and describes quarry workers who la bour hard under trying conditions.
Yet The Figures of Beauty is hampered by a pedantic approach to its subject, and though the characters’ lives intersect in intriguing ways, they do not come fully alive as the best literary characters and works of sculpture should.
Part of the problem is that some of the novel’s central characters talk too much about sculpture. Take Julian Morrow, the Welsh-born owner of a marble quarry near Pietrabella. We learn that Morrow possesses two skills — “reading stone, the other, reading people.” Morrow is also a windbag. On his return trips to Britain, he lectures about Italian marble. When Morrow meets an Ontario couple honeymooning in Italy, he regales them with the history of sculpture.
Morrow realizes with pleasure that the conversation serves as a rehearsal for his upcoming lecture. Though he shares some interesting facts (such as that to make their statues look antique, his workers bury them, then urinate on the ground where they are buried), he remains a tiresome pontificator.
Then there is Anna Di Castello, an aging sculptor whose daughter Teresa serves as one of the novel’s narrators. The story, which moves back and forth in time, takes us to 1968 when Anna had a brief love affair with Oliver Hughson, a young man from the same Ontario town as the couple Morrow befriended. Later in his life, Hughson recalls, “No conversation with Anna ever orbited very far away from the idea of stone.”
When the novel opens, it is 2013 and Hughson is dead. It was only in the final year of his life, when Teresa came to see him in Ontario, that he learned he had a child.
Macfarlane uses Hughson to explore the issue of regret. It falls to Teresa to piece together her father’s story, and the story of his relationship with Anna.
Macfarlane seems to be suggesting that like sculpture, stories can live on.