An acrobatic story, bewitchingly told
Dazzling novel ‘Curiosities’ deserves a broad readership
Some puzzle enthusiasts refer to themselves as dissectologists (as jigsaws were once called “dissected maps”). As far as I know, fans of literary puzzles, a.k.a. metafiction, haven’t adopted any clever name. They’re still known as “readers,” though many of them do seem to have graduate degrees in English.
While this exclusive cohort might have already received notification about “Curiosities,” Victoria author Anne Fleming’s sixth book, the dazzling novel deserves a broad readership.
Naysayers might associate puzzles — literary and otherwise — with boredom, frustration or tedious intellectualism. As though anticipating blowback, Fleming gets playful. As complex and interwoven as her acrobatic narratives are, they’re bewitchingly told. Intellectually stimulating and an offbeat dip into history, “Curiosities” appeals as a dense puzzle that’s intriguing fun.
To start, though, there’s a disconcerting contents page, which lists 16 snippets from six autobiographical pieces arranged in no discernible order: “The Memoir of Margaret Long,” “Joan’s Tale,” “Anne’s Note,” “The True Confession of John Heard,” “Tom’s Tale” and “Letters from Hudson Bay, Never Received.”
The assortment of historical documents date from the early 1600s, while “Anne’s Note,” apparently completed in Vancouver, recounts a “marvellous confluence” experienced by Fleming, who identifies herself as a “self-taught” 17th-century researcher, a “complete amateur” no less.
During a little getaway for research in England, Fleming (“Anomaly”) stumbled upon papers: handily, “in an archive hardly anyone looked at.” They’re memoirs, one by Lady Long — a “very minor figure in the annals of seventeenth-century England” — and the other dictated by Joan Palmer, Long’s companion.
On a wondrous lucky streak, Fleming later discovered lost letters written within an icebound ship on Hudson Bay. Plus further accounts: by a woman living as a man and by a devout preacher gripped by a mania about the witches in his midst.
Considering “Curiosities” is a novel, and therefore composed of fictional “documents,” the outpouring of voices from centuries ago is strangely affecting. With a winking ventriloquism, Fleming channels all these souls long gone. Despite the wink, they transcend their status as self-reflexive fictions.
The tales begin with sorrow. Lady Long’s husband dies at Christmas dinner and Joan recalls “the Sicknesse of 1603” as taking the lives of every villager in Wormshill, her childhood home. Suckling a goat named Agnes to survive, young Joan meets a waif called Tom, who prefers that name to Thomasina, her given name. Fearful of a “Witch with no Tongue,” the children seek shelter from a mute woman they nickname Old Nut, elsewhere known as Barrows Mary, the witch of Barrows Wood.
As accusations of spells and curses abound, and a credulous population deeply fearful of “concourse with the Divell” reacts to this eccentric — and soon splintered — family, debate breaks out about witches. Are they actual agents of chaos or “onlie wronged old women”? Sensible, educated Lady Long believes the latter. She remains in the minority.
Eventually coming to share a home with Lady Long, Joan yearns for Tom, her childhood bestie.
Discovered in 1981, Heard’s “True Confession” — discredited as “assuredly fictional” — describes a shrunken, quick-witted drunk at a tavern who relates a tale that begins with “a certaintie then that the man I had seen was the Divell.” Deeply neurotic and “destined for ridicule,” Heard nevertheless embarks on a demonologist’s career: to eradicate witches near and far. Ultimately viewed as “an idiot in a curate’s cloak,” he manages to “sow filth and dissension,” which is usually Satan’s work.
The paths of Tom, Joan, Lady Long and John converge, to violent effect.
Fearful for the safety of Joan, Tom flees the country. Marooned and near death in 1632 — in a frigid “lost and barren” land — Tom composes letters that describe his fate.
Fabulous in both senses, Fleming’s “Curiosities” is a riot of cerebral invention. At heart, the novel grips with fervent tales of affection, love and duty as it conjures a panicked era in which witchery was no laughing matter.