In Spring, when I was born, Ireland was full of daffodils: in the city in window-boxes and the front-gardens of houses, apartment-buildings, and on the stony small ridges beside footpaths as well as here and there in forests and uncultivated fields.
I have always identified strongly with the daffodil. I have never said so openly before to a single person – nor, to be honest, have I remembered it much myself; and yet every Spring, like when an old friend’s favourite piece of music comes on in the car, suddenly, entirely they fill my thoughts at the centre.
I am convinced that the part of everyone’s life we call ‘inner’ is like this: what Baudelaire described as “forests of symbols/who watch us with familiar looks”. Our deepest selves are less a stream of ideas than a criss-crossing lattice of relations, memories, habits, and desires all around particular things.
For everyone who exists there is a kind of secret symbolism, a non-verbal language, revealed to them and them only: it is their passport through life.
A novel tries either to elaborate one new such symbolism in its writing; or else to depict in some way the conditions in which it forms, to discover or at least raise the possibility of an Ur-language, a theory of universal totemism; or else simply to scold and terrify people, or make them laugh.
‘Seven Steeples’, the latest novel by Sara Baume, is of the second kind. It is much less a story than a list of the objects and creatures encountered by Bell, Sigh, and their two dogs, who have left Dublin to seek out a way of life in the South-West far away from everybody.
Insects, nettles, the washing machine – each other – the book is really about its paragraphs, like musical phrases, each describing an encounter with something, new or old, and its conversion into a symbol.
Insects, nettles, the washing machine – each other – the book is really about its paragraphs, like musical phrases, each describing an encounter with something, new or old, and its conversion into a symbol.
Baume’s sentences rhapsodically repeat words and make liberal use of the ‘Tab’ and ‘Enter’ buttons on the keyboard; sometimes the paragraphs feel like they were written by Alice Oswald. But if in Oswald’s poetry, which is after all made of verses, the point is to approximate by turns the gushes and drips of water, in Baume’s paragraphs it is to approximate the wind.
As symbols, both water and wind are varieties of nothingness, which is to say that these stylistic approaches are both about accommodating non-being in speech. But if water is a refracting spread that pulls reality apart, then wind is a blustering movement that sweeps it all together.
The embedded theme of Seven Steeples is oneness: symbiotic oneness, how things live by encounters with each other; erotic oneness, the drive towards the whole which is the greatest significance of love; and beneath these, symbolic oneness, the idea that in truth everything is one.
The embedded theme of Seven Steeples is oneness: symbiotic oneness, how things live by encounters with each other; erotic oneness, the drive towards the whole which is the greatest significance of love; and beneath these, symbolic oneness, the idea that in truth everything is one.
In a way this idea is very old – at least as old as the Greek philosopher Empedocles – the tone, shape, and themes of this book recall the Ancient Greek novel Daphnis and Chloe.
What is new is how this deathly wind, this oneness gusting everything into symbols, is so strongly aligned in the book with interiority and the rejection of other people. As a result what we are given here is essentially a beautiful but false and virtual reality.
People often say that virtual reality is something in the future – the day we can put on glasses and see the Spotify menu in front of us – but at least in sound rather (and more importantly) than sight, it is already here. Everywhere now public spaces achieve a kind of altered reality through music. For anyone who uses headphones this virtualisation of experience is even more profound, more personal, more constant, and in the end more solipsistic – think of the stereotype of the teenager with headphones tuning out the world.
In ‘Seven Steeples’ headphones come up a surprising amount, even if near the end they are replaced: “In November the song of the house was a gurgling in the throat of the bathroom tap, a crackling emitted by the tangled TV cables. The boiler growled. The fridge purred”.
Whereas in the past a ‘song’ was conceived as a public performance, something you went and looked at, someone talking to you, here it is imagined as something lived and moved around in: this kind of ‘song’ has not been widely available for more than a few decades. It is a great metaphor – two hundred years ago would someone have come up with it? I am not sure.
None of Bell and Sigh’s friends of family (who do not appear in the book) understand what they are trying to do, which is to transport themselves into a reality as solipsistic and virtual – as musical – as can be.
None of Bell and Sigh’s friends of family (who do not appear in the book) understand what they are trying to do, which is to transport themselves into a reality as solipsistic and virtual – as musical – as can be. This is not to say that the alternatives to which the book refers (emails and The Nine O’Clock News) are any less virtual; but Seven Steeples is about Bell and Sigh swapping one dream for another, somebody else’s for their own. The two dreams have the same basic origin.
In A Line Made By Walking, also by Sara Baume, the main character takes photos of every dead animal they find. It is typical of her characters to be scandalised by human society beyond what people around them can comprehend, and to try to leave it. But in Seven Steeples this move is undermined by dreaminess, by how the dogs of the narrative age but do not die: by the avoidance of fracture.
What Bell and Sigh give us at last is not really a way out of that scandal, not a hopeful and genuine vision for the future, but instead just one more thing for that future one day to examine through the same lens with which it will consider all of the things they reject most. They are both prisoners of time.
This is a brilliant, captivating book which unfortunately does not get to the heart of the matter.
‘Seven Steeples’, written by Sara Baume, published by Tramp, April 2022, €13.99.
