http://epaper.navhindtimes.in/NewsDetail.aspx?storyid=10316&date=2016-07-31&pageid=1
The
Signature of All Things
Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of bestseller
‘Eat, Pray, Love’ came out with another book in 2013 called ‘The Signature of
All Things.’ ‘Eat, Pray and Love’ was a semi-autobiographical
account in which she suffered from midlife crisis and after a heartrending
divorce travelled on a spiritual quest to Italy, Indonesia and India. Julia
Roberts played the role of the author in the film adaptation, but the verdict
remained uncontested that the book was better than the film.
‘The Signature of All Things’ is a big book
set in a big century, the 19th century. The heroine Alma Whittaker, born
at the dawn of the century, represents the age of enlightenment. She is an
independent woman, a botanist with a thirst for knowledge of the living world.
Her study of human beings (their compulsions and actions) and her engagement
with mosses leads her to write a treatise on the evolution of the living world.
Coincidentally her work overlaps with the publication of The Origin of Species
by Charles Darwin. The brilliance of the Elizabeth’s book rests on the premise of
how the author takes the reader through interludes with people and plants on to
the theory of evolution. The book ultimately questions the basic paradigm in Darwin’s
theory i.e. if evolution is the story of survival of the fittest through
natural selection, what place do altruism and sacrifice of human beings have in
this picture of fierce competition?
Elizabeth holds the reader from the word go
with an engaging character Henry Whittaker, Alma’s self-made father. He is an illiterate
vagrant in Sir Joseph Bank’s Kew Gardens and a deck hand on Captain Cook’s HMS
Resolution but his expanding knowledge of botany (inherited from his gardener father)
catapults him into an experimental realm of medicinal and ornamental plants.
With his maverick spirit and die-hard “I shall win,” attitude, he becomes the
richest man in Philadelphia and one of the three richest men in the Western
Hemisphere.
Alma is her father’s daughter. “She looked
precisely like Henry, ginger of hair, florid of skin, wide of mouth and
abundant of nose.” Henry takes great pride in her intelligence and
resourcefulness. Right from the age of four, she is allowed to sit at the
dining table at White Acre (their country estate in Philadelphia) and converse
with intellectuals flourishing in commercial enterprises by dint of their
ingenious ideas. Venerable philosophers, well-regarded men of science,
promising new inventors, respected thinkers, translators and actors are summoned
to their house, and discussions go on late into the night. Brought up on
immense wealth combined with the best of ideas and diligent hard work, no doubt
Alma grows up to be an intellectual consumed by logic and science. Her
immersion in the study of moss and its snail-pace growth dynamics is
interspersed with her great cravings for physical satiation and family
relationships.
“The Plum of White Acre”, as her father
endearingly calls her, is loved by everyone but she has a strained relationship
with her adopted sister Prudence. Whereas Alma is plain, highly intelligent and
practical, Prudence is beautiful, not so bright and extremely austere. Each
covets the other’s quality and is jealous. Though they never get along on the
surface, they sacrifice for each other. Prudence gives up the love of her life
George Hawkes (for Alma), and Alma her entire wealth and estate for Prudence’s
abolitionist causes and charity.
The book is polyphonic, peopled by an
interesting gamut of characters, each propelled by innate compulsions and
quests. These different voices lend varied dimensions to how life is lived by
people according to their perceptions. A
wide spectrum of behavioral patterns lends a richness to the human story of the
living world. Henry, the unethical owner
of immense wealth does not want to share his fortune outside his blood family. Reverend
Welles, who is on a mission of spreading Christian values, regards every human
being as his family and is non-judgmental and an extremely forgiving human
soul. Dees Van Devender, a wealthy Dutchman, is a family man, very cautious and
given to charity secretly without any recognition. Georges Hawkes, the sensitive scholar who
loves Prudence (Alma loves him too) and on a rebound marries dimwit Rhetta when
Prudence turns down his proposal in favour of her sister. Ambrose Pike, the
botanist and a highly spiritual human being who meets a horrible end when his
search for purity and high consciousness brings him defeat and immense
disappointment from his loved ones (Alma and Tomorrow Morning) Alma and the Tahitian
Tomorrow Morning are mortals with human desires and sensations seeking bodily
fulfillment, which clash fatally with Pike’s aspirations of meeting with
angels.
The large number of characters are
intertwined with real historical philosophers and scientists – like Alfred
Wallace Stevens, a scientist who admired Darwin and nearly published his theory
of evolution on the same lines but refrained to do so and happily shared in
Darwin’s success and luminosity. The tableaux of human souls, real and fictional,
etch out Alma’s own quest to understand the human world in tandem with the
plant world. It’s as if Elizabeth makes Alma the conduit for the search of
unanswered questions on the origin, survival and futurist evolutionary trends
of the living world. She is asking - Why do we do the things we do, Who directs
us, Why do we clash, Why we choose what we choose, Where are we going, What is dying?
And innumerable such mystifying questions.
The writing is pacy and packed with
ideologies of the enlightenment era. The landscapes from London to Tasmania,
Philadelphia, Tahiti and Amsterdam feature man’s herculean efforts to tame Earth
and its resources (natural or living) for his needs and desires. The story also
reflects how religion or more specifically, the beliefs propagated by the word
of God are interpreted by men which then shape their destiny.
No wonder the writing turned out to fill
pages after pages, an ongoing quest!
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