A sympathetic reviewer might call this rarefied, esoteric novel of an emotionally frozen female academic “lyrical” and “finely observed”. Hilary Mantel, for example, whose blurb appears on the over of my copy, found the book “astonishing and luminous”. After doggedly pushing through its nearly 300 pages, I am not quite as enthusiastic. We have here a chilly, “detached”, barely credible protagonist, the aptly named Elizabeth Stone, who, we eventually learn, suffered childhood trauma. Solitary and neurotic (in the classic sense), she’s a fifty-two year-old scholar of John Milton, determined to change course and complete a major project on the on the music of poetry—based on remarks by TS Eliot about the sound of words conveying more meaning than their semantics. Why does she wish to do this? Seemingly to please Edward Hunt, her poetry tutor at Oxford over thirty years before. When Elizabeth was a young woman, he had seen something special in her and had recommended her for a full scholarship. She wants to prove to him that his faith in her was justified. That’s the plot in a nutshell.

The professor’s project occupies her every waking moment. She has no family—her mother died years before apparently a suicide, and Elizabeth was taken in as a foster child by a minister and his wife. The professor also has no friends. Essentially, she has no life apart from her academic work, numerous tedious samples of which the reader is forced to wade through. Edward Hunt must’ve been a very special or very deluded man to see something exceptional in Elizabeth’s tortuously abstruse prose.

Even when Professor Stone learns she has as an aggressive brain tumour, she thinks only of getting back to her research project. To give you an idea of her thinking and writing, here are Elizabeth’s observations when the diagnosing neurologist shows her images of the mass in the right frontal lobe: to her it appears “nestled like a downy bird in the whorls of her cerebellum, a dense white mass the size of a plum.” For one thing, the cerebellum is nowhere near the right frontal lobe. It is located at the back of the brain underneath the temporal and occipital lobes, while the frontal lobe, as its name suggests, is at the front of the brain, behind the forehead. For another, I don’t know about you but to me comparing a tumour to “a downy bird” is fanciful, precious, and just weird. In any case, this is indeed a remarkable malignant growth, for it not only has the seeming capacity to travel within the confines of the skull—from front to back, it also possesses the magical ability to fully respond to treatment and completely vanish for a time, at least. This is no doubt a sign from the universe that the professor is meant to be here to complete her magnum opus. The resolution of the medical problem also allows her to travel to Oxford to review some Eliot papers and to see her former tutor after 32 years.

McCleen’s plot is almost as thin and unbelievable as her heroine. The skeletal storyline is, however, abundantly padded with descriptions of the sea, the sky, the clouds, the rain, and the sights, sounds, and smells of Oxford. Furthermore, there are many pages dedicated to Elizabeth’s thinking and research on her project, some sections that deal with her backstory (her early childhood by the sea with an anguished, book-loving mother, apparently suffering from debilitating rheumatoid arthritis), and numerous scenes in which Elizabeth is in the presence of the chain-smoking Edward Hunt, a kind of wiry Mr. Rochester with unusual tufted hair. Elizabeth’s overwrought sensibility rivals that of the heroine of a gothic novel. Branches can’t move in the wind without upsetting her stomach. While there are occasional passages of fine writing and the author sensitively portrays certain psychological states, more often than not the novel feels bloated and unwieldy. Its conclusion in which Elizabeth discovers that someone has already addressed her topic, and in which she reveals to Edward that she has terminal brain cancer, and the two engage in a rapturous consummation of their love is absolutely maudlin. Evidently, Hilary Mantel read a different novel from the one I completed.

So why did I read this book? Years ago, I was impressed with McCleen’s debut. This second novel of hers has been sitting on my shelf for a long time and I’m doing some pandemic clearing-out—i.e., I’m reading and eliminating stuff that’s just taking up space. This claustrophobic and oppressively dense novel will be exiting the house shortly. ( )

Elizabeth Stone, Professor of Poetry has recently got the all-clear after a battle with cancer and is looking at her life and her contribution to the literary cannon. She stumbles on an idea looking at an Eliot manuscript at the British Library, and deciding to follow it up, in hopes of finding an original, unmined theory, she has to return to her old college and cannot avoid meeting again her own Professor of Poetry when she does so.

I really enjoyed this second novel by Grace McCleen (I now have her debut novel in the pile). It’s my kind of thoughtful literary novel. A tone I enjoy, and skilfully written. The disquisition on sound in poetry being as relevant as meaning, and communicating despite meaning, was interesting, and I will now certainly return to Eliot and his Four Quartets.

However, I have to admit that I preferred the first half of the novel to the second, and found the ending quite predictable. ( )