David O’Connor writes: The titles of Adrian Duncan’s novels tend to refer to work. Place of, time off, profession. Love Notes From a German Building Site; A Sabbatical in Leipzig; The Geometer Lobachevsky. Not so the recently published The Gorgeous Inertia of the Earth – though it is, in the first of its two parts, as keenly occupied as its predecessors with the varieties of work and the working life, while Part II wanders agitated among what remains of centuries or more of nameless labour in the streets, piazzas and ornate interiors of the churches of Bologna.
Neither is it the first time Duncan has put the title phrase to use. In the short story ‘We Too Have Wind-Blown Plazas’, after a night of drinking and drugging with his employer in Abu Dhabi, a young Irish engineer sits on a balcony smoking. He experiences a sort of mystical union: ‘I felt myself coalescing with the building.’ As he inhales and exhales smoke, the building inhales and exhales. As the building feels the breeze, he feels the breeze. He is the building; the building is him. ‘I felt every beam and column translate these deflections and surface resonances into a multitude of smaller vectors that advanced inward to the lift shaft of the building where these forces and ideas of forces were absorbed, subsumed, then guided down along the calcifying grid-lines of the lift shaft’s abstract pre-history, onward, slowing, downward, crawling, towards a dark and wet subterranean bedrock where all of this was stilled to nothing against the gorgeous inertia of the earth.’
Much from that story is transposed – differently complicated and arranged – into the novel. Spiritual or religious abandon; chaos; a mother, father and son gone three different directions; tropical plants; rainforest; an image from Greek statuary. Shadows; immigrant workers; intense heat; a skyward turn. Broken bones; shattered or split bodies; a descent; climactic expulsion; rage. (At root, to coalesce means to grow up, and both story and novel are in a way about coming of age.) Yet, story and novel read nothing alike.
Among the advice told slant in her talk ‘The Nature and Aim of Fiction’ (a near sacred guide for Duncan), Flannery O’Connor says that the fiction writer ‘has the quality of having to stare, of not getting the point at once. The longer you look at one object, the more of the world you see in it.’ Duncan’s narrators stare, often with their eyes shut. ‘I imagined’; ‘I pictured’, or as with the engineer in Abu Dhabi, ‘I felt’. ‘I begin to see in my mind’s eye’ says the narrator of The Gorgeous Inertia of the Earth. Again and again, in novels, short stories, and autobiographical essays like ‘A Bridge in Haβfurt’: ‘I pictured these slopes being cut open, broken out, and transferred into the ordered shapes that made up the town below. I thought how tiny the tactile world is within the spectrum of phenomena.’ Cut or broken stone; ordered – and disordered – shapes; the tactile world within the spectrum of phenomena – all transfer to The Gorgeous Inertia of the Earth. (Duncan shares the Australian writer Gerald Murnane’s belief that the writer should learn to trust his obsessions.)
The Gorgeous Inertia of the Earth is a novel in two parts narrated by an Irish restorative sculptor, John Molloy. (It seems odd to refer to the narrator by name as he is to us an I.) It begins with the narrator ‘in this small city of I_’ with Bernadette, an Italian sociologist and former art student with whom he has been ‘paired’ to work on intermittent projects, here a statue of the Romantic era poets Achim and Bettina von Arnim. They draw, measure, photograph and study the ‘sculpture in an attempt to better understand its form’. Part I tells of their work, and their gradual coming together as lovers, a periodic courtship or shy mutual approach. It ends with John in Bologna to visit Bernadette and meet her nine-year-old daughter, Philomena. Part II begins ten or so years on with the narrator living in Bologna with Bernadette and Philomena. It is the day after his fifty-sixth birthday, and he receives word from Ireland that his friend Anna is dying in great pain. Anna’s partner Patricia asks him to pray ‘to hasten Anna’s last breath’. Anna, who oversaw ‘projects to shore up ruins’ and sought to ‘hold’ the narrator ‘together’. She was, we are told, Patricia’s counterweight, but so too was she a counterweight to John. Even her name is balanced. And with her dying, he tilts. A morning walk becomes a day and nightlong stray into harrowed mysticism.
Some of John’s past we hear as shared with Bernadette in the early sections of the novel, some in his own lone recounting from an apartment in a crumbling luxury block in Ireland. He is haunted by his mother, who, one night in 1972, a decade before it was ‘in vogue’ – and though unmentioned, on the night after Bloody Sunday – ‘saw a statue of the Virgin Mary speaking to her in a grotto’. (How long – I wonder – did she stare before the Virgin spoke?) The family is ostracised. His father is beaten to invalidism, falls at work in a quarry, suffers further injury, an early death. When they buy tickets for a football match, John tells Bernadette how, at age sixteen, in a vengeful tackle on a ‘son of one of the men who had beaten my father’ his own shin snapped. She asks if this led him to study stone restoration. “‘Don’t think so, Bernadette.’”
By then, we have read of ‘the stone citadel’ of his person, ‘the rock-like rind’ of his consciousness ‘loosened and breached’ and the flood of guilt, but Bernadette alerts us to John’s obsessive metaphorising. Geological processes and the making of a human self. Bone and stone, the human body, the built world, earth and water in trembles of aggregate phrasing. A towering finger of stone, sandstone arteries, a knuckle covered in trees, currents of people. Toes ‘like a sandstone peninsula’, a castle’s ‘toothsome façade’, a church ‘stripped back to the bone’. Abel in bas relief is forced back into ‘parent stone’. The lovers make of themselves a sort of sculpture: ‘this small space we’ve carved out between her cheek, my lips, my eyes, my eyelid, her ear, her neck’. John fears prayer because of the ‘fissures’ and ‘destruction’ it brought his mother. Destruction: literally unbuilding.
An earlier Duncan narrator is drawn ‘to the idea of the contours of language and words and letters as firmaments that lie across and through the actual world’. Stare awhile at that word, firmament. Sky, heavens, vault or arch of sky; basis; the field or sphere of an interest or activity. Above, below and all around. Etymologically a synonym of the Old German Wolkan, meaning cloud. Words as entities of particles that gather and condense, that form, drift and dissipate. Entities of incessantly altering uncertain edges. Duncan has contrasted writing dulled with jargon and cliché with writing that is ‘activating’, calling for words ‘to reach their edge … words … brought to the edge of their meaning’. The Gorgeous Inertia of the Earth is a book of edges and edgelands: border, boundary, gable, terrazzo, city wall, the outer realms of a new music. The making of edge after edge as stone is chiselled to shards, to dust; ‘the selvedges’ of his mother’s consciousness eroded by prayer. Selvedge: an edge on woven fabric to prevent unravelling or a zone of altered rock at the edge of a rock mass. Self-edge – the edge of a self. With edges comes movement, against and through and across, and attempts to stay it. Migration, incursion, pulling toward. A side door entered (Duncan loves a side door). Assimilation and exclusion. Two bodies in an act of love: ‘I realise, as our bodies tauten and harden against each other that she, at this fascinating new distance to me, is about to alter.’ Who alters or is altered? The verb strains its edge. Translation also takes a word past its edge. Duncan has spoken of how the German word for reverence reveals a component of dread and therefore courage and John considers ‘what is direct and frightful in any act of reverence … what was not mad, but brave in my mother too.’ ‘I admire you’ he wishes to say to Bernadette. Which would mean, ‘I fear you.’ Another edgy use of words is the implicit and by hint and indirection this novel is rife with violence and the legacy of colonial and other conquests, realised or attempted. Lazio ultras, Via Gerusalem, Montsera plants, tobacco, a monkey native to the Indian subcontinent. A dog’s ‘great fear of strangers’.
Implicitly too the book questions the conditions and value of its own making. Anna dismisses restoration work and says John is better off in his job, designing and building playgrounds. So better off making places where children may learn with pleasure to coalesce, to grow in love or rage, to forget for a time, how their parents may leave, or haunt them. This is an umbrageous, pinging novel, its maker adept.
14/7/2025
The Gorgeous Inertia of the Earth, by Adrian Duncan, is published by Tuscar Rock Presss at €16.95.
