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spenkevich's review against another edition
5.0
‘For in the beginning was the Word!’
Language is the thing that binds us; language is how we assess and express the world, a heavy weight for something as weightless and fluid as air. Rikki Ducornet’s breathlessly brilliant The Jade Cabinet—the fourth novel in Ducornet’s tetralogy of elements, this one representing air—assesses language as both a unifying force and the power of its silence as well as the role language plays in memory. This is the story of two aptly named sisters with the younger, Memory, recounting the life of the air-like Etheria. Driven mute by her father’s insistence on keeping her innocent of speech in his quest for the Edenic Original Speech, Etheria moves through the world with sheer beauty and weightless grace after a childhood of wonderment among her fathers academic investigations. Raised in a fantastical house full of study into language and Darwin-like interests in the animal kingdom, and her friendship with Charles Dodgson (better known to readers by his pen name [a:Lewis Carroll|8164|Lewis Carroll|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1571554989p2/8164.jpg]¹), Etheria grows as a wonderful expression of the arts. She is pursued by the earthly and weighted Radulph Tubbs, whose vile attempts at possession cause her to flee from his world and adopt an air-like state of existence where magic reigns supreme and not even language can touch her, while Tubbs faces the opposite effects akin to a crushing gravity. The Jade Cabinet is storytelling at its finest, bringing to life all the mystery and adventure of far-off places and cruel villains that give vibrancy and power to childrens fiction through perfectly polished and pristine prose that also affords all the insight and intellectual investigation of high Literature.
‘She dreamed of air, of vanishing in thin air; she dreamed of evaporating. She dreamed of levitating, of growing wings, of transforming herself into a cobweb, an angel, a volatile gas.’
The element of Air takes precedence over The Jade Cabinet, manifesting itself in many forms and figures. From Etheria herself to memory and language, which Ducornet brandishes in perfect order. It is nearly shocking to learn that the novel was published in 1993 as the language feels authentic to the Victorian Age in which it is set and each sentence is as polished and perfect as the eloquently cut jade figures in Tubb’s cabinet. Like air, the story flows and pours in all directions, unrestrainable or containable by linear narrative devices.
Language also lies at the root of everything in the novel. Characters obsess over the universal language of existence, or build their own alphabet systems. Language is the manner in which the story is told, becoming an appendage of memory to pantomime the tale.
Memory is always changing, like air, swarming us from all sides and never constant.
Ducornet excels at creating villains in this piece, and no character is more interesting than Radulph Tubbs, Queen Victoria’s ‘Dragon of Industry’. This cigar smoking businessman, a man burdened by his own gravity and affixed to the world puffing out clouds of smoke much like his factories, is a reflection of all the evils of industry and the rational mindedness that refuses to see beyond what is tangible and conquerable. He is disgusted by art and the abstract (‘freak shows are proof that all artists are freaks and art an aberration.’) and believes only in order and industry. He is a man who prefers smokestacks to sunrises and give photo albums of his factories as a romantic gift. He rules through his wealth, and his jade cabinet works on many levels to examine this. It is with his jade that he buys Etheria and because of his jade that he loses her. For him it is how he can take the world and put in away under his control, for Etheria the jade figures are playthings.
When the scene changes to Egypt is when we see Ducornet at her most playful. Tubbs and his associate Baconfield become like Carroll’s The Walrus and the Carpenter, in a wasteland of nothing but sand, intent on flattening the world, turning relics of history into something they can eat, sterelizing humanity for their own purpose². Creating a world where ‘There were no birds to fly.’ Like Tubbs, Baconfield attempts to order the world in a neat fashion, having idealized self-reliant societies that extinguish any need to look beyond ones own borders. Also, like the father Agnus Sphery, Baconfield obsesses over the mysteries of the universe, but instead of abstract and angelic features he pursues mathematical certainties as the building blocks of existence to the point of madness and beyond. There is a comical irony in their destruction of Egyptian history, turning mummies into fertilizer all in the name of profits to build their own monuments. Many dualities of life come alive in ironic fashion within The Jade Cabinet, from language to silence, air to gravity, a Hunger Artist who becomes ‘preposterously fat’, and freedom or despair.
Ducornet has created a fantastical tale with all the elements of classic Literature. Great tragedy and loss, far off exotic lands full of roaming thieves, madmen becoming God to desert tribes, great monuments falling, death and dramatic escape, and classic villains. Ducornet takes the epic tale a step further, using it as a springboard for philosophical musings and fleshes out her characters, taking villains to their inevitable demise while also stepping within them to humanize and empathize with them. She does a fine work of collecting the memories of a family's sad saga like figures in a cabinet, but ones that can come out and play and bestow an immediacy on all who come in contact with them. Ducornet is a master of storytelling and prose, and this is a book that gripped my heart and mind for days, being addictively readable and enjoyable and sending me out with a head full of wonderment for those moments between reads. Comical and clever, deep and daring, Ducornet is an author that should hopefully find her way onto the bookshelves of every home.
5/5
There are those who say that the memory is like a collector’s cabinet where souvenirs are tucked away as moths or tiny shells intact. But I think not. As I write this it occurs to me that for each performance of the mind our souvenirs reconstruct themselves. The memory is like an act of magic.
¹ The inclusion of Carroll/Dodgson lends an intoxicating atmosphere and grounding for the novel. Ducornet brings a biographical element of Dodgson that addresses points such as his penchant for associating himself with young girls and photographing them in the nude (always with parent approval and with the parents present) with a delicate and unjudgemental manner. Furthermore, the addition of Carroll helps bring to life the childlike elements of wonderment and adventure to the book, making use of his Walrus and the Carpenter story.
² One cannot help but imagine Tubbs as the Walrus from the classic Disney animated version of [b:Alice in Wonderland|23302193|Alice in Wonderland (annotated and illustrated)|Lewis Carroll|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1412358290l/23302193._SY75_.jpg|55548884], particularly as he has grown quite fat and brandishes a cigar at all times.
Language is the thing that binds us; language is how we assess and express the world, a heavy weight for something as weightless and fluid as air. Rikki Ducornet’s breathlessly brilliant The Jade Cabinet—the fourth novel in Ducornet’s tetralogy of elements, this one representing air—assesses language as both a unifying force and the power of its silence as well as the role language plays in memory. This is the story of two aptly named sisters with the younger, Memory, recounting the life of the air-like Etheria. Driven mute by her father’s insistence on keeping her innocent of speech in his quest for the Edenic Original Speech, Etheria moves through the world with sheer beauty and weightless grace after a childhood of wonderment among her fathers academic investigations. Raised in a fantastical house full of study into language and Darwin-like interests in the animal kingdom, and her friendship with Charles Dodgson (better known to readers by his pen name [a:Lewis Carroll|8164|Lewis Carroll|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1571554989p2/8164.jpg]¹), Etheria grows as a wonderful expression of the arts. She is pursued by the earthly and weighted Radulph Tubbs, whose vile attempts at possession cause her to flee from his world and adopt an air-like state of existence where magic reigns supreme and not even language can touch her, while Tubbs faces the opposite effects akin to a crushing gravity. The Jade Cabinet is storytelling at its finest, bringing to life all the mystery and adventure of far-off places and cruel villains that give vibrancy and power to childrens fiction through perfectly polished and pristine prose that also affords all the insight and intellectual investigation of high Literature.
‘She dreamed of air, of vanishing in thin air; she dreamed of evaporating. She dreamed of levitating, of growing wings, of transforming herself into a cobweb, an angel, a volatile gas.’
The element of Air takes precedence over The Jade Cabinet, manifesting itself in many forms and figures. From Etheria herself to memory and language, which Ducornet brandishes in perfect order. It is nearly shocking to learn that the novel was published in 1993 as the language feels authentic to the Victorian Age in which it is set and each sentence is as polished and perfect as the eloquently cut jade figures in Tubb’s cabinet. Like air, the story flows and pours in all directions, unrestrainable or containable by linear narrative devices.
[T]his morning it seems to me that the story webs and nets about. It is a fabric, not a simple thread. My father used to say: “The memory is an anthill. How it swarms!”Ducornet takes a very modern approach of multilayered narrative to a Victorian style novel, blending Memory’s own views as well as the memoirs of the pompous and tortured Radulph Tubbs to take the reader on an epic voyage across continents and decades. The effect is simply breathtaking.
Language also lies at the root of everything in the novel. Characters obsess over the universal language of existence, or build their own alphabet systems. Language is the manner in which the story is told, becoming an appendage of memory to pantomime the tale.
Memory is always changing, like air, swarming us from all sides and never constant.
Let’s suppose memories are like those special things; each star, each rain of meteors, each eclipse is like the last and yet it isn’t because the mind, you see, is never in the same place twice. Like stars and eclipses are simultaneously a rule and an exception.So through this changing of memory, always hoping to stay constant and true, Memory attempts to deliver her story in a sprawling manner. A great many unique and engaging characters spiral across the map of memory, many coming to tragic ends, all in a quest to elucidate the mystery of Etheria who is as elusive as air and as ethereal as her name might suggest.
Ducornet excels at creating villains in this piece, and no character is more interesting than Radulph Tubbs, Queen Victoria’s ‘Dragon of Industry’. This cigar smoking businessman, a man burdened by his own gravity and affixed to the world puffing out clouds of smoke much like his factories, is a reflection of all the evils of industry and the rational mindedness that refuses to see beyond what is tangible and conquerable. He is disgusted by art and the abstract (‘freak shows are proof that all artists are freaks and art an aberration.’) and believes only in order and industry. He is a man who prefers smokestacks to sunrises and give photo albums of his factories as a romantic gift. He rules through his wealth, and his jade cabinet works on many levels to examine this. It is with his jade that he buys Etheria and because of his jade that he loses her. For him it is how he can take the world and put in away under his control, for Etheria the jade figures are playthings.
Men like Radulph Tubbs who believe only in what can be seen, or touched, or eaten, are not the exception but the rule. Whereas the things that truly matter cannot be carried about in the pocket and fingered.
When the scene changes to Egypt is when we see Ducornet at her most playful. Tubbs and his associate Baconfield become like Carroll’s The Walrus and the Carpenter, in a wasteland of nothing but sand, intent on flattening the world, turning relics of history into something they can eat, sterelizing humanity for their own purpose². Creating a world where ‘There were no birds to fly.’ Like Tubbs, Baconfield attempts to order the world in a neat fashion, having idealized self-reliant societies that extinguish any need to look beyond ones own borders. Also, like the father Agnus Sphery, Baconfield obsesses over the mysteries of the universe, but instead of abstract and angelic features he pursues mathematical certainties as the building blocks of existence to the point of madness and beyond. There is a comical irony in their destruction of Egyptian history, turning mummies into fertilizer all in the name of profits to build their own monuments. Many dualities of life come alive in ironic fashion within The Jade Cabinet, from language to silence, air to gravity, a Hunger Artist who becomes ‘preposterously fat’, and freedom or despair.
Ducornet has created a fantastical tale with all the elements of classic Literature. Great tragedy and loss, far off exotic lands full of roaming thieves, madmen becoming God to desert tribes, great monuments falling, death and dramatic escape, and classic villains. Ducornet takes the epic tale a step further, using it as a springboard for philosophical musings and fleshes out her characters, taking villains to their inevitable demise while also stepping within them to humanize and empathize with them. She does a fine work of collecting the memories of a family's sad saga like figures in a cabinet, but ones that can come out and play and bestow an immediacy on all who come in contact with them. Ducornet is a master of storytelling and prose, and this is a book that gripped my heart and mind for days, being addictively readable and enjoyable and sending me out with a head full of wonderment for those moments between reads. Comical and clever, deep and daring, Ducornet is an author that should hopefully find her way onto the bookshelves of every home.
5/5
There are those who say that the memory is like a collector’s cabinet where souvenirs are tucked away as moths or tiny shells intact. But I think not. As I write this it occurs to me that for each performance of the mind our souvenirs reconstruct themselves. The memory is like an act of magic.
¹ The inclusion of Carroll/Dodgson lends an intoxicating atmosphere and grounding for the novel. Ducornet brings a biographical element of Dodgson that addresses points such as his penchant for associating himself with young girls and photographing them in the nude (always with parent approval and with the parents present) with a delicate and unjudgemental manner. Furthermore, the addition of Carroll helps bring to life the childlike elements of wonderment and adventure to the book, making use of his Walrus and the Carpenter story.
² One cannot help but imagine Tubbs as the Walrus from the classic Disney animated version of [b:Alice in Wonderland|23302193|Alice in Wonderland (annotated and illustrated)|Lewis Carroll|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1412358290l/23302193._SY75_.jpg|55548884], particularly as he has grown quite fat and brandishes a cigar at all times.
freewaygods's review against another edition
adventurous
mysterious
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
3.25
kraghen21's review against another edition
4.0
In Victorian England a beautiful & featherlike young girl - Etheria - is forced into marriage with an older man, as a result of her wistful father's obsession with primordial language. The girl is traded for a collection of jade sculptures that her father believes to be key in unlocking "the original tongue of mankind".
So the girl becomes trapped with an industrialist villain, who very unlike Etheria, sees no beauty in nature, only in possessing it & twisting it to his means.
His feelings towards Etheria are much the same, and as a result her innocence is ruptured by his ferocious appetite, causing the girl to flee.
As with the other entries in Ducornets 'Tetralogy of Elements', the language is playful, inventive & rich with metaphors.
The element of this installment is 'Air' - and so the text reverberates with gusts & gales, chills & currents, breezes & birdsong.
There are fairytale-like qualities to the writing & story, although some scenes will make it quite clear that this is very much a book for adults.
Another delightful book from Ducornet, albeit not quite at the level of the superior predecessor 'Fountains of Neptune'.
So the girl becomes trapped with an industrialist villain, who very unlike Etheria, sees no beauty in nature, only in possessing it & twisting it to his means.
His feelings towards Etheria are much the same, and as a result her innocence is ruptured by his ferocious appetite, causing the girl to flee.
As with the other entries in Ducornets 'Tetralogy of Elements', the language is playful, inventive & rich with metaphors.
The element of this installment is 'Air' - and so the text reverberates with gusts & gales, chills & currents, breezes & birdsong.
There are fairytale-like qualities to the writing & story, although some scenes will make it quite clear that this is very much a book for adults.
Another delightful book from Ducornet, albeit not quite at the level of the superior predecessor 'Fountains of Neptune'.
lightfoxing's review against another edition
5.0
Ducornet's writing has an incredible sense of pacing, frequently both ponderous and breathless, dragging the reader under without their ever noticing. The prose has an intensely dreamy quality to it, as do the characters, although even those who exist mostly ephemerally (like Etheria) are grounded in incredible emotion that would suffer from hollowness in the hands of a less skilled writer.
george_salis's review
4.0
From Rikki Ducornet's afterword titled "Waking to Eden": "I like to imagine that Adam's tongue, his palate and his lips were always on fire, that the air he breathed was kindled to incandescence each time he cried out in sorrow or delight. If fiction can be said to have a function, it is to release that primary fury of which language, even now, is miraculously capable--from the dry mud of daily use. So that furred, spotted and striped, it may--as it did in Eden--scrawl under every tree as revelation."
lmrising's review
dark
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.75
alexlanz's review against another edition
This part of the tetralogy addresses art and capitalism most directly.
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