The Alchemy of Desire

Author: Elizabeth Gilbert

Publisher: Bloomsbury

Pages: 512

Price: Rs 599

The monstrous success of Eat,Pray,Love haunts Elizabeth Gilberts wildly ambitious new novel like a particularly unfriendly strigoi. After all,most professed lovers of literature are a prejudiced bunch,forever dismissing this and that book on account of a faux pas or two. The most unforgivable,as every self-appointed custodian of literary taste knows,is to become so terribly successful as to dominate bestseller lists for weeks. And if one is gauche enough to achieve this by writing an insipid memoir-verging-on-self-help,why,the only way to salvage a serious career is by confounding every expectation and following up with a vastly superior,big,panoramic tour de force,a la Gilbert. Spanning years and continents,The Signature of All Things is a true epic,complete with a protagonist adventurer in search of a career-defining discovery. But Alma Whittaker is most unusual,because she is that rarest of things a fully etched female character with agency,uncompromising in her ambition and passion for knowledge.  

Alma,born with the century in the January of 1800,grows up in Philadelphia with every advantage but for a face like a bowl of porridge,the daughter of one Henry Whittaker,a one-time orchardsman,sometime seed-filcher and all-time useful little fingerstink of low birth and high ambition,who goes from sailing the high seas with Captain Cook in search of exotic plants to an extremely wealthy drug baron. Alma inherits her face,hair and curiosity from her father: she knows her numbers in four languages by the age of four; her fathers expansive estate,with its rare birds and beautiful gardens,is her playground; her parents expert guests,her dinner companions. She is a creature of the Enlightenment,fascinated by Henrys thriving botanical imports business,possessed of a relentless hunger for explanations that drives her to Tahiti. But she is also alert to the limitations the world imposes on her because of her sex. Alma,you see,can only be an amateur scientist,Darwins female counterpart at a time when that was unthinkable.

She embodies her era,a true Victorian: intellectually insatiable,industrious and sexually repressed. Alma yearns to experience romantic love,and thinks she finds it in the course of intellectually stimulating debates with Ambrose Pike,a gifted lithographer who drifts through the family estate. But her marriage is a disappointment,and the ever-rational Alma exchanges romantic fulfillment for something else: she dedicates her life to the study of moss,living her life in generous miniature now that the world had scaled itself down into endless inches of possibility. Moss,she recognises,is something that could be truly hers. She admires its elegant beauty,even how its slow growth patterns make it unsuitable for study over the human lifespan. Alma finds her Galapagos in her crop of mosses,with her lifes work culminating in a theory of competitive alteration as she calls it,on how plant species evolve over time.

The novel,a botanical odyssey that whisks us from London to Peru to Tahiti to Amsterdam,takes its title from Jakob Böhmes mystical The Signature of All Things (1622),a work that fascinates Almas husband. Böhme believed that prescriptions for all human ailments were embedded in medicinal plants walnuts for headaches,celandines for jaundice by god. Moss isnt quite the cure for Almas loneliness,but she finds deep contentment in her pioneering work,even achieving a deeper understanding of others in the process. Gilberts heroine is a tribute to the forgotten women of science who lived in the shadows of their more famous male colleagues,whose contributions to advancing our understanding of the world went unheralded. Gilbert tells us that Alma wished to live within humanitys most recent moment,at the cusp of invention and progress. What a wonderful thing it is,when having is as pleasing a thing as wanting.