dreams
Anthony Doerr
About Grace is a literary novel by Anthony Doerr, author of the acclaimed All the Light We Cannot See. Was it of the same calibre? – that’s the question that drove me to buy a rather battered copy and read it.
It’s impossible to review it without some spoilers so please be warned if you intend to read it yourself. I’ve tried to keep them to a minimum.
David Winkler has always been different. From his youth he’s had presentiments, vivid dream-like experiences where he sees things happen which then come to pass: glass falling and breaking; a man being cut in two by a bus on an icy road; a young woman dropping a magazine in a supermarket.
So fixated is he by the vision of the young woman that he goes to the supermarket to watch her drop the magazine, and ends up marrying her (Sandy) even though she has already been married to Herman for 15 years. That union produced no children because Herman was infertile, so both Sandy and David are delighted when baby Grace is born.
As an hydrologist, David is obsessed by water and snow, and he’s increasingly disturbed by vivid nightmares about floods. His inherent sleepwalking escalates, taking him outside and even into water. But when the nightmares/premonitions are of Grace drowning in his arms as they’re submerged in flood waters, he is torn by indecision.
A fearful storm does indeed hit, and their house is flooded, just as he saw in his dream. Somewhere Grace is crying, just as predicted. As the water rises ever higher he is forced to make a choice; does he go into the house to rescue his daughter and be the instrument of her death as per the dream, or does he walk away and trust Sandy to save her? The tension is palpable. Is it even possible to hoodwink the powers that control our fates?
What if by leaving he had somehow tampered with the order of things, removed a thread and left the fabric snagged and incomplete?
He does run away and takes ship far away to the Grenadine Islands in the Caribbean, but always at the back of his mind is the gnawing question: is Grace still alive? Sandy wants nothing more to do with him; as far as she’s concerned he’s a deserter; he’s dead. She even returns all his letters. He spirals to rock bottom: alone, destitute and bereft, surviving on what he can scavenge or scratch together by odd jobbing, almost drowning in a desperate attempt to take a ten-foot rowboat over a coral reef in tumultuous seas the night he receives Sandy’s note,
Don’t come back. Don’t even think of it.
But then he befriends a precocious girl with an obsessive interest in marine life, Naaliyah, who becomes something of a substitute for Grace. When he has a premonitory dream about her drowning with her ankle caught in the anchor chains of her boat, he begins to stalk her. In consequence he’s present when the accident does happen and thwarts the future by rescuing her.
Had he … was it possible … that he had changed the course of Grace’s fate too by his actions in much the same way?
And so it is that 25 years on, he sets out for Cleveland, Ohio, where it all happened. By now he’s 59. But his search is fraught with difficulties and eventually he finds himself in the frozen wastes of Camp Nowhere, off grid, in one of the most inhospitable parts of Alaska with Naaliyah. It’s here that Doerr excels; capturing the place, the life, the fight for survival, the power of love, eloquently and movingly.
But his story of one man’s battle with foresight, raises deep questions.
Where does reality begin and end?
Where are the boundaries and definitions – around dreams, nightmares, premonitory glimpses into the future, reality, sleepwalking, sentience …?
Is life preordained or do we have any control over our fate?
What is time? Must it be sequential, can it retreat, recycle?
Are events and meetings and love as prefigured and inevitable as the six sides of a snow crystal are honeycombed into its very atoms?
A literary work it may be, but I could at least understand it!! However, the pace is very measured; the main character is maddeningly slow; so if you’re anything like me you need to choose your moment to tackle this one.