Before starting this book I didn’t know much about William Cowper, just that Veda Hille uses bits of Light Shining out of Darkness in a song called “Cowper’s Folly.” Also, back in April, someone taped the whole text of “Light Shining out of Darkness” to a column in the Canal Street subway station, and despite the fact that it is religious and I am not, it made me smile, because here were the words of this long-dead British poet in the middle of the day in the middle of New York. So, this book: it’s a novel about Cowper. The title and cover design caught my eye at the library, and I picked it up on a whim. I am glad I did.
The story starts in 1800, the last year of William Cowper’s life. The past is present in his dreams each night, and the narrative at first is one of memory and association: one carriage bringing to mind a string of carriages and clopping hooves, one snail bringing to mind another snail, and also the idea of snails, a woman “with a wig like a monstrous snail, no shell, only the body” (p 20). Things then resolve into a mostly-linear story, though: here is young Cowper in London, trying to kill himself, then taken off to the asylum at Saint Albans; here is his religious conversion, his friendship with the Unwin family, his friendship with John Newton (who comes across as one hell of a supercilious and hypocritical bastard, preaching from the pulpit but cursing like the ex-sailor he is when someone pisses him off). Lynch’s writing style is smart, often gorgeous (especially when describing the British landscape, clear October days and blue skies and birches and larches, or the cold of winter, or the first hints of spring in March), and often unexpectedly funny, with passages like this one, demonstrating Cowper’s cluelessness about the logistics of daily life:
Some time later, Sam and Dick came in from their shopping.
‘What is that, master?’ Sam asked.
‘Dinner. But it won’t go in. The entreé will not enter.’ He was trying to fit a joint of meat into a saucepan.
‘But there’s enough there for ten men.’
‘The sheep’s heart yesterday wasn’t enough for the three of us, so I thought … I wonder, could we fry this?’
‘Fry a whole leg of mutton? No, Mr Cowper, we could not.’
(p 67)
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