Her husband furnishes no heat and little light: he absconds, an unfit specimen of manhood. Her amatory life is chiefly a matter of erotic self-discovery in the closet, where she triggers "an up-fire, a vortex of pleasure, a chimney-effect of heat. "Who will ever kiss this encyclopaedia of a head?" wonders Alma. This focused writing is a relief from prolix description.
The microworld is equivalent to a view of the firmament, "as seen through one of William Herschel's mighty telescopes". the Amazon jungle as seen from the back of a harpy eagle", with different continents where moss grows in mountain ranges, tiny deserts and "deep, diminutive fjords". Beneath the magnifying glass, Alma studies "a stupefying kingdom. And as the style of heavy levity can rarely adapt, so character cannot change, only disport itself in further prodigious arabesques.Īlma's specialism – producing the novel's loveliest writing – is the microworld of moss. It's a tall tale, told with verve and wit – but all on the same note. Gilbert's style is comparable: long paragraphs effloresce with superabundant detail. The novel displays its own narrative excesses in those of the heroine: six-foot giantess Alma's knowledge of "global bryology excruciatingly dense" she is aware that "my world has become too detailed". "Less is more" is hardly the author's watchword. Gilbert's Alma is a comic-heroic magnification of this phenomenon. Sundry village entomologists and botanists were amateurs of biology. Gilbert is fascinated by the 19th‑century passion for exploration, taxonomy and classification that led, via Darwin's barnacles, to his concept of evolution by natural selection. This archaic lore does nothing for Ambrose's health, nor can it satisfy Alma's curiosity – traditionally the sin of Eve, linked with lust and gluttony.
According to Böhme, God imprinted prescriptions for human ailments in medicinal plants – brain-shaped walnuts for headaches, celandines for jaundice.
The novel takes its title from Jakob Böhme's The Signature of All Things (1622), a work that enthrals Alma's dottily mystical husband, Ambrose Pike. When Alma takes off for Tahiti, she too sails in the aftermath of a failed marriage and to feed a gargantuan appetite for knowledge.
Gilbert's bestselling memoir of her pilgrimage to Italy and India, Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything, followed her quest for wisdom after her divorce. Her story is a historical-fantastical jeu d'esprit, a feminist fable, a cabinet of curiosities, a scholarly romp. Alma will visit Tahiti and settle in Amsterdam. Two pages later Henry is off to Peru, and settles in Philadelphia. Picaresque in form, grotesque in characterisation and antic in disposition, The Signature of All Things whisks us through more than a century and from Kew to Hawaii, where Henry sees Captain Cook being clubbed to death.
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