Book review: A love story with a different perspective

The author's prose is outstanding for its visual impact, often featuring stone or light, leading to speculation on the relation between the physical world and the characters’ inner lives 

The Gorgeous Inertia of the Earth by Adrian Duncan: Duncan's work has an international perspective, and the Longford-born author  currently lives in Berlin.

• The Gorgeous Inertia of the Earth
• Adrian Duncan 
• Tuskar Rock Press, €14.99 

Adrian Duncan, an artist and engineer as well as a writer, is a compelling new voice among Irish novelists. 

His first novel, Love Notes from a German Building Site, won the 2019 John McGahern Book Prize. 

His second, A Sabbatical in Leipzig (2020) was shortlisted for the Kerry Novel of the Year, while his story collection, Midfield Dynamo (2021) was longlisted for the prestigious Edge Hill prize. 

His third novel, The Geometer Lobachevsky, was published in April 2022, the same year that he published a non-fiction book, Little Republics: The Story of Bungalow Bliss.

As his titles indicate, his work has an international perspective, and Longford-born Duncan currently lives in Berlin (see interview link below).

He then opted to learn about writing fiction, which he does extremely well. 

His prose is outstanding for its visual impact, often featuring stone or light, leading to speculation on the relation between the physical world and the characters’ inner lives.

In its originality and intensity it bears comparison with John Berger and WG Sebald, both of whom enriched and extended the novel form by their innovative approaches.

On the very first page I was struck by the precision and resonance of this description of dusk in a small Alpine-city ski resort: 

“As Bernadette and I walk, the mountains around us empty of people while the sky falls from dark navy to blacks. Funiculars and cable cars rush downward, hurtling skiers to a squat building at the end of a broad strip-lit bridge that runs into the belly of the old town.”

Duncan’s latest novel is set largely in mainland Europe — a small city in the Alps, Warsaw, Bologna — but there are frequent references to the narrator John Molloy’s Irish origins.

Initially he is based there, having recently returned from a decade in the US where he was apprenticed to a carpenter. 

Back in Ireland he works as a restorative stone carver, sculptor, and stone mason, currently on periodic assignments for the Board of Works. His obsession with stone permeates the first half of the book.

But it is not all about stone and light: the novel also tells a delicate and very touching love story.

Molloy is summoned to Athens by an Italian curator to meet Bernadette Basagni, an Italian sociologist. 

Adrian Duncan

He invites them to work on an EU-funded project in which ‘non-artists’ are asked to compile a ‘history from within’ of a selection of European sculptures.

The connection between John and Bernadette is initially enhanced by their shared excitement about a sculpture of the Romantic-era poets Achim and Bettina von Arnim which they explore in the snow.

It is evident that their shared pleasure in their work and lively exchange of ideas is leading to something more than a work relationship.

It is unusual and very enjoybale to read an account of a man falling for a woman initially attracted by her intelligence and her professional accomplishments.

Another strand of the story concerns John’s parents, his stone-loving quarryman father, and his mother, who saw moving statues ten years before everyone else.

The end sequence, in which Molloy spends a day and a night in anguished contemplation of his inability to pray for his dying friend Anna, is a tour de force of dramatic writing. 

His lack of a spiritual life disgusts Bernadette: “…she stands and asks, her palms open at her sides, ‘How can you be on earth this way?’”

He spends a frenzied night touring the ornate churches of Bologna, as he is forced to question the relation between the excess of their elaborate stone interiors and the inner life it is supposed to foster.