The Hearing Trumpet

Posted by Verity on November 25, 2024 in Art, Book review, climate change, Exhibition, feminism, Literature | 2 comments

Leonora Carrington, Penguin Modern Classics 2005

After reading Dame B’s review of the Leonora Carrington exhibition a few weeks ago, I was determined to see it, and the only disappointment was that there were no fridge magnets of her bizarre and haunting works in the shop. I bought her book instead.

Who could resist a slim novel in the distinguished livery of a Penguin Modern Classic, with the imprimatur of world-class Surrealist Luis Buñuel, ‘Reading this liberates us from the miserable reality of our days.’? With winter coming on, this sounded like just what I needed.

I’m not going to attempt a summary of the plot, which ranges wildly through time, across continents and onto the astral plane.  The basic premise is that our heroine Marian Leatherby is a ninety-two-year-old woman living with her boorish grandson and his wife. When her best friend Carmella gives her a hearing trumpet, she finds out what her ghastly grandson really thinks of her (‘She’s a drooling sack of decomposing flesh’) and his plans for her: incarceration in a ‘reasonably inexpensive institution run by an American cereal company’.

Fortunately for Marian, she has an unassailably positive image of herself, despite what others think: ‘Indeed I do have a short grey beard which conventional people would find repulsive. Personally I find it rather gallant.’ She also takes herself seriously as a raconteur, and has a fund of anecdotes she is keen to relay to others.

Her move to the institution is far from happy. She is obliged to leave her beloved cats with Carmella, and the regime at her new establishment involves endless self-scrutiny and self-discipline with a view to improving one’s Inner Christianity, overseen by the oppressive Dr and Mrs Gambit. Some of Marian’s fellow ‘detainees’ also give cause for concern, and it’s when she detects a case of poisoning that all hell breaks loose, and that’s perhaps not a metaphor.

As ancient documents and strange riddles come to light, we are sucked into a vortex of mysticism involving the Knights Templar, the Holy Grail, alchemy, Egyptian mythology, climate change, werewolves – you name it. The Welsh bard Taliessin appears as a kind of time-travelling Postman Pat, crossing centuries and oceans with his songs and his sack of letters. It doesn’t really matter if you can’t make head or tail of this , as the wild ride itself is enjoyable, narrated in Marian’s dry and level-headed voice.

Her friend Carmella is a wonderful character, Full of fantastical schemes, she is also practical and loyal, providing a lifeline to Marian and the other sufferers in their austere prison: they are saved from starvation by her emergency delivery of tins of sardines, washed down with port smuggled in in hot water bottles. Both her optimism and her catastrophising take extreme forms: with any luck she could win a helicopter in a crossword competition, but any misstep in Marian’s escape plans might see the pair of them chastised by Nubians in scarlet loincloths…

Her appearance towards the end of the book (rest assured, this is not the sort of book in which the concept of ‘spoiler’ applies) as a dea ex machina with a violet limousine and a Chinese manservant is nothing short of uplifting. (She has become a squillionairess by digging under the servants’ lavatory and inadvertently exposing a seam of uranium.)

If I have one criticism of the book, it’s that there is a large chunk of wholly realistic autobiography right in the middle of it – but hey, what could be more surreal than that?

Mind-bending, funny, and with a strong streak of feminism running through it, The Hearing Trumpet is indeed escapism extraordinaire.