I read a lot of nonfiction. Books about leadership, technology, business, world affairs, history, biographies. Books that I can learn something new from. But every now and then - whenever I want to escape into a world that has a different texture, different smells, sights, habits than my own - I pick up fiction.
A lot of fiction I pick up is just that: an escape. A temporary way for my mind to take flight. A way to mark the implacable ticking of the clock without noticing its ticking. Once I finish the book, most of the time I forget about it. I may remember what the story was about - the friendship between two boys from different sects in Afghanistan, the solving of ten murders on a remote island, and so on - but I forget the intricate skeins of their narratives. The book was just a time pass, to take my mind elsewhere, but not to clutter it with.
Rarely, I come across a book that feels as memorable as my first glimpse of the night sky over the North Cascades, emblazoned with stars as dense as the sands on an ocean shore. Such a book, to me, was Hamnet by Maggie O'Ferrell . The book is the story of Anne or Agnes Hathaway, the wife of the beloved playwright William Shakespeare. It's a novel about her courtship with William, her extraordinary skills in the healing arts, her motherhood, and above all, the loss of one of her children Hamnet to the Bubonic plague of the 16th century. Agnes is a competent woman with the strongest of will. She is independent, smart, and resilient.
She is resilient, that is, until the day she loses her son. And when she does, she loses her grip on life and slides into a dense black hole that threatens to subsume her whole. The weave of her life unravels. Her marriage starts to tear apart. Her eldest daughter steps in to run the family, but Agnes as we know her, has disappeared.
I was touched by Agnes's violent withdrawals and reactions to her loss. I have faced loss in my own life that I have struggled to come to terms with. But when a mother loses her child, it's clear it's the kind of grief that shreds your heart into a million rents. I grew up without a mother, and I am not a mother myself, and so - without a question - this monumental love of a mother for her child inspired awe as much as it was unfamiliar to me.
Hamnet is lost to his family, but he still looms large in their lives. Agnes keeps looking for her dead son in her garden, in the crooks and corners of her home. William looks for him in the faces of the people that throng to his plays. Judith, Hamnet's twin, looks for him in the inky dark before dawn, running between their apartment and their grandparents' house. In the end, Hamnet turns up in the character of the anguished prince in one of Shakespeare's greatest plays (in my view, his greatest play), Hamlet - a tragedy about mortality and the meaning of life.
We read a lot about the works of Shakespeare, about how they changed the world and enriched the English language. We rarely think about his private life though. What was his home like? What did he eat for breakfast? What was it like to be his wife, his children? What did his family sacrifice so we could all have the wealth of his plays? This book Hamnet is a rich and a beautiful imagining of those details. We see his family eating bread coated with warm, homemade honey. We see his wife milking cattle and making cheese at home. We see his daughters douse and stir laundry in a vat of scalding water. We see the jug of cream on his scrubbed dinner table, his father's glove workshop smelling of leather and oil. We see him cower from his abusive father and run away from him as a child. We see William become a writer slowly, the words jostling with each other inside his head, the imaginary worlds forming silently.
The storytelling in the book is astounding. A particularly remarkable chapter is the one where the author describes how the plague reached England, telling the story through the eyes of every subsequent creature that the fleas carrying the disease spread to, from a circus monkey to a cabin boy to the cats on a ship to a glass merchant in Venice. I have never seen such an engaging way to describe the outbreak of a contagion. Her words wash over you and you luxuriate in their warm surf - mesmerized by how they sound, their intimacy, their lucidity, and their richness. She describes things so minutely, so musically that you reread her sentences not because they are obscure but because you want to enjoy them again and again. You slow down to savor them, like you might slow down when eating ice cream, taking the tiniest morsel of the dessert at a time with the tip of your spoon, letting the creaminess and the flavors reveal themselves one by one, and melt over your tongue. I had several sentences in the book that I savored just like that:
"Just the creaking of beams expanding gently in the sun, the sigh of air passing under doors, between rooms, the swish of linen drapes, the crack of the fire, the indefinable noise of a house at rest, empty."
"The child is rapt, miniature hands scrolled into themselves, like the shells of snails"
"He huddles into himself as he sits on the hard board of the boat, watching the river, the sliding by of the houses, the dip and sway of lights on other vessels, the shoulders of the boatman as he wrestles the craft through trickier currents, the dripping lift of the oars, the white scarf of breath that streams from his mouth."
Windows shudder in winds, church bells tremble, feet clatter on flagstones, houses whistle with draughts of air. The book was truly a symphony of words. After reading it, I began to pay closer attention to the mundane things around me. How pale the green grape I was eating was. How, with every one of my bites, my teeth pierced their skin and the sweetness burst all at once into my mouth. How pale and thin the coconut milk that I swirled into my coffee was. Things that often escape my attention and that I began to appreciate more.
Reading fiction has that effect on you. Superficially, it is much like binge-watching a series on your streaming service. It is entertaining, and it can help you to escape into other people's stories. But it is more than the passive viewing of TV.
And in some wonderful creations like Hamnet, you lose yourself in the words, words that feel as intoxicating and delicate as fine red wine. Hamnet was indeed a riveting read. I highly recommend it. But more that, I highly recommend immersing yourself in good fiction this winter.