Fiction Review: Everything the Light Touches

Book By Book

I recently finished another audiobook for my Big Book Summer Challenge, Everything the Light Touches by Janice Pariat. I was sold on this book when I read comparisons to Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, which I loved, and Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr, which is still in my stack for this summer. I enjoyed this beautifully written novel that weaves four stories together from different times and places, all linked by a nature theme.

We first meet Shai, a young woman in modern-day India. She has recently lost her job and moved from Delhi back to the smaller city where she grew up. She learns from her mother that her beloved nanny, who raised her from infancy to her teen years, has taken ill, so Shai sets off on a journey to visit her. Her nanny lives in a remote village in the mountainous northeast, a place so isolated that it has no roads to it. The elderly woman is, indeed, quite ill, living in a small home with her daughter. Shai ends up staying with her for a lengthy time, helping to care for her, becoming a part of the slower, quieter life of the remote community. She also helps out in the garden, reconnecting with nature, which is very important to her own father.

In the early 1900′s, a young woman named Evelyn is leaving England for a long trip on a ship to visit India. While everyone around her expects her to find a husband and settle down, Evelyn keeps her true purpose hidden. She studied botany at Cambridge and was fascinated by the writings of Goethe, who proposed a whole new way of looking at plants, as a whole, integrated natural world. Evelyn wants to go on an expedition to the northeastern mountains, in the foothills of the Himalayas, in search of what might be a mythical plant.

In the 1780′s, Goethe himself is traveling from his home in Germany to Italy and immersing himself in the unique natural world he discovers there. During his years spent in Italy, he comes up with his own view of the natural world that is in contrast to the study of botany at the time, defined by Linneaus. The famous botanist made a career (and changed the study of botany) by identifying and categorizing individual plants and their components in minute detail, but Goethe sees the natural world as an integrated whole; from this trip, he will write his lesser-known work, The Metamorphosis of Plants.

And, finally, we meet Linneaus himself, on an expedition in 1732 to Lapland, in the northernmost region of Finland. Linneaus is encountering wholly unique plants that he has never seen before and applying his rules of identification and classification. This section sounds as though it may have been taken directly from Linneaus’ journals.

The novel’s narrative takes us through each of these four unique stories, set in different times and places and focusing on different characters … and then back again through Goethe, Evelen, and Shai’s stories. The thread connecting all of these disparate narratives is nature and different ways of seeing the world: splitting it into its component parts or seeing it as an integrated whole. The inclusion of real-life historical figures gives the narrative extra dimension and relation to the real world. Along the way, the author also addresses colonialism, class differences, environmental issues, and constant change in the world. It’s a lyrical novel, with moving passages that capture the beauty of nature and its effect on each of the characters’ very different lives. While its structure of interwoven stories from different times did remind me of Cloud Atlas, it also brought to mind The Overstory by Richard Powers, with its disparate characters coming together to focus on the natural world. I very much enjoyed this unique and immersive novel that was excellent on audio, with multiple narrators.

512 pages, HarperVia

HarperAudio

This book fits in the following 2023 Reading Challenges:

Alphabet Soup Challenge – E

Diversity Challenge

Travel the World in Books – India, Italy, Finland

Big Book Summer

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Listen to a sample of the audiobook here and/or download it from Audible.

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