the novel. But a far more fundamental truth also dawned on me as my reading of the novel progressed. I grew to realize that I had come to this story with a whole basket of assumptions and presuppositions, and was trying to force it into a mould in which it did not fit. This is not a story about a young artist’s love affairs, happiness or physical or emotional wellbeing. It refers to those things, but its theme is much bigger. The clue is in the opening quotation from Nietzsche. Another quotation that kept coming to mind was one from Aristotle’s Ethics that we kicked around in a seminar many decades ago: ‘What can be the good of each but that in whose name all else is done?’. What is it that really matters about an individual or about life itself? What are the terminal values, the things that are good in themselves and require no further justification, and what are the lower order values that exist to serve these? The fact of the matter is, it doesn’t matter whether I like Victoria, or even whether Victoria likes herself. It doesn’t matter whether she is a bit of a bastard or whether the man she ends up with is a bit of a bastard too. It doesn’t even matter whether they are happy together or whether their relationship is tempestuous and destructive. Those are all lower-order considerations and not what the novel is about. The novel, quite simply, is about art. It is, I think, an examination of the conditions under which art flourishes, and the conditions under which it withers and atrophies. Once I had grasped that basic fact every-
Review: Serpentine by Catherine Edmunds
thing else fell into place, and I found myself in awe of the skill with which the thesis had been constructed. In some respects Edmunds makes heavy demands of her readers, but she gives a great deal in return. It is a novel that you often want to argue with, full of characters that you want to take aside and tell to lighten up, or grow up, or stop hurting one another, or stop expecting the impossible from human relationships. It forces you to take sides, and to examine your own beliefs about what the proper task of life should be. And this is accomplished through elegant prose, and without a wasted word or a dull moment. Is it reasonable to ask any more of a novel?
Gold Dust
Catherine Edmunds Catherine is a musician, artist and writer. Examples of her work can be seen at:
www.freewebs.com/catherineedmunds and she maintains a blog about her creative life at:
www.catherineedmunds.blogspot.co.uk Issue 21
June 2012 www.golddustmagazine.co.uk
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