Isn’t that why we embark on journeys?” a character remarks in Janice Pariat’s ambitious and capacious novel. “Not only to see new things but to see things in new ways.” An epic story of travellers and discoverers set across continents and centuries, Everything the Light Touches focuses on four people whose routes do not crisscross, but whose stories are tangled together like roots, through the ways in which they encounter the natural world around them.
The four characters are Shai, Evelyn, Johann Philipp Möller (an alias of Goethe’s) and Carl (Linnaeus), and their sections are arranged like a palindrome, Cloud Atlas-style, beginning and ending with Shai. Ranging from Goethe’s travels in Italy – the “beginning and end of all of his journeys, the completion of his life’s education” – to indigenous land rights movements in present-day India, Pariat shows us new ways of looking at old and new things. The shortest section, about Swedish botanist and taxonomist Linnaeus’s 1732 expedition to Lapland, is told exclusively through prose poetry and verse. This formally and structurally inventive novel, interspersed with letters and archives, diary entries and drawings, sheds a postcolonial light on questions of discovery, botany and the asymmetry between the human and nonhuman world.
Shai, a directionless young woman in contemporary India, travels out of Delhi to go back to where she comes from – her hometown in India’s north-east, “a place that falls off the map”, where, post-independence, the people of these hills “found themselves swallowed up by Assam”. They fought for their own state: Meghalaya. “A Sanskrit name given to a place that spoke no Sanskrit. The Home of the Clouds.” Shai’s conservationist father tells her about talking trees, their vocabulary and capacity for memory. When tragedy strikes, she travels into the countryside and learns how to toil on the land. She knows that six and a half billion years ago, supernovae sent uranium – the metal found beneath the ground she stands on – into space, but not the story of her people’s resistance against mining in the region. The villagers don’t have a name for uranium, save the one government officials give them for the part-processed ore: yellowcake. “Why would we name what we didn’t need?” But without their land, they are lost.
Evelyn is a student of science in Edwardian England. Inspired by Goethe’s radical botanical writings, and frustrated by the sexism around her, she travels to India, her head full of questions as she wanders the forests of the Lower Himalayas. She realises that problems in science go beyond the sidelining of women: they’re also about “how botanical knowledge was sought, gathered, processed, gleaned – and whose methods were considered sound and ‘scientific’”. (Goethe’s perspective on the natural world, unlike Linnaeus’s, was dismissed by the establishment.) How and why was the history of science “pruned and neatened”? “These textbooks don’t magically, benignly, come into being,” she says, “they are written to prop up a particular scientific view.”
The section on Goethe, or Johann Philipp Möller, as he called himself while travelling in Italy in the 1780s, stands out for the way Pariat plays with fact and fiction. She follows in his footsteps as he formulates his ideas for The Metamorphosis of Plants, fusing them into a fascinating intertexual mixture of biography and philosophy. “Leaf is not something still and static and clearly circumscribed,” her Goethe argues, “it is dynamic, alive, it is always changing.” In other words, one cannot study plants as though they were inanimate objects. “Hold back your theories! Let the phenomena speak for themselves!”
The epigraphs, including quotes from Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae and Goethe’s The Metamorphosis of Plants, juxtapose their contradictory theories and practices. But Shai’s father says that forests stand beyond these two stories: “We have no language yet with which to begin to speak of trees.” Goethe likewise tells his friend that to be inspired by plants “is to learn to drop fixed ideas, to enter into an open-ended dialogue with the world”. As the reader journeys through this atmospheric and accomplished novel, they discover that the natural world around us is loud enough for those willing to listen, and Pariat has found the language for it.
• Everything the Light Touches by Janice Pariat is published by Borough (£14.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
