‘Moonwise the dance began’: 'The Hearing Trumpet' by Leonora Carrington – Book Recommendation

Well, this is probably the oddest book I’ve ever read as an adult. Its singularity is a definite reason to recommend it. The novel begins normally enough as Marian, a ninety-two-year-old woman given a hearing trumpet by a friend, overhears her family discussing her removal to an old people’s home. She ends up being sent to a bizarre institution where the accommodation consists of (amongst other things) cement boots, igloos, and toadstools. Marian is later told that she deserves to live in a boiled cauliflower but doesn’t, because one isn’t available. Having determined that ‘one has to be very careful what one takes when one goes away forever’, Marian had ‘decided to pack as if [she] were going to Lapland’, which surprisingly turns out to be quite useful (without giving anything away). Although she now finds that ‘[s]leeping and waking are not quite as distinctive as they used to be, I often mix them up’, Marian embarks on a fantastic adventure involving a cross-dressing man who, in a past life, sold marijuana-stuffed pincushions; a painter of toilet paper; death by fudge; and an exploding eighteenth-century nun who dabbled in goddess worship and is immortalised, winking, in a painting hanging in the institution’s dining room. What else? Oh yes, uranium is discovered in a servant’s lavatory; people are seeking the Holy Grail; there’s an earthquake; and a wolf-woman (werewoman?) who makes a collage from the bodies of a tortoise, a baby, and a stork. There are some wonderful pronouncements, too: “People are nude everywhere if they haven’t got any clothes on”, and ‘it is wrong to deprive animals of their life when they are so difficult to chew anyway’. A nightmare about death is less concerned with ideas of pain or descent into some unknown abyss than with the disagreeable inconvenience of dealing with a dead body: “I keep dreaming that I am dead and have to bury my own corpse. This is most unpleasant as the corpse has begun to go bad and I don’t know where to put it”. Oh, and apparently, the Bible “is inaccurate. Noah did go off in an ark, but he got drunk and fell overboard. Mrs. Noah…watched him drown, she didn’t do anything about it because she inherited all those cattle.”

Basically, this is a book in which anything can and does happen. Rebirth and change are constant themes, as is religion (with particular emphasis on pagan Mother Goddesses). Alice went to Wonderland as a child; Marian stays here, but she also goes to Hell and back. Through her journey, feminine power is renewed and restored, and life and hope are rekindled. It’s original, joyful, funny, and fantastic.

So that’s the plot out of the way. Carrington (about whom I knew nothing before reading this, occasioning the revving up of the search engine) was at the heart of the Surrealist movement, an upper-class rebel who possessed an astonishing imagination and talent for painting, sculpture, and writing. From what I have seen, she was clearly interested in exploring and portraying a feminine perspective within her work. I might have to find out more about her. I might even end up liking her as much as I like Bosch.  

For anyone seeking a literary livener, this is recommended as a splendid brew of hope, humour, meaning, and magic.

The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington ISBN: 9780141187990