Books: Female and phoenix

08 December 2013 - 02:02 By Michele Magwood
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Elizabeth Gilbert draws a woman and a world so rich it adds lustre to everything you know, writes Michele Magwood

The Signature of All Things *****

Elizabeth Gilbert

Bloomsbury, R270

You won't forget Alma Whittaker in a hurry - if you ever do. It is rare in fiction for a woman to emerge from the page so fully formed, so uncommon, that she changes your understanding of the world. Rare, too, in the contemporary canon drenched in dystopia, to read a work that bristles and hums with a fecund wonder, for botany, for science, for new lands, for humanity itself.

Alma Whittaker is "born with the century", in 1800, in Philadelphia - daughter to one of the richest men in the Western world. Her father, Henry, was the delinquent son of a meek orchardman at Kew Gardens. Disgusted by his family's poverty, he stole exotic specimens of plants to sell - but was caught and sent away to sea on one of Captain Cook's voyages to Tahiti. He apprenticed himself to a botanist on board and learned enough to found a pharmaceutical empire based on medicinal plants. He established himself in Philadelphia, which is where Alma is born.

His daughter is not blessed with beauty, being "ginger of hair, florid of skin, small of mouth, wide of brow, abundant of nose" - the spit, in fact, of Henry.

But what a world she is born into. The Philadelphia estate is an Arcadia of hothouses and woodlands, libraries and ballrooms, a stuffed giraffe in a pavilion, and "shelves stocked with South Sea coral, Javanese idols, ancient jewellery of lapis lazuli, and dusty Turkish almanacs". By the age of four Alma knows her numbers - in English, Dutch, French and Latin.

She develops a recondite scientific mind, which will lead her to become an eminent botanist and taxonomist, but under a male nom de plume. She embraces the philosophy of the Christian mystic Jacob Boehme, who believed that "God had hidden clues for humanity's betterment inside the design of every flower, leaf, fruit and tree on earth". This is "the signature of all things".

Alma is a sensualist trapped in a lumpen body, she loves deeply but disastrously, but there is always her work and her ceaseless curiosity about the world. Determined to escape the burden of running her father's estate, and tracing lost love, she sets off to study the flora of Tahiti. In this unruly, fantastic territory she will be profoundly changed.

For those who wonder how this epic, dazzling novel could be the work of the author of the schmaltzy Eat, Pray, Love, look again. The signature is there. Those who mocked the yapping solipsism of that book might remember that at the heart of it is the quest of a woman to define herself outside the traditional framework of husband, children and homemaking.

Alma stands in for all the forgotten women of science, whose quiet, thoughtful observation was eclipsed by more famous men. She is unforgettable. - @michelemagwood

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