Astrology and Blooming, Buzzing Confusion
Research for my stories leads me down strange pathways.
‘I write to taste life twice: in the moment and in retrospect.' Anaïs Nin
Star signs? All nonsense of course. But which of us does not have the desire for some shape, some purpose in the randomised pick-and-mix of human experience? We might discover that shape in the certainties of organised religion or the world of science and the academy.
The other week I talked with a friend about coincidence. He doesn’t believe in it. He thinks there is something more than coincidence behind coincidences. We talked about ideas from CJ Jung which refer to synchronicity and the conscience collective – a kind of well of human experience, wisdom and perception which, some say now, may be genetically accumulated.
So far, so unscientific!
But we seem to need it. Look at the way some of us unscientific folk embrace the work of Einstein, Schrödinger and others, who have challenged to notion of a linear time in warping, bending, reversing, and even breaking the received wisdom of time’s straight arrow, using the mechanics of relativity and quantum physics.
Like babies we live in this world of blooming, buzzing confusion and look always for patterns which will explain it all. Religions of every sort - as well as the schools of scientific theory and academic concepts – flaunt their holy books, their heroes and their villains and offer us comfort, in that if we follow their rules, they will make shapely sense for us, out of our individual confusion.
Reading the stars in the night sky and interpreting them to ascribe character and to predict the future - if time’s not linear then the future is there to see! - is the most immediate and possibly primitive of these processes. And like many people, over my morning coffee, I read my stars in newspapers and magazines. There is this lady who has offered to do it for me in person, but I haven’t as yet taken her up on it. She calls herself a shaman, which is interesting,
My own favourite thing is to check out personality types designated by the stars. I am Pisces - ‘impressionable, compassionate, sensitive, artistic, mystical, meditative, spiritual, a medium, also escapist - tendency to flight, dependent, masochistic. Can be mendacious. (i.e. tendency to tell lies – come to think of it I tell lies (i.e. stories) for a living!) And paranoid. (e.g. Why is nobody in Germany reading my deathless prose?)
I have to tell you that, in my case, all these aspects of personality are more or less true. I might have dozens of other characteristics but even these link back to the above qualities one way or another.
Looking at other Pisceans I can see these qualities coming through. Lots of actors (including Ellen Terry, Elizabeth Taylor and Bruce Willis); many writers (including Anais Nin, the inspiration for all these essays); politicians (including Gordon Brown and Bill Clinton); inventers and thinkers (including the aforementioned Albert Einstein). I imagine as well that prisons and psychiatric units will have their fair share of rather more anonymous Pisceans, with their mendacity, paranoia and desire to escape.
Talking of prisons, the joint star sign of the Kray Twins (see my novel The Lavender House) was Scorpio…
Reviewers Comment: ‘resourcefulness, penetrating insight, strength in crisis, psychic power should come as no surprise that this book is an exceptional read.
At one point I was preoccupied by all this because Stella, or Starr. the central character in my novel An Englishwoman in France is a professional astrologer. Even through her life-changing adventures in France she still posts her astrological columns to the magazines that employ her. Although she is somewhat creative in generating her copy – she’s a Piscean, after all – she has taken to the work like a duck to water because all through her life she has sensed dead people and seen through time.
Reviewers Comment
‘Wendy Robertson’s novels have a habit of being exceptional.'
The Story
The opening chapter is a case in point. It introduces us to Estella, known as Starr, who sees people where they ought not to be, particularly the dead. This gift runs in the family. To her it is quite ordinary, but it evokes a puzzled teasing from her friends. She decides to keep it to herself.
This chapter also goes back in time to 301 AD, where a young boy called Tib is watching the boats go by in his hometown of Good Fortune. His father is the governor of this port. This juxtaposition suggests a link between the past and present, but what is it?
The two narratives develop side by side.
Tib, like Starr, has gifts beyond the ordinary. He can heal with his hands and using natural medicines in a magical way. No explanation – it is God-given. His father engages Modeste, a doctor of many arts, to complete the boy’s education, but worried that these two might be seen as revolutionaries, and a threat to the Roman establishment he represents, he sends them away for fear of reprisals.
Meanwhile, fast forward to 2009, Starr on a night out with her friend Mae, has a one-night stand with a boat-builder called Ludovic. It is a perfect match in its other-worldly intensity, and she conceives a daughter, Siri. Twelve years later, the girl is brutally murdered.
Starr’s quest to come to terms with her loss finds her in a French port called Agde. She is feeling unsafe in the here and now, and a chance meeting with a mysterious Madame Patrice and her friend Louis, with whom she sleeps, ignites the feelings she had with Siri’s father.
These two characters are not rooted in the present, and Louis and a red-headed boy who keeps him company have an uncanny connection in the story Tib and Modeste.
Then on her own, having sent her friends home, Starr finds herself during the feast of Pentecost drawn towards the water, and suddenly she is in 301 AD.
Tib and Modeste are now in a world which it is mirrored by Starr’s search for het murdered daughter.
The novel explores the relationship between past, present and future. Modeste’s scrolls are like Starr’s articles for her newspaper, and he has blue eyes like the other two men in her life. As well as this she sleeps with him and experiences the same time. The three ‘times’ circle through the narrative.
The pace of modern life with its hustle and bustle contrasts with the narratives older time’s pastoral prose. Starr’s bewildered reaction to her time-change is at times humorous until she accepts it and finds peace about her loss of Siri’.
So far, so very unscientific, you might quite rightly say.
As I say, researching a novel takes you down the strangest pathways.
Cover copy for An Englishwoman in France.
Psychic Starr Warner’s happy-go-lucky attitude to her gift of second sight swerves to a halt when Siri, her 12-year-old daughter is savagely murdered. Starr is distressed because she cannot use her gift to find her daughter anywhere – in this world or the next. Then, in the old French town of Agde, she meets Louis, a man of genius and his mysterious companion the young boy Tib. These two lead Starr to a place and time stretching back to the beginning of Christianity, where her search for her daughter Siri takes on a new meaning.
Her partner Philip....' thinks I’m barmy. No! Seriously thinks I’m mad. The thing is I’m very normal – as normal as anyone ever is. But the truth is it’s quite ordinary for me to see other times and people who might be called dead. For instance, there was this woman standing behind the woman at the till in Asda. She was very old and wore a red sari with gold edges. She was like smoke in the air.’
A WELCOME REVIEW:
‘It should come as no surprise that this book is an exceptional read. Wendy Robertson’s novels have a habit of being exceptional.
The opening chapter is a case in point. It introduces us to Estella, known as Starr, who sees people where they ought not to be, particularly the dead. This gift runs in the family. To her it is quite ordinary, but it evokes a puzzled teasing from her friends. She decides to keep it to herself.
This chapter also goes back in time to 301 AD, where a young boy called Tib is watching the boats go by in his hometown of Good Fortune. His father is the governor of this port. This juxtaposition suggests a link between the past and present, but what is it?
The two narratives develop side by side.
Tib, like Starr, has gifts beyond the ordinary. He can heal with his hands and using natural medicines in a magical way. No explanation – it is God-given. His father engages Modeste, a doctor of many arts, to complete the boy’s education, but worried that these two might be seen as revolutionaries, and a threat to the Roman establishment he represents, he sends them away for fear of reprisals.’
Meanwhile, back in 2009, Starr on a night out with her friend Mae, has a one-night stand with a boat-builder called Ludovic. It is a perfect match in its other-worldly intensity, and she conceives a daughter, Siri. Twelve years later, the girl is brutally murdered.
Starr’s quest to come to terms with her loss finds her in a French port called Agde. She is feeling unsafe in the here and now, and a chance meeting with a mysterious Madame Patrice and her friend Louis, with whom she sleeps, ignites the feelings she had with Siri’s father.
These two characters are not rooted in the present, and Louis and a red-headed boy who keeps him company have an uncanny connection for the reader with Tib and Modeste.
Then on her own, having sent her friends home, she finds herself during the feast of Pentecost drawn towards the water, and suddenly she is in 301 AD.
Tib and Modeste are now joined by Starr, renamed Florence, in their quest for the truth about the Nazarene, and it is mirrored by Starr’s search for her daughter.
The novel explores the relationship between past, present and future. Modeste’s scrolls are like Starr’s computer articles for her newspaper, and he has blue eyes like the other two men in her life. She sleeps with him as well, and experiences the same aura. The three ‘times’ are circulatory.
The pace of modern life with its hustle and bustle contrasts with the older time’s pastoral prose. Starr’s bewildered reaction to her time-change is at times humorous until she accepts it and finds peace about her loss of Siri.