Perchance to dream... Sandra Newman's "The Heavens"

The Heavens by Sandra Newman

A review

Whittling down the plot of “The Heavens” to its bare bones makes it sound incomprehensible, if not downright silly.  However, I’ll try to do it justice with as few spoilers as possible.

The novel’s “present” is set in New York around the year 2000.  Except it’s not the city as we know it, but one which is different in subtle yet significant ways.  A female, environmentalist President has been elected, it’s “the first year with no war at all” and there’s a general sense of utopian optimism.  In other words, all’s right with the world.

It’s certainly all right with Ben’s world.  He’s just fallen in love with Kate and can’t believe his luck.  Kate is smart and beautiful.  She’s exotic, describing herself as Hungarian-Turkish-Persian, three romantic, impractical strains, three peoples who had thrown away their empires.  She moves within a glamorous set of friends who welcome Ben into their fold.   

Soon, Ben learns that Kate has a strange recurring dream in which she visits an alternative reality.  As her relationship with Ben gets stronger, the dream also becomes more defined and we realise that, in her sleep, she is travelling to late 16^th century England, and experiencing it as (the historical) Emilia Lanier.  Lanier was a poet and musician, mistress to the cousin of Elizabeth I, and wife of court musician Alfonso Lanier.  Emilia is also sometimes touted as the “Dark Lady” of Shakespeare’s sonnets.    

On each return to the “present”, Kate notices that the world has changed from the way she left it, and often for the worse – this sets her on a mission to change the past, in the hope of creating a better future.  But the second part of the novel also presents us with a radically – and tragically – different possibility, namely that this whole time-travel thing is all in Kate’s mind, even though the novel’s post-apocalyptic ending leaves it up to us to figure out what is really happening between the book’s pages.

This is a quirky novel with an appropriately quirky set of characters.  Ben and Kate/Emilia are the protagonists, but Kate’s set of friends provide an eccentric supporting cast, adroitly reflected in the court circles frequented by Emilia.  It might not be a perfect comparison, but “The Heavens” reminded me somewhat of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas – firstly in the idea of different eras impinging on each other but, more importantly, in its mixture of genres.  “The Heavens” is part romance, part historical fiction/alternative history, part science-fiction, part fantasy/speculative fiction with a touch of magical realism.  On one level, it can also be read as an expression of millennial angst – there’s an important scene which recreates the 9/11 attacks, making it the third novel I’ve read in the past few months which in some way or another references a defining event of recent history.   (Ottessa Moshfegh's My Year of Rest and Relaxation and R.O. Kwon's The Incendiaries)

There’s similar variety in the style – which shifts from realistic narration to poetic description, from tragedy to comedy and back to something-in-between.

If it’s eclectic in its influences and style, “The Heavens” is equally varied in the subjects it addresses.  Now whilst I don’t mind genre-hopping one bit and actually love a novel which breaks barriers between genres, the boring part in me still tries to find an “anchoring” theme, subject or message.  In this regard, “The Heavens” is more like a colourful butterfly which flits impulsively from one theme to the next.  The novel could be an ideal book club choice as it provides plenty of discussion material.  Just a few of the questions raised:

·        How does the past affect the present?

·        Does history repeat itself?

·        Is the idea that we can affect the future merely an illusion?

·        On a larger scale, can politics really change the world for the better?

·        Is there a place for utopia and ideals?

·        Can art...music...literature... change the world?

·        Can love change the world?

·        What does it mean to be happy and can one be happy when the world’s in a bad state?

·        What does it mean to live with mental health problems or with a person with (possibly) mental health issues?

They’re not easy questions and the novel does not provide easy answers, which might be frustrating for some readers and quite the contrary for others.  What’s more impressive is that these themes are addressed (or, at least, raised) in a novel which often displays a light, playful touch.

Expected publication

February 12th 2019 by Grove Press

May 2nd, 2019 by Granta Books

Grove Atlantic edition cover

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The historical Emilia Lanier was born in a family of Italian musicians who served the Tudor court.  She married into another famous family of court musicians, the Laniers.  Of these, Nicholas Lanier, is by far the best-known, having been the first Master of the King’s Music.

Music plays an important part in the 16th/17th Century segments of the novel.  Viol consorts where a regular entertainment in the Tudor and Stuart courts.   Here’s a viol consort performance of Fancy for six Viols by Orlando Gibbons (1583 – 1625)

 

One of intriguing aspects of “The Heavens” is the way in which it brings together two disparate eras – an imaginary 21st century New York, and late16th century England.  For a musical equivalent, I suggest John Harle’s settings of Shakespeare.  Harle’s keening saxophone and the raucously expressive voice of Elvis Costello give them a contemporary feel but the pieces still nail the particularly English feeling of “melancholy (melancholia)

 

https://open.spotify.com/track/7sEnK1QdbZfuI0hZ8bBFyj?si=mv-uDd9gS5eUor9RN5WCuA

 

It’s interesting to compare Harle’s style to  a setting of Shakespeare’s poem “O Mistress Mine” by Thomas Morley (1557-1602), a contemporary of the Bard of Avon.

 

To end, here’s a link to an interesting and insightful blogpost about musical literacy in Shakespeare’s time:

 

https://blog.oup.com/2016/08/musical-literacy-shakespeare-england/#__prclt=A6Ds5eEl