I Read Julia Armfield’s ‘Private Rites’.
Julia Armfield has given water a new dimension within itself. In both her previous work, Our Wives Under the Sea and this new novel, the way that water is cared for and verbally curated is the way that a bonsai master cultivates and manicures their plant. Reading through her books, the way she describes the element makes me feel like, despite being on the earth for 43 years, I ultimately don’t believe I’ve ever experienced this sensation the same way. Several times, it made me want to immerse myself in fresh water, in salt water, in bath water, in pool water, just to feel the different densities, the different weights, the different escapes that each of them provide.
But water is not the point.
Language is.
The most frustrating part about reading this book was in the moments I would find myself without a pen to underline quotes that I knew I would need to come back to.
What Armfield is capable of maintaining in a book that has about 30% kineticism and 70% mood is keeping me drilled into each scene, hanging on every alcove and every eyelash of her environment. Her sometimes floral, sometimes industrious, sometimes poetic design of delivery is masterful. Sometimes I simply don’t care what she’s writing about, I just want to descend on all of it infinitely, diving through fractal after fractal until we’ve examined every mite, every hollow, every pin. In Private Rites, (beyond water) she’s writing about three sisters whose lives seemingly couldn’t be more different, each moored to one another by the flooding city in which they live and the father who’s roof under which they grew up.
The way that each of these sisters explores this post-industrial, post-capitalist, post-salvationary cityscape is examined from very close range. I often try to spare the specific details in these reactions, but I may have to dive a bit into summary territory to full explain what I’m talking about here. Irene’s rigid and inflammatory temper lights her pages with a fire and a tension that allows you to feel like you’re walking on glass. Isla’s quiet and non-confrontational meandering feels wispy, ethereal, almost like a chalk outline waiting to be filled with a body or at least blood.
And then there’s Agnes, who I believe we seem to get the most time with. Agnes is the youngest of the sisters. She meets a woman who seems to orbit her possibly by accident but likely not, and hooks up with her, moves in with her, dates her but doesn’t want to fall too deeply. She follows her emotions and puts her guard up. She ignores her phone, builds walls, trusts the tides of destiny. In this way she is fearless, but almost in the way that aloofness is fearlessness, that courage can be mistaken for ignorance. She wears the armor of youth almost by mistake. It’s in these passages that I think I saw the most humanity, the most naked look at The City around them.
The City is also a character which has chapters dedicated to it, perhaps through Its eyes, perhaps just passive observations, perhaps in the way that some deific vision is passing along like scripture. I haven’t quite finished my theory on what I’m seeing yet (more on that later). But what can be said is that the passages here are of the utmost stoicism, blameless, timeless, but beautiful and astute. Like reflecting on unfortunate accidents. Like sifting through ashes of a building you used to live in before you started being a complete person. This City is a place of utmost importance. A detail that you must know is that here, in this city, it is raining all the time. All of the time. Infrastructure is failing to it. Foundations are failing to it. We are failing to it. And The City, whether it exists as the sum of its buildings, the sum of its people, the sum of its borders, watches on with austerity.
This story feels told in two parts. Reading through its first 60% or so, I would say that while I was fully committed to the Book, to the Novel, I didn’t necessarily feel committed to a story that was being pushed forth. I felt no agenda. A cup wasn’t filling, it was instead being passed around a table. There’s a very distinct part of the book that starts a very poignant set of events into action, one where I can draw a very distinctive portion of my attention to. It involves a ferry landing, an observer and the effects of gravity and the everpresent water. This, I believe, is an indication of what to expect, of “what we’re looking for”. It’s like one of those scenes in a film that you’re watching for the second or third time, and once you’ve seen it with knowing eyes, you’ve created a new and more complete codex.
I do recommend this book, if not for the story, at the very least for the author’s vision. The way she has her mind’s eye on (and within) the people she’s writing about tells of a sixth or seventh sense about the minute behaviors that we exhibit not only within our exosocial systems, but also the compendium of nervous twitches, of eye-contact and the angles at which we dive into and out of it, of the dovetailing ways in which we avoid and engulf ourselves in conversation. Julia Armfield is an expert navigator of the human experience. Read this book to find yourself chest high in relationships and then let the rest of you get swallowed by the tides of the conflict of the end [The End].
