(Remedios Varo, Embroidering the Mantle, centre panel of a triptych, 1961; found here)
Normally, when I buy a book I read about it – the back-cover copy, reviews, the first few pages, that sort of thing. But sometimes I choose a book because I imagine I would like the person who wrote it. I think perhaps that is where the difference lies between books you admire and books you genuinely love: the author has a sensibility or a way of looking at the world that speaks to you and they become a favourite author. That favourite author may write books that are more or less good, but you enjoy them anyway because that sensibility is still there.
So it was with this novel. (Which is, for the avoidance of doubt, very good indeed.)
By chance I read an interview with Rym Kechacha at the British Fantasy Society (did I see a link to it in Bluesky?). She loves Diana Wynne Jones, and she also likes Sylvia Townsend Warner, Kelly Link and gardening. Definitely my kind of person. She has written a novel inspired by the paintings of Remedios Varo. A painter whose work I love, though I don’t know much about her. All these ingredients impelled me to buy a copy of To Catch a Moon as soon as I could find one (sadly, it is out of print at present but there are plenty of copies floating around on the internet and perhaps soon it will be snapped up by another publisher).
And I loved it! One of its pleasures is working out what sort of novel it is, and where it’s going, and how the pieces fit together – so I’ll try not to give too much away.
(Remedios Varo, The Juggler (The Magician), 1956. MoMA; found here.
It is in a way a portal story, with you, the reader, being the character that travels through the portal – Varo’s kitchen in Mexico City in the middle of the last century – into a world that has been inspired by Varo’s paintings and may or may not be inside her imagination. It’s a world that is governed by different laws to ours, stitched into existence by yellow-haired girls in a tower in the woods, and finely balanced in a contract between the powers of the Moon, the Sun and the Earth. There is a group of travelling performers – a woman, a talking goat, a trickster juggler, an enchanted lion made of leaves. There is a wandering star child. There is an owl woman, who paints baby birds by moonlight and then they come alive. There are witches with flaming thumbs. All of these people will be drawn together, but you’ll have to read the novel to find out why this is.
Here are the labra trees, stitched in a thread that sparkles green and gold when they raise their needles. Here are the flecks of grey foam, frothing on the waves as the wind drags them into a curl. Here are the sloping slate roofs, perfect cones and pyramids balanced atop the boxes of houses. Keep the hand steady, don’t let the fingers slip. Not a stitch too many, nor a snip too few. Mandoré calls out the patterns from his book and stirs the urn with his great silvery staff and they’d better keep up; let their fingers fly across the silken folds of the world they’re making. If they let it slip by unmade they’ll feel the sting of that staff across their backs.
Kechacha’s prose is careful and beautiful; at times it becomes an incantation, summoning the world into existence as the girls sew. The magic that she conjures up in her precise descriptions of flowers and foxes, wheeled spirits and joyful witches is the mysterious force that flows through everything in the world and creates a harmony in everything. But, while this world seems a lovely place to be and the story is told at a leisurely place that allows you to enjoy it fully, it is constructed upon a foundation of suffering. It requires a small number of people to eke out wretched and enslaved existences to create and sustain it. The novel delicately asks: in an ecosystem where everything is co-dependent and finely balanced, what does it mean to have free will?
Any piece of fiction which centres creativity also explores at some level the act of writing and of making art itself. Here, the world is created by girls, albeit imprisoned and compelled by male spirits; girls who embroider, doing traditional and culturally undervalued women’s work. The thread with which they stitch is magically possessed and it is the thread that creates, guiding the girls’ needles. Some of their stitched creations are also creative: the owl woman, but also the witches and the wandering players. All of this has been woven into words by Kechacha, who herself draws on the art painted by Varo; layers upon layers.
Thinking about this in the terms of free will that the novel has set up, it’s clear that there are layers of exploitation and constraint involved in the acts of creation depicted in the book and in the book’s own creation. Within the book, the sewing girls and the Moon’s daughter both create under duress, imprisoned. The creativity of other characters - Leira, the owl woman - is also exploited, more subtly, by Luna. Meanwhile, in the writing of the novel itself, Kechacha has chosen some formal constraints: the world depicted in her writing is a world conjured up by selecting from and linking Varo’s paintings and must retain a fidelity to them. And she has framed the fantastical part of her book with an apparently realist piece of fiction constructed around real people: Remedios Varo, Leonora Carrington and Walter Gruen, containing what might seem like unreality with something that purports to be reality.
The girls and the owl woman within the novel are able to create in the most literal way: their art brings things to life. Yet they are also shown most literally as channels for a force that originates outside them and is directed by the Moon, an artistic compulsion if you like that flows through the thread and the prism. (Look at the painting below, Creation of Birds, to see what I mean.) In this way they are analagous with witches, traditionally seen as instruments of darkness. The significant difference is that the owl woman directs that compulsion herself and the girls are forced by Mandoré and his fellows. In the frame story, Remedios struggles to reconnect somehow with this vital source of creativity, something both necessary and dominating, external and internal, that guides and possesses.
At the end of the novel, Remedios is working again. At some level, the story has refreshed her: she has caught the moon.
(Remedios Varo, Creation of Birds, 1957; Museum of Modern Art, Mexico City; found here)