PATRICK HOLLAND Navigatio. Reviewed by Folly Gleeson
In his fifth book, Queensland writer Patrick Holland takes us back to the sixth century and invites us to reflect on the meaning of life’s journey.
Navigatio is the story of Saint Brendan of Clonfert and his legendary search for the Isle of the Blessed. Patrick Holland has taken a 1600-year-old mythic tale and turned it into a fable of life’s protean journey. It is a story of hints and impulses; those matters which concern our varied and multiple motivations and beliefs, and although it is about a quest, it is certainly not a narrative where something specific is searched for and found. St Brendan, a monk who sets out on his voyage through many islands in a curragh with several companions, confronts dangerous seas, experiences and characters, among them angels, demons, mermaids, crones, Death and Satan. These encounters are treated as symbolic versions of the many conflicting paths and experiences we all confront in our lives. But, having said that, Holland also gives us a strong rendering of the real world.
When St Brendan is tempted by a woman’s voice extolling the beauties of a land of sunshine, he responds:
How beautiful are the snows that fall on the high stones in the winter and settle on the great trees making them sleep, erasing the hard lines of this world and promising some other. Do not the wild cold winds of that season come like a wordless voice that speaks from there? And how entrancing the rain falling in silver sheets on the moors when my sister and I were young and my mother would call us inside to dry our clothes by the fire. How pregnant too the night while I stood at a cliff’s edge and watched it settle on the ocean as though veiling a secret …
No, said Brendan aloud to the spirit. Yours is not the country I seek. It is some other.
The non-linear flow of the novel means that each chapter is like a text for a meditation, often very short and seemingly not necessarily connected to what has gone before. Yet each is capable of provoking a pleasing and profound, even sensuous, response. In fact, the prose descriptions are elegant, fastidious and astringent and they instil in the reader a contemplative impulse.
The corresponding mood is rather like that caused by the reading of poetry, and the reader is invited to enter a place for reflection, to take time to think about his or her own joys and difficulties. This sounds a little sombre but there are many pleasures, even amusing moments.
Navigatio offers a riposte to those who think that e-books have won the battle for our reading habits: it is very beautifully produced. Junko Azukawa’s delicate ink drawings add a haunting charm to the text and the layout is quite playful – one chapter consists of the word ‘ocean’, with some hidden additions. It induced a sense of the sea, even seasickness in me. I found it fun to play with that, indeed.
The language is truly inspiring but much of the tale deals with horrific experiences of confusion, stupidity and betrayal, brought about by human activity, spiritual trauma and physical storms. Although lovely, this book is not for the faint-hearted:
A gale rose and they scud [sic] before it with no sail set till they were blown upon a black headland. Inky waters boiled in the rocks and a great chasm like a gate opened up before them with a dead green light in its depths and they knew this could only be the home of Death. They planted their oars in the water and it was all they could do to keep the curragh from the black gate.
Death came to meet them.
Death was stooped and shrouded in grey with a face that was sexless and pained, like a wastrel prostitute and her aging tout lover at once, now older than cities, now with the rosy cheeks of a little girl running from what she does not know in a wood where night is falling; now tired like a drunkard in the early hours of the morning when the wine has left and sleep has not yet arrived; now hungry like a wolf waiting yellow-eyed with the patience of stone in its winter cavern for the first fawn to break the ice crust with its hoof …
This is a book for the contemplative reader and for those beguiled by beautiful prose.
Patrick Holland Navigatio Transit Lounge 2014 HB 224pp $29.99
Folly Gleeson was a lecturer in Communication Studies. At present she enjoys her book club and reading history and fiction.
You can buy this book from Abbey’s here or from Booktopia here.
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