Book review: The Chthonic Cycle is a bold move for a first book, a collection of interlocking antic and anarchic essays sparking off the alluvial gravel of existential angst. It was written to ward off that generational sense of impending apocalyptic doom, but with style, like we did it in the 1980s in the ever-present shadow of nuclear armageddon.
Cruickshank wrote The Chthonic Cycle (“chthonic” simply means “of the earth” but there’s probably an allusion to Great Cthulhu who will emerge when the stars are right to destroy the world with madness) to ward off her own existential dread and that of the similarly afflicted.
This is such beautiful writing ‒ clever, lyrical, sensitive to source. Cruickshank’s prose and flow of ideas gives every appearance of effortless elegance, sprezzatura as the Italians say, but even as it glides from topic to topic like an exquisite swan, one can feel the frantic paddling of the feet beneath the water. When she writes about the mineral jet, it’s almost a metacommentary on the whole project: “When I decided to write about jet I thought I already knew what it was. Jet is the chthonic cousin of amber, and an elegant sibling of coal. It’s been the stuff of mourning jewellery, and before that, rosaries, and before that, charms for the young dead. And before that? A waterlogged corpse, a footnote in the book of extinction. Its origins are both banal and hyperspecific; it has been a tool of magic and fashion, put to ritual uses both cynical and sincere.”
Cruickshank’s breadth is oceanic without getting bogged down. The subjects that catch her attention with their dark, sparkly lustre range across mass poisonings, amber, ambergris, baroque pearls, coral, the Great Exhibition in London, and the reanimation of the deceased. The threads that bind these pieces together are death, and how the French poet Charles Péguy called the “carnal earth” and deep geological time transform death into beauty – even if it is sometimes a macabre beauty.
Cruickshank has a wonderful eye and a light touch for the ironic juxtaposition: “But the world’s few modern experts are now unanimous: ambergris is sperm whale shit … Its primary use today is as a fixative for perfumes.”
In other ways it is a carefully curated cabinet of curiosities, a collection of memento mori, that remind us, not without philosophical consolation, that we too shall die and will probably end up eventually turned into something else.
New Zealand literature doesn’t have much to compare it to unless it’s one of Martin Edmond’s maximally baroque stream-of-consciousness psychogeographies. At times, it reminds of Iain Sinclair and WG Sebald, Jorge Luis Borges, Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Ovid’s first line: “My soul is wrought to sing of forms transformed to bodies new and strange!”) and Joan Didion, but never forced or pastiche. Cruickshank is her own unique voice.
The world is very, very old, around 4500 billion-odd years, and complicated and terrifying, prone to titanic mass destruction, extinctions, upheaval and violence that human beings can barely comprehend. If the entire history of the Earth was compressed down to a single 24-hour day, humans, as a species, have existed for only 1 minute and 17 seconds (or thereabouts – Bill Bryson is prone to generalisations and convenience).
We’ve lost much of our sense of awe in the last couple of centuries, and this book has it all rushing back.
The Chthonic Cycle, by Una Cruickshank (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $35), is out now.
