ABOUT GRACE
by Anthony Doerr
Fourth Estate £15.99 pp404

Ingrid Hill’s expansive, exuberant novel about human connections across the generations begins at a specific point in time: Monday June 9, 2003. On this “crystalline” morning, little flaxen-haired Ursula Wong hurtles down a disused mineshaft in Michigan, leaving her distraught parents, Annie and Justin, gaping helplessly above. Ursula is, definitively, “under”.

The rest of the story unfurls across time and space, with chapters zooming back through centuries and continents to tell the tales of Ursula’s ancestors, from a second-century-BC Chinese alchemist to a 19th-century Finnish miner in Michigan who, coincidentally (or not), also ends up “under” — in a mining disaster. It is these echoes that power Hill’s impressive imagination: could, for instance, an ancient Finnish curse visited on one of Ursula’s grandmaternal ancestors have “circled the earth” for centuries before “hurtling toward Michigan”? Could, indeed, the “newness of the 21st century” be bound up on some mystical level with those ancient forebears? The answer in this novel, of course, is yes. The footprints of the forebears lurk both in the earth and the genes: in Ursula’s bright blonde hair and Justin’s “lacquer-red” Chinese blood.

The detailed stories of ancestral life almost become novels in their own right. And knitting these to the present — paradoxically, for a novel about connections — can be a stretch. Mostly the style is engaging, but, when describing Annie and Justin’s love or Ursula’s “cuteness”, things can verge on the emetic (“Get beddo Mommy wegs,” lisps Ursula, touching her mother’s crippled limbs). Overall, however, Hill’s innovation and intelligence triumph in this flawed but imaginatively superior debut.

Anthony Doerr’s emotionally complex novel also features a small, endangered daughter — David Winkler’s baby, Grace. Winkler, a solitary Alaskan hydrologist with a snowflake obsession, is prone to dream premonitions. He correctly dreams how he will meet his wife Sandy, and then how he will try to save their baby from a flood only to drop her in the rushing water, and see her drown. When the dreaded flood arrives David flees, appalled at what he might do if he tries to save his baby. He ends up in the Caribbean where he stays for 20 years, not knowing if his daughter survived. Eventually, he returns and tracks his way across America towards Alaska, looking for Grace.

The metaphor is not as heavy-handed as it sounds. As Doerr painstakingly dissects everyday life, snowflakes become “infinite permutations of an ice crystal”, a phone call “a burst of electrons smashing toward the great vibrating switchboards”. His characters are obsessed with the world’s minutiae, trying desperately to understand how it all works, what the patterns are. Winkler himself can be frustrating. He is vulnerable, wounded, introverted, unable to express himself to those he loves (if he could just talk to his wife he would save himself a book’s worth of angst). But his journey is enlightening. Gradually he comes to realise that the connections and permutations in his own life are not fixed but — like snowflakes — full of infinite possibility and beauty. He may see the future, but his actions can change it. This discovery is Winkler ’s “grace” and lends a delightfully hopeful ending to this intensely poetic first novel.

Available at Books First prices of £8.79 plus 99p p&p and £12.79 (About Grace) plus £2.25 p&p on 0870 165 8585

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