The Service of Clouds - Softcover

FALCONER, DELIA

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0330360272 ISBN 13: 9780330360272

Publisher: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1997

Synopsis

The year the Hydro Majestic Hotel failed as a hydropathic institute Harry Kitchings fell in love with the air and stayed. Les Curtain began to feel the dusk in his lungs. It was a romantic year. Men carried thermometers and dreamed of women struck by lightening. Postmen hauled pockets filled with love and human hair. Women carried notebooks and pressed storms in them like flowers. You could feel our love rising from the mountain tops like steam.

About this title

Review

A mystically inclined photographer who tries to find the face of God captured in clouds; a tubercular horticulturist who experiences others' dreams; a pharmacist's assistant who sells tonics to cure homesickness and unrequited love--these are the inhabitants of Katoomba, a town high in Australia's Blue Mountains where the air is "too thin to support any certainties." Opening in 1907 and spanning nearly two decades, The Service of Clouds follows the coming-of-age of young Eureka Jones, whose town springs into life once she sees it through the eyes of photographer Harry Kitchings. But plot is never this narrative's focus. "My mother, being possessed of a practical temperament, did not use metaphors lightly: she expected them to do a full day's work," writes Falconer, and the same could be said of her novel itself. Metaphors here are meant to be taken quite literally; clouds take on double and triple symbolic duty, but they also literally "soak into the pores" of her characters' skin, "improving its texture and the quality of our blood." In fact, Falconer's metaphors do the full day's work of both characterization and plot, and at times, that load is too much to bear. The prose is magical, but it is also sometimes frustratingly abstract. No matter: Katoomba itself is vivid, and the novel's language dazzling--even when it leaves the reader standing on less than solid ground.

From the Publisher

"This is almost surely the lushest, most daringly poetic book you will read this year, in which the writer is positively drunk on words themselves." --Susie Linfield, The Los Angeles Times

"Extravagantly imagined...Falconer is a passionate writer, and when she directs that intensity to capturing the tone of the era her delight in its details is infectious." --Deirdre McNamer, The New York Times Book Review

"Absolutely beautiful.... It is always interesting and intelligent, and its prose is lovely." --Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post

"This is an astonishing first novel, elegantly conceived and gorgeously executed." --Barbara Fisher, Boston Globe

"[A] sumptuously poetic first novel.... The depiction of this remote, sapphire blue-tinged community is as mesmerizing as E. Annie Proulx's THE SHIPPING NEWS." --Heller McHalpin, Newsday

About this edition

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus & Giroux
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0330360272
• ISBN 13: 9780330360272
• Binding: Paperback