Limestone and Clay

Nadia longs for a child, while Simon prefers exploring caves, but a jealous ex-girlfriend's revelations subject them both to dark obsessions that must be resolved in one desperate night

Motherhood, artistic creativity and the mysterious powers of the earth are among the weighty themes tackled in this affecting novel from English author Glaister ( Digging to Australia ). Nadia, a potter, lives with her spelunking boyfriend Simon in an unnamed English town. "Darkly, strongly female" though Nadia is, she has never been able to bring a pregnancy to term: memories of a recent, second-trimester miscarriage are overwhelmingly painful. Shortly before Nadia's baby would have been due, Simon thoughtlessly agrees to impregnate his former lover Celia, whose husband is sterile. Nadia is bruised when she hears that breezy, arrogant Celia is pregnant and furious when she discovers that Simon is the unborn child's father. Simon's infidelity proves to be the catalyst for the couple's parallel journeys of self-discovery: while Simon risks his life exploring an unmapped cave on his own, Nadia finds an unexpected way to play at motherhood. Sensational as this plot line may sound, it simply serves as a framework for a meditation on the relations between men and women. Vivid, sensual descriptions of daily life cleverly amplify the narrative's larger events: "Something about the ordinary process of fishing the wet brown teabag out of the cup, the useless wodge leaking thick brown onto the silver surface of the draining-board, causes her to moan." Drawn with exceptional clarity, Glaister's complicated, fallible characters linger in the reader's mind.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

This English author has dealt before (Digging to Australia, 1993, etc.) with the creepy stuff that can issue forth from ``ordinariness,'' a disarming quality often buffeted by her grotesque-to-cheerful eccentrics ballooning over a modest landscape. Here a jangle-nerved young married couple cook their respective obsessions to a nightmare boil. Nadia is a potter and sculptor; her husband, handsome Simon, is a teacher of geography and a caver--discovering new worlds beneath the surface of the earth is his passion. His latest project is to locate a joining of two caves, a project in which his friend Roland lost his life. Nadia is obsessed with another interior mystery--why can she not successfully conceive a child? One rainy night, both Nadia and Simon are drawn separately to potential disaster. Simon, minus caving mates, descends below. Nadia, in a white rage at learning that Simon acted as donor to his former lover, who has conceived his child, takes off to an inn where she is asked to babysit an infant. In a drunken fancy, Nadia absorbs the child as her own, while below, Simon, in the dark (Nadia had taken his batteries, not knowing his destination), approaches terror--and a horrible vision. Offstage monitor of disaster is Nadia's neighbor Iris, with her ``cheerful doughy face'' and an obese husband with a beard clogged with food. Iris calls Nadia ``ducks'' and her crow pet ``Darling.'' Iris--a Glaister trademark eccentric--tells tea leaves, even cornflakes. Like Darling's caw, Iris alerts Nadia to danger. In the end Simon and Nadia, spirits shriveled, make their tired decision at the mouth of Simon's cave. Although one tires of the details about Nadia's plumbing, and Simon is a bit of an ass, still there's no denying Glaister's ability to pull terror and suspense from just about anywhere, including a truly scary hole in the ground. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Unlike Trick or Treat (1992) with its wild cast of characters, Glaister's latest novel plunges deeply into the lives of just one couple: Nadia, a potter who represents the clay of the book's title, and Simon, whose obsession with exploring caves is symbolized by limestone. Although the story turns upon Nadia's difficulty in having a child, Glaister navigates around that problem while exposing the emotional defenses and vulnerable areas of each of the main characters. Glaister scores high marks for these relentless, almost excruciatingly succinct portrayals; his powerful contemporary tale heats up as it proceeds toward a tense and poignant climax. Alice Joyce