I Finally Read A Marvellous Light By Freya Marske
I love a slow burn narrative, one that asks you to take your time and trust the process laid out by the author. It's a journey that wants you to sit and consider and guess and theorise and gives you the space to do it all. At their best they give you all of this and then shatter your expectations just enough to surprise you.
A Marvellous Light is the other kind of narrative. It grabs you by the wrist propels you through the narrative at a pace which never stops long enough for it to feel like it's stalled or spinning it's wheels.
I've never been able to read a book slowly, ADHD means hyperfixation and hyperfixation means not putting a book down until it's done with me. Marske matched my pace in a way I rarely see, even when I was devouring each page the story and the characters kept up with me and it was all the more fun for it.
Robin is a delightful mess of a man who is so kind and caring and absolutely unwilling to compromise on those things. It's the first time I saw my ADHD reflected back without needing to squint, to shuffle the parts around a little until they made sense. Robin wasn't simply coded ADHD it is just part of who he is in the way he interprets things and how he lives.
Edwin is autistic and the world was not made for him. His family, his friends, the very grounds he grew up on were not made to accommodate his kind of brilliance which is why Sutton Cottage was such a refreshing aspect to see. We see narratives where the autistic character must bend for the world around them but Edwin instead creates a space for himself. One where the very plants welcome him home. Robin struggles to be kind because no one and nowhere was ever kind to him but he cares so deeply about doing the right thing - he can learn what kindness feels like from the people who love him.
It's clear the land plays a significant role in the narrative; a deliberate choice to frame a person's relationship with nature as a conversation, a pact of care that is felt most clearly at Sutton Cottage between Edwin and the land itself. The Cottage will care for him as long as he cares for the Cottage, a symbiosis that Marske cares deeply about transcribing into her work. It's an important message, now more than ever, one I've seen rarely in fiction but but am delighted to see given the space to be explored.
In short, I loved this book and these characters and the ingenuity with which the author crafted her world. I'm glad to see an author who cares for the natural world begin to explore our relationship to it with an understanding that isn't one of extraction but of care and consideration.
Read this book.
