The Hearing Trumpet

 

The Hearing Trumpet / Leonora Carrington
Potter's Bar, UK: Naxos Audiobooks, 2017, c1974

This novel by Surrealist painter Leonora Carrington was certainly as surreal as her artwork! I didn't know much about it when I began listening to it in audio format, so it was quite an adventure. 

Marian Leatherby is an aged woman living with her son and his family somewhere in Mexico. She spends most of her days in her room or in the yard which she can access directly from her room. She is fairly satisfied, but her family is not. They feel that her mind is failing, that she needs to go into a home. Marian discovers the plan when her friend Carmela gives her an antique hearing trumpet as a gift; now she can actually hear people talking. 

This tool of illumination is a metaphor for Marian's beginning to understand more than just the speech of those around her. She is sent to a residence found by her daughter-in-law, an odd place in which all the individual homes are novelty shapes spread throughout a garden -- Marian is taken to a tower that's her new home. As she accustoms herself to her odd co-inhabitants and the cultish owners of the residence, she begins to undergo an illumination about the world and these new surroundings.

I found this book both fascinating and confusing. There is a portrait of a nun in their dining hall which Marian begins to fixate on, and part of the book jumps to a history of this very un-Christian nun and her witchy history. That history then ties into the situation Marian finds herself in when there is a disaster and the wider world basically ends. The women all form a coven, there is a giant ground-ship that arrives with a family of werewolves aboard, the Earth's poles change and her Mexican home becomes more like Lapland...this all happens very quickly and abruptly near the end. 

I couldn't stop listening to this strange and compelling book, but it still doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Lots of striking and memorable images, some humour, some satirical commentary. Certainly a much different take on a potential apocalyptic dystopia! It has feminist &anti-ageist themes that resonate, but it also includes moments of racism that jarred among the rest of the story. Not a perfect story, but intriguing in any case.