Sara Baume, _Seven Steeples_

 EXTRAORDINARY NOVEL. UNUSUAL, though. The two main characters, Isabel and Simon,  who are referred to throughout as Bell and Sigh, have decided to quit their jobs, detach from what we used to call the rat race, and live as modestly as they can out in the country. They are not off the grid, exactly, but they are only lightly attached to it. The novel describes their first seven years in their new life, one chapter per year.

One unusual thing about Seven Steeples is that there is next to no dialogue between Bell and Sigh--no conversations, no arguments, no discussions, not even much in the way of "what would like to have for dinner?" or "the door handle is coming loose." For that matter, there is next to no interiority, nothing about what either is thinking or remembering or hoping for. Their personalities hardly emerge at all; their two dogs, Pip and Voss, are much more sharply individuated, much more distinct from each other, than Bell and Sigh.

What we get instead of dialogue or interiority is what they perceive and what they do. We get descriptions of the small house where they live and the routines they establish. We get descriptions of the attached property and the local landscape, including glimpses of a neighbor and the nearby village where Bell and Sigh shop, but mainly just the natural environment.

This might strike you as a poor substitute for getting insights into the characters, and if I say Baume's descriptions of the house and region are poetic, you might say "uh oh, sounds like trouble," so let me hasten to say that the poetic quality of the descriptions lies not in the ornateness of their imagery or a bustle of exotic adjectives but in Baume's use of spacing and line breaks. That is, the ending of a paragraph often looks like poetry, with phrases separated by white space, and interestingly enough, this made me read it differently and made the descriptions land differently. It's a simple trick--some might say gimmick--but surprisingly effective.

The main feature of the local landscape is a mountain, from the top of which one can, reportedly, see seven standing stones, seven schools, and seven steeples. Baume has the audacity to sometimes write from the point of view of the mountain--that too might make you say, "uh oh," but she makes that work, too. Bell and Sigh never get around to climbing the mountain, however, until they are seven years in...at which point their long-delayed ascent feels like an acknowledgement of something, a culmination, a ceremony. They have made a home. 

And so this novel that barely has enough plot for a short short story and in which the characters scarcely emerge from the background ends by being moving, insightful, and unforgettable.