Mornington Hall, once a grand country estate, has fallen to ruin in a drought-stricken, dystopian English landscape. An earthquake has compromised the library’s storage system, and flooding from burst pipes has damaged the art collection. Many valuable artworks are sold to finance the repairs, including J.M.W. Turner’s A View on the Seine (1833), once the pearl of the collection. An art historian named Penelope is tasked with building an archive of the remainder. As Mornington Hall heads towards inevitable demolition, Penelope’s interior landscape unfolds in parallel fashion, reflecting the vulnerability of both internal and external worlds. 

Revealed in a series of diary entries, Penelope’s interior world takes shape around shorter interludes that log objects from the archive she is cataloging. These material objects—photographs, books, a Claude glass, scrapbooks, postcards—form a physical collection that stands apart from the epistolary, offering information just as immediate and contextualized. 

In an interview, Lai points out an affinity between novel-writing and collecting: “In many ways, a novel is its own kind of archive, and writing is a form of accumulation.” The writer brings together images and ideas, placing them into a collection from which she and her audience extract particular meanings. In using the epistolary form, written notes become the embodiment of one’s personal history, however fragmented.

Penelope’s first diary entry contrasts the “wreckage” and “ruin” of the estate with the “linearity of the catalogue and the neat collection of books.” Working at Mornington Hall provides Penelope with a sense of order that helps her make meaning of other things. Yet, she is unable to make sense of the defining event of her life—an event made known not through obvious references but through allusions to artworks featuring representations of violence that seem to glorify the act. 

The epistolary form and archive-building lend structure to the novel, but so do the paintings of Turner, who created sublime landscapes through his treatment of light, color, and atmosphere. Penelope frequently alludes to Turner’s works as they influenced both her academic trajectory in art history, as well as her relationship with Julian, the perpetrator of her assault two decades before. 

Years before the novel begins, Turner’s Norham Castle, Sunrise (1845) motivates Penelope to focus on Turner as her subject of academic study. “The painting’s radiance belies its dark core, the ghostly blue ruins of Norham Castle, once the site of battles and death,” she writes. Penelope is fascinated by the way Turner embeds violence in a gleaming landscape. Similarly, she finds herself attracted to Julian as an object of mystery with dark undertones; drawing nearer to him, she unknowingly inches closer to her own destruction. 

Lai’s setting creates a fitting backdrop. In an interview, Lai explains that many of England’s great manors were built with wealth gained through slavery and colonialism, implicating these beautiful homes in a history of destruction and exploitation. Yet, visitors flock to these places, enjoy tea and stroll in the gardens. “The history of the country estates is often forgotten in the face of beauty,” Lai reminds us.

Sometimes beauty is obscured, and blurred outlines offer more suggestion than clarity. By calling an artwork “indistinct,” for example, we are freed from the responsibility of having to describe it, Lai suggests. Similarly, readers wait for Penelope to write about her violent encounter with Julian, but the incident is never explicitly defined. It forms a hole at the center of the book, mirroring the many images of hollows that recur throughout, such as the empty space on the gallery wall and an unfilled jewelry box. Readers may find this omission disappointing, but Lai prefers to create a dark silhouette, emphasizing the violence by tracing an outline around it. 

Turner’s Rape of Proserpine (1839) prompted Lai to consider the symmetry between architectural ruins – in Turner’s painting, a crumbling castle – and the metaphoric ruins of a person. His painting’s title is a subtle reference to the Roman mythology featured in Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s marble sculpture, The Rape of Proserpina (1622), which captures the expression of fear on Proserpina’s face and the overwhelming force created by the muscular form of Pluto, to tell an entire story within a single moment. 

Everyone seems fixated on the light in Turner, but Penelope wants to explore the shadows. Turner’s painting remarks on a tradition, beginning in the Renaissance, of artists’ depictions of assault, rape and murder that give violence a veneer of beauty and heroism. Lai wonders “how someone who has been the target of an assault would encounter such a painting.” Interspersed among Penelope’s diary entries are italicized descriptions of other artworks featuring such acts of violation, including Edgar Degas’s Le Viol (1868-9), which follows a diary entry on desire and possession and describes how, for a time, Penelope equates the two. 

By the novel’s end, Lai has offered a comprehensive gallery of ruination that also remarks on the traumatic event to which Penelope repeatedly returns, lingering at the ruins as a way of working through personal crisis. At the same time, these paintings build toward a climax in which Penelope will supposedly reunite with Julian at Mornington Hall for the first time since the assault. 

Like her namesake in The Odyssey, Penelope spends much of her time waiting: for the demolition of Mornington Hall, for Julian’s return, for her own departure. Meanwhile, at Mornington Hall, birdsong enters through the opening in the roof, dust settles and vines grow, puddles form, dead leaves carpet the floor. Nature envelops the crumbling estate but does little to reassure. Each loss, both within and without, is a singular cut, and at the boundary of this erasure is memory. What Lai offers is an incisive exploration in interiority, and in Penelope she presents a character who is, like all of us, a work unfinished.

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Christine Lai grew up in Canada and lived in England for six years during graduate studies. She holds a PhD in English Literature from University College London. She lives in Vancouver.

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Katy Dycus holds a Master of Letters from University of Glasgow and works as a staff writer for the anthropology journal Mammoth Trumpet. Her work has appeared in Lady Science, The Wild Detectives, Hektoen International, and Harvard Review, among others.