lizabeth Hand's Mortal Love traces a series of disastrous romantic relationships, short but passionate affairs between one disturbed and unusual woman and a number of young, artistically inclined men. The woman is oddly long-lived: In 1872, she seduces and abandons several members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, including poet Algernon Swinburne and painter Dante Gabriel Rosetti. A century later, she has a single quick encounter with a young American painter, Valentine, that almost destroys his sanity. Years after that she emerges in London, using the name Larkin Meade, and takes up with a disaffected writer, Daniel Rowlands, who is researching the legend of Tristan and Iseult.
The central mystery of this novel is the nature of Larkin Meade, a self-styled muse who inspires brilliant art but leaves its creators psychically shattered and physically scarred. As an author, Hand is grappling with age-old questions about the borders between artistic creativity and madness as she shows Larkin moving in and then out of the lives of her besotted victims. It is clear that Larkin does not belong in the everyday world. Perhaps she should make her way home—but where she comes from is another thing she has forgotten. In time, everyone who shares the mixed blessing of her brief favor must eventually question whether humanity might not be better off allowing a few of its most creative souls to be exposed to her destructive energy—in other words, if the resulting paintings and poems are worth the damage to their minds.
This is more than an academic question, for Larkin's presence and powers have not gone unnoticed. Even as she passes through the years, meeting and inspiring a host of creative men, an unethical and equally long-lived psychologist is stalking her. Thomas Learmont hopes to use Larkin deliberately as a catalyst for art: to expose her to chosen poets and painters, driving them mad and then harvesting the brilliant results.
A magical tapestry of words
Mortal Love may be one of the most beautifully written fantasies of recent memory, because Elizabeth Hand's prose style is exquisite. She makes every paragraph a treat to be savored, evoking both Victorian London and the modern city so vividly that a reader might be peering directly into them through a crystal ball, watching the story unfold in picture-perfect clarity. Larkin's drawing-in of Daniel Rowlands is an intriguing tease: Each scene is hypnotic, laden with gorgeous images and almost unbearable suspense. The progression of Daniel's downfall is engrossing. Even though the outcome is never in doubt, readers will be hard put to turn away.
Despite this wealth of literary beauty, Hand may fail to completely mesmerize all readers—primarily because the modern-day Daniel is almost indistinguishable from a Victorian-era artist whose obsession with Larkin is taking root in a parallel storyline. Viewpoint characters both, the experiences and personalities of these men are so similar that they run together; meanwhile, the most intriguing man in the book, Valentine, appears early on and does not make a much-anticipated reappearance until late in the story.
Hand's plots tend to be subtle, relying heavily on atmosphere and suggestion to carry them. Readers who prefer their stories more clear-cut and free of enigma may thus find Mortal Love to be a frustrating journey. It offers a great deal of interesting scenery, to be sure, but when the final destination is reached, it is still shrouded in a significant amount of fog. In other words, this author has once again set up an entirely captivating world ... but doesn't allow her readers to fully explore its boundaries.
