Sara Baume’s Seven Steeples is a tale told through absence. Her third novel – Baume’s debut, Spill Simmer Falter Wither, won the prestigious Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize – is a love story. But it’s a love story clipped of cliché: there’s no Richard Curtis meet-cute, no unhinged exes orbiting malevolently, little interiority and less conflict.
Instead it follows a couple, Bell and Sigh, and their two dogs, Pip and Voss, who abscond from their conventional lives to a tumbledown cottage in south-west Ireland. There they walk the dogs, bodge together the slow-collapsing house – and gradually, but definitively, cut themselves off from the wider world. A modest mountain overlooks their home, from whose summit, they are told, you can see “seven standing stones, seven schools and seven steeples”. But for seven years, it goes unclimbed; Bell and Sigh’s world – vast in its littleness – is sufficient. They’ve no need for perspective on their lives.
I’ve read few better depictions of being in love. The prose often splinters into verse; the typography is wormed with gaps, holes, winking blank spaces. At first, this seems mannered. But it grows on you, beautifully capturing the push-and-pull, the silences and unspoken communication of long cohabitation. Five years in, and “Bell and Sigh had been thoroughly infected by each other’s way of speaking. There were times when sentences collapsed/ words rendered in syllables;/ syllables multiplied and recoupled. They spoke a dialect of their unconscious creation.”
Their isolated existence creaks like a bathysphere. Second-homers are skirted with the wariness you’d accord an anglerfish, supermarket trips to stock up become Jules Verne-esque ventures into the unknown. Locked down before it was cool, it’s telling that when the pandemic arrives, it registers only as a change of “atmosphere, a whiff of bleach”. There’s a freshness in the way Baume celebrates their ordinariness of their lives. Bell and Sigh’s relationship is not in crisis but – like most – stable in its instability, buckling around flux.
Seven Steeples unfolds with lovely, unhurried lyricism. “The light in June,” Baume writes, “[is] like a rip current, sloshing across everything, sluicing out every crevice”. A native of West Cork herself, her descriptions of landscape ring with specificity. The natural world is not a stage set for human drama, but an equal, complementary presence. The dogs, the seasonal cows, an attendant fox, even the house spiders which grow fat in the cottage’s undusted corners: all are seen through the same witty, attentive gaze. In the summer, the couple swim in the sea “as a means of remembering their surroundings; of being reminded that they were each made out of their surroundings.” It’s fine description of Seven Steeples’s enveloping effect: though short, it’s a book of deep patience.
Love, it suggests, plays tricks on time. Like their decaying house, Bell and Sigh’s bodies gently crumble over the years: “Their teeth were blunted too, by then, broached by pinprick holes, sketched by hairline cracks”. Yet Baume movingly shows how care for another causes time to skip and jump like a scratched CD. Looking back on the arc of their relationship, Sigh reflects on “how they got to be/ all there, all together, at once/ for a limited amount of time. A few years, just… a few decades, just.” Life, Baume observes, is over in a moment, in the space between one word and the next. But, in the right company, it can go on forever too.
Seven Steeples is published by Tramp Press at £11.99. To order your copy call 0844 871 1514 or visit books.telegraph.co.uk
