The Age of Light by Whitney Scharer

The Age of Light by Whitney Scharer

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

It’s an interesting one this because it kind of folds in on itself and creates layers so dense that even the story can’t quite figure out what it means to say. But then, I think, maybe that’s the point: this is the story of Lee Miller’s movement from art- to Art-, from participant to creator, from model to photographer, and the reckoning of her experiences along the way. Even the vaguest familiarity with her story would know that some of those experiences involve the worst of the second world war and how they would crumple and remake anybody in the witnessing of, that they would throw up insurmountable barriers and densities, and the legacy of that is something Scharer reckons with most profoundly in this time-shifting, acutely constructed novel. Oh this is knotty too, this paragraph, so let me try and unknot it and present something that makes sense.

In 1929, a woman arrives in Paris. Her name is Lee Miller and she has been a subject all of her life. She is in Paris to find something different and that difference is Man Ray and that difference is Art. Specifically surrealism, of looking at the world and finding both its wonder and its banality in the same breath, and for a moment Lee is overwhelmed by it but then starts to find herself and her eye (her i, perhaps) within it. Man and her fall in love; their time together is raw, passionate, but also doomed to end. That’s not a spoiler, I think, you know that this is the way it will go. This is a story of independence as much as of partnership, of figuring out what you are within the world when all of the dressings are removed.

I like what Scharer does a lot here. She has a deliberately high voice here, one almost poetic at times, and it helps to construct the world as a piece of theatre. We don’t feel intimate, I think, with anywhere or indeed anybody until Lee sees it/them properly, through her own eye and her own lens. The problem with this is that it can feel disconnected and even repetitive but I think that is the point; Lee is full of trauma, shifting sands, and the reckoning, the resolution of such things involves treading certain paths, over and over again, until they become firm.

I liked this even though there were moments which I wondered if they would have benefited from a different approach; I am a fan, for example, of letting the book do the work, of letting the form and aesthetic of how the story is told help you out, and of utilising the white space on the page in order to help you make your point. Somethings in stories are even beyond words and perhaps there is something interesting, particularly in a story like this, so wed to art and innovative ideas of form and message, of embracing something slightly move avant-garde in approach. But this is me and this is not my book and what Scharer does with it, I still liked. A lot. There is something incredibly interesting here and even when it did not quite work, it was still interesting enough in its intent, its purpose, in order to keep me with it.

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