In The Runcible Goose Has Landed, debut novelist and accomplished fine artist Eustacia Blot offers an eccentric, exuberant, and surprisingly affecting literary foray that reads like the fever-dream correspondence of Edward Lear, Virginia Woolf, and Julie Hatteau. Blot, known in the contemporary art world for her unnerving mixed-media tableaux and papier-mâché reliquaries of imagined saints, brings to fiction the same sensibility she brings to her installations: surreal precision tempered with unexpected emotional acuity.
The novel, despite,or perhaps because of,its literary title, announces itself unapologetically as something not quite of this world. The “runcible goose” in question is neither bird nor allegory, but an ambiguously sentient weather-vane-cum-clock, discovered atop an abandoned folly in a fictionalised archipelago off the coast of Devon. The plot, such as it is, follows Gilda Trapse, a retired ecclesiastical upholsterer with a latent talent for cartography, who finds herself reluctantly drawn into a cultish movement of birdwatchers, metaphysicians, and rogue librarians known as The Ornithognostics.
What sounds, on paper, like an exercise in preposteristical excess is, in practice, a novel of surprising formal elegance. Blot’s sentences are exacting. Her use of syntax evokes early Nabokov, all tremble and torque.
Her visual training is palpable on every page. The topography of the fictional island of Quarrelton is drawn with such textured clarity one is tempted to believe in its existence. In fact, an appendix includes a hand-drawn fold-out map,rendered by Blot herself,that walks a fine line between medieval mappa mundi and Turner’s storm studies. The effect is not unlike walking through an exhibition in a high-concept white cube gallery that happens, inconveniently, to be speaking in riddles, written on the walls, in French, using white ink.
And yet beneath the arch tone and polymathic layering lies a narrative of genuine human concern. Gilda’s gentle descent into belief,belief in something vast and irrational ,is never treated with condescension. In Blot’s hands, absurdity becomes a spiritual mechanism. The novel, finally, is about how we make meaning out of the nonsense around us. It is, in its way, a hymn to eccentric faith.
One must make peace with the fact that The Runcible Goose Has Landed resists all easy classification. It is not satire, though it skewers. It is not fantasy, though it invents. Nor is it parody, though it toys with the genre’s structural bones. What it is, perhaps, is the literary equivalent of one of Blot’s own sculptures: strange, intricate, disturbing.
It may not be for everyone. Those seeking plot in the conventional sense may find themselves adrift among footnotes, parenthetical digressions, and excerpts from apocryphal ornithographies. But readers willing to surrender to its idiosyncrasies will find themselves richly rewarded.
With The Runcible Goose Has Landed, Eustacia Blot proves that her voice is delightfully unique. This is the sort of novel that will either be adored or politely avoided – it will not be forgotten.
