Isn’t that why we embark on journeys?” a character remarks in Janice Pariat’s ambitious and capacious novel. “Not only to see new things but to see things in new ways.” An epic story of travellers and discoverers set across continents and centuries, Everything the Light Touches focuses on four people whose routes do not crisscross, but whose stories are tangled together like roots, through the ways in which they encounter the natural world around them.
The four characters are Shai, Evelyn, Johann Philipp Möller (an alias of Goethe’s) and Carl (Linnaeus), and their sections are arranged like a palindrome, Cloud Atlas-style, beginning and ending with Shai. Ranging from Goethe’s travels in Italy – the “beginning and end of all of his journeys, the completion of his life’s education” – to indigenous land rights movements in present-day India, Pariat shows us new ways of looking at old and new things. The shortest section, about Swedish botanist and taxonomist Linnaeus’s 1732 expedition to Lapland, is told exclusively through prose poetry and verse. This formally and structurally inventive novel, interspersed with letters and archives, diary entries and drawings, sheds a postcolonial light on questions of discovery, botany and the asymmetry between the human and nonhuman world.
