In 2020, when the statue of slaver Edward Colston was toppled into Bristol harbour, the public were treated to weeks of confected outrage and faux-philosophising about the aesthetic, civic and social meaning of sculpture. Around the edges of the reactionary culture war nonsense were occasional good-faith attempts to grapple with how best to talk and think about these large, static objects that pepper what is left of the public realm. Lumps of stone and brass; often representational, often hagiographic, often stately, often decaying, and often deeply, unnervingly strange.
It is precisely this sense of strangeness – of statues hovering somewhere between architecture and painting, and between repose and movement – that animates the latest novel by the Irish artist and writer Adrian Duncan. From its opening pages, The Gorgeous Inertia of the Earth dives into heady, knotty questions about temporality, the occupation of space, the relative finitude of life, the fine line between observation and devotion, and the futility of attempting to render the numinous using only chisel and stone. This, in case I’m not being clear, is a relentlessly high-minded and serious novel. The enjoyably preposterous title is not a joke but an earnest indication of what is at stake; the old-school, unfashionable desire to explore what, if anything at all, life really means.
