Bringing the Invisible Beyond Near
A Review of
Here in Avalon: A Novel
Tara Isabella Burton
Hardcover: Simon & Schuster, 2024
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Reviewed by Jeremy Chen
I’m a sucker for enchantment.
Whether we’re talking fantasy realms like Middle Earth, Narnia, or the wizarding world of Harry Potter, or phenomena that bridge the surreal and real – faeries, preternatural visions, teleporting evangelists, holy wells, and the like – anything shimmering with any hint of the magical, supernatural, or mystical piques my interest. Any glimpses of noumenal fullness peeking through from beyond the claustrophobic disenchanted confines of what Charles Taylor has so evocatively described as the “immanent frame,” I can shamelessly say, leave me giddy with wide-eyed wonder. Psychologize it disparagingly as Peter Pan syndrome or “puer aeternus” all you want, but I see it as the imaginal side of childlike faith.
Now, add to this mystical-bent my current research wandering through the mind-bending pre/post-secular spiritual realms of the occultural and esoteric. It’s a journey which I owe, in part, to the first Tara Isabella Burton work I came across, Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World. Burton inhabits the elusive intersection of the magical, the modern, and the religious with a contagious obsession – a cocktail of impulses that pulses through all her work, including her fiction. Her agile mind is hard to describe. Her passionate curiosity is tempered, or perhaps guided, by an erudite subtlety and released in a creative fervor that can speak to audiences academic, popular, religious, and secular alike. You can see why I absorb anything written by her with the wonder of Harry’s first visit to Hogsmeade’s Honeydukes.
As in her other works, Burton’s latest novel, Here in Avalon incorporates, without being preachy or academically abstruse, her attentiveness to the way idiosyncratic philosophies and niche religious (and religion-like) sensibilities incarnate in dramatic human lives, always in a bricolagebricolaged way, accented by their quotidian eccentricities. In sisters Rose and Ceclia, we find persons relatable and flawed, ethereal and archetypical, and a binding-of-oppositebinding-of-opposites relationship that never bores. Burton’s deeper philosophical and even spiritual sensitivity allows her to create characters whose motivations realistically embody the ambiguity and tension between inner forces of personality, passion, and principle, with both characters, inflected of course in their own ways, on spiritual quests towards transcendence, meaning, and enchantment.
Without giving too much away, I must say that the character Cecilia, whose own romantic desire to live a larger-than-life fairytale drives the detective-like plot, reminded me a bit of the obsessive larger-than-life philosophizing of the neurotic Virginia Strauss of another Burton novel, The World Cannot Give. Very different characters for sure, but both evince Burton’s acumen in portraying powerful feelings of grandiosity and compulsion as well as complex relational dynamics between female characters. (If any other readers of both stories can better help me pin down this overlap, I will be eager for the book club meeting.) And while the stories, again, contain different, self-contained worlds, genres, and characters, I can’t help feeling that these stories could take place in something of a broader Burton Literary Universe.
Perhaps it is because her works commonly explore this liminal space of longings holy and haunted, secular and spell-bound and sacred, and in doing so, draw out of readers like myself a sense of the mysterious nearness of the invisible beyond that her stories seem to rhyme, in a way. They are portals giving access to the feeling, the phenomenology, of varieties of enchantment that pull at our heartstrings and vie for our allegiance. And we get the sense , in depicting these different streams of transcendent possibility on offer, that Burton is a fellow sojourner through this post-secular landscape with similar feelings as the rest of us: – curious, honestly seeking, dissatisfied with the flatness of secularity, but not entirely sure how various spiritualities add up – established traditions, popular trends, and secretive movements such as that featured in this story, alike. Perhaps as a feature of what some have called a metamodern post-postmodern, post-ironic sincerity, her story-telling suggests aat the Real beyond without moralizing– allusively depicting rather than didactively pontificating.
I hope this review may convince many not only to read this truly entrancing novel, but to follow Burton’s work and or even themselves join the broader project of learning to navigate our (post-)secular age with subtlety, imaginative agility, and above all, wisdom guided by love. I cannot claim to be an avid or experienced novel reader, but I hope that does not detract from seriously considering my advice to find a copy for your nearest indie-bookseller or library. For whatever it’s worth, this title claims the spot for my favorite fiction read since Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi.
Jeremy Chen
Jeremy Chen is a PhD student at Fuller Seminary examining Afro-caribbean Orisha religion and the intersection of religion, secularity, and re-enchanted/magical spiritualities. He also engages local teens in the Kensington neighborhood of North Philadelphia in community beautification and gardening.
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