Natural Elements

by Richard Mason

Book Overview

In this moving, layered novel of memory and family, celebrated author Richard Mason tells the story of a mother and daughter, one caught in the past, one racing toward the future. Joan is eighty years... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0307267466
• ISBN13: 9780307267467
• Release Date: March 2009
• Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group
• Length: 397 Pages
• Weight: 1.56 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.5" x 6.6" x 9.6"

Customer Reviews

"Joan glanced behind her to make sure that the pair of burnished brass piano pedals...were with her

Natural elements of the periodic table, music, aging, war, and human relations uniquely coalesce in Richard Mason's newest novel. Natural Elements is the present-day story of Joan McAllister, a woman in her seventies, whose forty-something daughter, Eloise McAllister, gently but firmly deposits her in an elegant nursing home called The Albany. Before they return to London to accomplish this move, the two take a trip to South Africa, home of Joan's ancestors. In a museum, near what was once her family's farm, Joan discovers heirlooms, including a journal kept by her grandmother, Gertruida van Vuuren. Reading it shows Joan the horrors the Boers endured in the concentration camps they were forced into by the British during the Anglo-Boer War. It also reminds her that her mother warned her not to marry an Englishman, but she had...and had lived to regret having Frank McAllister for a husband. Joan is not only elderly but is slowly exhibiting more and more symptoms of an Alzheimer-like dementia. She, once a gifted pianist, has visions at the very beginning of NATURAL ELEMENTS of piano pedals, a benevolent sign to her. Later, other visions increasingly encroach. In fact, the latter portion of the novel traces Joan's unsettling blending of memories and earlier family history as her illness progresses. Joan, a woman who calls nearly everyone, "dear," and who has, throughout her lifetime, been accustomed to passivity, isn't told directly by either The Albany's staff or her children (besides Eloise, she has a son, George, who lives in Australia) of her affliction so she resists treatment and lives her dreams as if they were reality. Eloise, besides worrying about her mother's well-being, has dug herself a pit at work. She interpreted an off-hand comment by her French metallurgist former lover, Claude Pasquier, about an element called osmium as a cue to buy millions of dollars of it. Now she must deal with this market's plunge, and it could bankrupt her firm, not to mention land her in jail. It could also curtail her mother's first-class care. A great deal of effort has gone into NATURAL ELEMENTS. Details embrace every plot advancement and every character. Eloise is a not-untypical single woman who has foregone a family for her privacy, comfort, and profession. George isn't 13,000 miles distant by accident. Claude needs a catalyst like Eloise to inspire his genius. And Joan is eccentric but likeable, especially in the early parts of the book. For many readers Gertruida's harrowing journal may deal out the most shocking revelations of the novel. However, as Joan's hallucinations and delusions intensify, many other family secrets, including family violence born of torture during World War II, reveal themselves. What begins as a relatively congenial mother-daughter story shifts into far more flagitious territory, and as Joan slips further into her spliced imaginative/real world; a jumbled, nightmare feeling builds for the reader as well. The novel's

Enjoyable reading

A well told story of family dynamics skillfully told with historical background of the Boer war. The characters are drawn so that you're immediately drawn into their life experiences and their feelings. I look forward to another novel by this author.

Ghost Story

There are two main characters in this busy but engaging novel: Joan McAllister, a former pianist now in her eighties, and her daughter Eloise, a London hedge fund manager specializing in metals. In the first third of the book, Joan flies with Eloise to Bloemfontein, South Africa, where she was born. As she looks for traces of her family's lost estate and visits the concentration camp (the original use of the term) where so many of her relatives lost their lives in the Boer War of 1899-1902, it is as though she is bringing life to old ghosts. Joan has a natural ease with people that her more uptight daughter does not share, and it gives a warm glow to all her scenes. So when, on her return to London, Eloise moves her into the Albany, a very expensive retirement home, we are firmly on her side against the forced cheeriness of the Nursing Manager, Sister Karen, and applaud every attempt that Joan makes to subvert the system. She has the ability to retreat into pieces of music in her mind, and also to recall or imagine other times and places, inhabiting them as though they were real. A chance encounter on a visit to the local library gives Joan access to the memorabilia of the family who originally built the Albany, which makes her aware of another group of ghosts, inhabiting the very rooms in which she is now living. And when she discovers that one of the family served in the Boer War and was stationed at Bloemfontein, the two sets of ghosts become one. It is so easy to sympathize with Joan that one tends to discount the characters who are ranged against her, but it is to Richard Mason's credit that he never allows this to continue too long. Horrible though Sister Karen is, we begin to sense that she may be right, and that Joan's clairvoyance is in fact a symptom of a rapidly-progressing dementia called DLB. More significant are the changes that we watch in Eloise. She may come across as cold and materialistic at first, but she is under tremendous strain, having embroiled her company in a hundred-million-dollar speculation on the future of osmium, solely on the basis of a tip from a former lover. But as the financial nail-biting continues, we begin to see different sides to Eloise, not merely a cool competence, but also an unexpected sense of humor, a blossoming romantic streak, and a deepening care for her mother's plight. There are too many strands to this novel, too many back-stories, too many twists of family history for the reader to follow, let alone for the author to tie up. And the ghost story element eventually militates against the hard-nosed reality of the rest. But as a sensitive, sympathetic, and not in the least depressing account of an aged parent passing into senility, the book is a triumph.

"The trick is simply to find them"

In Natural Elements a fragile relationship between a mother and daughter weave throughout this hefty narrative which melds the history of the Anglo-Boer war into a contemporary narrative set in London. When the middle-aged hedge fund executive Eloise McAllister visits the Albany in 17 Kinsley Gardens she's positive this salubrious geriatric institution, once a Victorian mansion, and sympathetically restored, would be the perfect place for her octogenarian mother Joan. Joan has reluctantly accepted the fact that she would have to leave her home for an institution of some sort just as she accepted the other inevitabilities of life. Almost over night Eloise has found herself in charge of her mother's share portfolio that had been liquidated, and now she shoulders most of her financial burdens, knowing that it was useless to trouble her selfish brother George who has made a new life for himself in Sydney. Deciding to keep a place at the Albany open for her, Eloise treats Joan to a lavish holiday to Bloemfontein so that Joan can reconnect with her family, visiting her brother's Rupert's grave. But the City is a vastly different place, with its cheaply built towers of concrete and glass, the family's ancestral home now a shopping center. When Joan discovers the diary of her grandmother Gertruida van Vuuren and her account of the incarceration by the British in a Concentration camp, the green folder suddenly becomes talisman against the despair that is threatening to overwhelm her, and it provides Joan with an almost spiritual link with a past far harsher and more brutal than the present. When Eloise is suddenly summoned back to London the narrative takes a dramatic turn. Living for her job at Derby Capital, what appears to be a simple dedication of trust turns into something far more angst-ridden when Eloise discovers that the price of osmium, a metal that she has bargained the fortunes of the company, is declining fast. The company of her ex-boyfriend George Pasquir, a talented scientist who has been defined by his research work into this powerful metal, is threatening to abandon the project. Joan's first reaction is to be violently ill. She owed her colleagues Patrick and Carol honesty at least, especially Patrick because it is his business, his life's work that her own daredevilry has risked. While coping with this free-fall, Eloise is also haunted by her failed relationship with Claude, both were once too proud to negotiate and too young to see what would happen if they did not. A chilling calculation of betrayal sets the tone for the final part of this novel. Eloise is constantly buffeted by the combination of filial duty and fiscal responsibility, the funds hemorrhaging of clients and money, Carol's growing hatefulness, and the price of Joan's care that constantly pressures her. And of Joan who descends into a fantasy world where the previous inhabitants of The Albany come dramatically to life in her mind, and her constant feeling of bein

This book lit up my life

By Barbara Anderson (Massachusetts, USA) - See all my reviews Are you old enough to understand regret for life choices, to fear old age, nursing homes and dementia, to experience intergenerational not to mention sibling guilt? Apparently, incredibly, one thirty-year old author knows all these things and shares his light with us. Do you want to fall in love with an 80 year old woman who has a walker named Cordelia? Do you believe in ghosts?, or do your meds just need adjustment... Do you simply enjoy a good story? or are you looking for enlightenment in your own rooms... Read this book, and add it to your list of favorites as I have. Then buy copies for your best friends, on their significant birthdays.