Paul Fulcher's Reviews > Mothlight

To my knowledge, Phyllis Ewans has only two great preoccupations in her long life: walking and moths. An interest in those same two subjects also grew within me after a number of years of knowing her; such was the power of her influence.  My predominate preoccupation today is with the study of Lepidoptera for my own academic research, and it was solely thanks to her that I followed this pathway.  It dominates my life - that is, of course, when I am not plagued by my illness.

Adam Scovell’s Mothlight is published by small independent Influx Press, 'committed to publishing innovative and challenging fiction, poetry and creative non-fiction from across the UK and beyond', and winner, with Eley Williams’s stunning Attrib. and other stories, of the 2018 Republic of Consciousness Prize.

Mothlight is surely a contender for the 2020 edition.  

The novel's title is a nod to Stan Brakhage's 1963 4-minute film, albeit one produced without the aid of a camera, of the same name (see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mothl...) and it is narrated by Thomas: his name taken from the photographer in Michelangelo Antonioni’s film Blow-Up, itself based on a short story by Julio Cortázar.

As a child, and via his grandparents, Thomas became acquainted with two elderly sisters, Phyllis Ewans, with her twin obsessions of walking and moths, and her sister Billie. Billie is very different, clearly glamorous and successful with men in her youth, and there is a strong tension between the sisters, based on some long-standing resentment of Phyllis towards Billie for something, which they don't want to discuss, that happened in their mutual past.

Their modest house in the Wirral is full of Phyllis's specimens, and the air swirls with the mist of the scales from the moths' wings. But Billie's room is very different:

The air had a mist that was perceivable in the white rays of sunlight drifting through the murky net curtains.  But - and I considered this even then - the mist was not fragments of wings from decaying Lepidoptera, but the disturbed remnants of powdered make-up.  In many ways they were scaled of another deceased creature.

When Billie needs care, Phyllis refuses to provide it, leaving Thomas's family to have to step in, and when Billie dies, the two families become estranged. Phyllis soon after moves to London and Thomas loses touch with her.

But Thomas finds that Phyllis's twin obsessions soon becomes his own. He often visits Snowdonia, where Phyllis loved to walk, and becomes a professional lepidopterist. When he also moves to London, to take up an academic post, he manages to re-establish contact, and the two otherwise very lonely people find they have a mutual kinship.

But as Phyllis and Thomas talk, the personal boundaries between them evolve:

There is little need to relate the extensive details of such conversations, as they were almost always framed around walking and moths but, with an unnerving regularity, I was plagued by a constant sense of deja vu. This pervaded in both directions, by which I mean I recognised many of her memories of walks in the country and the capture of moths but, also, she greeted my memories with recognition too: as if we were one and the same through experience.   This was not some kinship between people of similar backgrounds but a crossover that grew more alarming with each story, each moment becoming no longer my own.

Scovell has been rightly praised by Robert Macfarlane and Benjamin Myers, master of the art themselves, for his sense of place, and the novel very effectively evokes the Wirral and, particularly, Snowdonia. It felt less successful to me in evoking the (South-?)London setting, where Phyllis ends her life and Thomas his account, but that was perhaps deliberate as neither character (nor the author?) really feels at home there.

Thomas begins to have hallucinations, hearing the beating of moth's wings behind him, seeing the dust of their scales where others can not, visions that began as a child as Billie's funeral but now return, and also sensing the presence of a female hand holding his own. And after Phyllis dies, he takes on the task of sorting through her things - both her collections of personal photographs and her moths - becoming obsessive in his desire to catalogue and put everything in order, his work at the department taking second place, and also increasingly finding that he seems to places and people in pictures he has not known personally:

My illness required the methodical repetition of behaviour ... the trapping of an obsessive compulsion, locked into an order that could not be broken.

When he finally tracks down, via a succession of clues, someone who knew Phyllis when she was younger and might be able to help unlock him from his obsession:

Heather still refused to say what I need to be said, what I had known all along from the memories that I had shared.  I just needed her to say it.

An excellent novel and one that builds on its many influences to create something unique.

Scovell has acknowledged the significant influence on his work of two of my all-time favourite authors, W.G. Sebald and Thomas Bernhard (both authors obsessed with walking):

I think the majority of the voice techniques come from European fiction of the post-war period. Sebald was and always will be the biggest influence on my writing, but the main voice that dictated the OCD recursions in Mothlight was Thomas Bernhard. I don’t think I’d have the bottle to write fiction the way I do without having read him, and he’s probably the closest a writer has come to recreating my own “head voice”. In particular, the way Bernhard uses repetition to lock you into the tics and worries of his narrators is really quite astounding, and you can definitely see what Sebald took from his writing as well. 

The influence of Sebald is clearest in the heavy use of photographs whose excavation forms a key part of the book. In the novel the photos are those of Phyllis and Billie, but in reality they were photos the author inherited from two sisters that he got to know via his grandparents, on whom the fictitious characters are based. None of the photographs include any moths, in practice as the real-life "Phyllis" was not a moth enthusiast, but it also makes for an effective and unsettling technique to have the moths so central to the text but absent from the illustrations.

But the narrative voice, if anything, reminded me most of one of Ishiguro's self-deluded narrators. Robert at one point chides himself for speaking in a horrifically English and repressed manner, and while realising he is mentally ill, still retains unrealistic hopes that all will be well once he has finished his obsessive re-cataloguing:

I would no longer be considered ill, or met with worried looks and glances from colleagues. On the contrary, I would be respected, and would have earned that respects through. the work done with this vast collection of mounted moths.

There is also a strong element of the weird/folk horror, which the author himself attributes to the influence of writers such as M.R. James.

The novel ends with a quote from Virginia Woolf, and Orlando seems a clear reference as gender fluidity is a key theme, alongside memory. And a motif running throughout the book is the parasitic wasp which lays its eggs in the cocoon of the moth, which one can take, although the book leads the reader to draw this conclusion, as a symbol of the relationship between Phyllis and Thomas. Scovell also acknowledges the influence of Deleuze, so his concept of the orchid and wasp would also seem relevant.

Useful sources:

https://www.instagram.com/mothlightbook/ - colour version of some of the photographs in the book

https://celluloidwickerman.com/2019/0... - the author's own round up of reviews and interviews

https://celluloidwickerman.com/2018/1... - a film trailer for the book

https://thisissplice.co.uk/2019/02/06... - the This is Splice interview from which the Bernhard and Sebald influence quote is taken

https://celluloidwickerman.com/2018/0... and https://celluloidwickerman.com/2017/0... - examples of Scovell's own writing on Bernhard and Sebald