The Gorgeous Inertia of the Earth by Adrian Duncan review – the meaning of beauty

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.

The novel is the latest instalment in a loosely connected series of works by Duncan that have explored the memories and reflections of a bridge builder (A Sabbatical in Leipzig) and the tender meditations of a commercial construction worker (Love Notes from a German Building Site). This time around, the focus is on restorative sculptor and stonemason John Molloy, who, over the course of 200 or so pages, falls in love with a fellow statue enthusiast, relocates to Bologna, receives gnomic instructions to pray for the expedient death of an ailing friend and then stumbles across the city in a semi-hallucinogenic haze looking for a suitable church wherein he can confront the gaping void that separates him from a meaningful relationship with the divine.

Throughout, Duncan is particularly concerned with the qualities of light: what it illuminates, what it casts into shadow, the ways in which it transforms and distorts the surfaces of the material world. In fact, so noticeably abundant are the descriptions that it is initially tempting to think them a stylistic tic, a vague descriptive gesture in the tradition of bad lyric poetry. It becomes clear, however, that in the relentless, accretive attention Duncan pays to luminosity and its inverse, something far more interesting is taking place. The Gorgeous Inertia of the Earth is not just a novel about a sculptor, it is also a novel which self-consciously attempts to reenact, or perform, the process of sculpting. To this end, the narrative voice constantly weighs the scene, checks it from various angles, considers where its boundaries should be, how it would look lit by sunlight or candlelight, and only then … chip … a declaration is made and the heart of things becomes almost imperceptibly clearer. It makes for a deliberative and delicate reading experience, revelatory in the truest sense of that word.

And it is revelation the whole way down. When Molloy finds love, he seems most comfortable conceiving of it as a slightly cold spatial arrangement, a function of the proximity of two delineated objects. An amateur geologist, developing a taxonomy of rocks in his spare time, he expresses a desire to know the “ore” of his partner, Bernadette, but seems prevented from doing so by his commitment to earthliness: his inability to reach beyond the world of stone and rock and toward the less tactile realms of the transcendent. Even Molloy’s attempts to pray are hampered by the intrusive thought that religious epiphanies might be just a byproduct of architectural scale: that any awe one could feel in a place of worship is the result of a cheap engineering trick.

So when Bernadette asks Molloy, “How can you be on Earth in this way?” – by which she means shorn of a relationship to God – she is voicing the central concern of the entire novel. What does it mean for Molloy to spend a life engaged in the preservation of stone figures, as though their fate is not ultimately the same as the people they depict, namely to crumble away and be forgotten? And what does it mean for him to bestow the quality of attention and care so painstakingly and reverently, without conceiving of doing so as a fundamentally religious act? After all, embedded in the word religious – from religio – is a sense of “re-binding”: to make whole that which has been rendered into parts. To restore.

In its moral and philosophical sincerity, Duncan’s writing has more in common with authors such as Knut Hamsun or Peter Handke than with much modern fiction. It has been some time since I read something so serious, so solemn and so still. But in the turning world, such stillness is precisely the point. And as Bernadette writes in an early letter to Molloy: “When did we stop believing in the life within motionless things?”

• The Gorgeous Inertia of the Earth by Adrian Duncan is published by Tuskar Rock (£12.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.