By Michael Collins
Susan Rowland’s second novel and thirteenth book, The Alchemy Fire Murder, brings together the noted scholar’s interests in Jungian studies, feminism, and crime fiction in a unique alchemy quite its own – though, somewhat amazingly, prior knowledge of none of these fields is required to be pulled into quickening weavings of plots and characters. Mr. Jefferys, who first suggests Mary Wandwalker and her Depth Enquiry Agency to find the Alchemy Scroll stolen from her alma mater, provides one primer on alchemy: “Quite apart from the fact that alchemy proves to be a form of what we today call psychology – the alchemists projected themselves into the work – without realizing it, of course” (22). Jeffries refers to Jungian psychology, which incorporates historical work by alchemists into its central theories, particularly the projection of soul onto – and into matter in alchemical processes. Dame Eleanor, president of St. Julian’s college from which a valuable alchemy scroll has been stolen, further frames the importance of alchemical work and texts to the novel: “[B]ack then alchemists made medicines. You could call them the research chemists of early pharma […] Not just what they mixed in their labs; alchemical manuscripts were medicinal too. Today we would understand them as uniting psychology, science, theology, and visual art with substances absorbed by scent and skin” (22; italics original). As we will see, this brief description generally serves for the deeper mysteries of the “copy” scroll that has actually been at St. Julian’s for centuries – and this detective story as well.
The Alchemy Scroll is thought by some to have antibiotic or antiviral properties. We are never given a definition of its powers; however, the companies’ pursuit of the profits that would result from new drugs literalizes a central metaphor of alchemy: “As if it really could make gold” (24). However, Janet, one of the “witches” who care for the scroll presents a more holistic view: “It’s a practice, a magic that is alive and needs feeding. Like a creature. We care for it, and in turn, the Alchemy Scroll sustains us” (154). Anna, one of Mary’s collaborators, confronts these aspects directly, after stealing one scroll herself: “The Alchemy Scroll is alive, she felt. It quivered with magic reinforced by the devotion of generations of Holywell Key Keepers, like Janet.. […] The Alchemy Scroll is a ghost of those who treasured it, thought Anna. She thought she heard whispers from muttered prayers. Anna knew fear” (202). Characters are transformed in different ways by engagement with the scrolls – both the original and the copy – and even those who are involved with them from a distance experience inner transformation.
The “witches” experience – and cultivate – the scrolls’ healing aspects most directly. Running a recovery center for young girls who have been rescued from sex trafficking, they are “proper therapists, trained and registered” yet “they also take what they call ‘the craft’ very seriously. Spells and rituals are their kind of alchemy, nourishing the soul and keeping inner fires alight”: “Witchcraft is part of what Holywell is. To them, it is living Mother Julian’s visions of the divine as maternal” (42). Much of their “magic” is worked through compassionate attention and fostering agency: “If the trafficked women can learn trust, to distinguish between those out to exploit them and those they can relate to, then our therapy is succeeding” (216). The sort of inner alchemy the witches attempt to offer those in their care seems to be creative fusion of social work, Jungian psychology, earth-based spirituality in which inner transformation is approached through healthy group activity.
The central characters, though not often with the witches, undergo similar alchemical transformations in their internal and group dynamics. Mary’s other associate, Caroline, makes interesting connections between the detective cases and her ongoing work with her depression, which she connects with alchemical prima materia: “They say alchemy is about transformation, including psychological mending” (275). However, the nuanced portrayal shows that this process is not linear, and involves continual “work” with the depressive tendencies that form this “material”: “Back in the bedroom she shared with Mary, Caroline’s bright mood dimmed at the thought of Anna’s silence and their estrangement. A dark pit waited to swallow Caroline at such moments. What had a therapist once advised? Ah yes, distill the dread, stop it from seeping into her being” (251).
Anna, herself a survivor of sex trafficking, makes her own interesting connection between alchemy and her computer hacking activities. Her experiences of inner transformation also display the role observation of one’s imagination can play, for example, her inner conversation with Caroline, also her lover, after Anna’s uses dangerous means to rescue her:
Staring into the clear evening light as Los Angeles slipped away, she made herself return to the imaginary conversation. How would it go if all was well between the three women at the agency?
“My cyber hacking is contemporary alchemy.”
Anna’s research online had resulted in this epiphany. Hacking dissolves one machine into another. Networks are soluble. Each one has a different voice or tone, like living beings in cyberspace. Hackers talk to them, ask them to do more than the usual stuff.
“Helps you steal things,” Mary would say with her divided soul. Her criticism would not be as disapproving as she wanted it to be.
“It’s cyberlove,” Anna wanted Caroline to say, with glee. But Caroline wasn’t talking to her since the fire. Her reproaches kept seeping though.
“How could you take such risks with other people’s lives. How could you, Anna? How could you? (206; italics original)
The imagination allows Anna both to see her hacking, which more often fits with her generally reckless behavior, as recontextualized by loving relationship, and, in her work with the agency, this is sometimes the case. However, the process of imagining Caroline also returns Anna to Caroline’s feeling betrayed by Anna’s lack of consideration of endangering others. Further, the final italics seem to indicate that this is a particular place the imagined Caroline finds particularly hypocritical and insensitive of Anna, who has personally experienced such disregard for her own humanity. Anna is a novice alchemist, only beginning to realize her own deeper connection to the hacking “processes” she enacts. The passage is a fascinating example of blending different understandings of alchemy and human psychology bridging from material to subtle aspects of “the work.”
Anna’s “character development” also shows how personal and interpersonal forms of psychological alchemy blend together: She is able to make connections between her traumatic past and her own harmful behavior through Caroline’s response within her own imagination, yet this response is based on her own internalization of Caroline’s views and feelings. Much of the “work” of learning to value and integrate others’ perspectives has taken place before the imagined scene expresses them. Mary’s operating conception – or guiding myth – of the group involves similarly interdependence: “Anna backed up Mary’s intuitions with her occult online skills; Caroline was their soul. Together, the three could plot, feel, and imagine into enigmas” (187). Likewise, Mary’s ideation around the group indicates her personal needs: “If they could only make it work, Mary used to say. If the Agency could become a container for something neither Anna nor Mary had known before: a family” (200).
Other subtle nuances of interpersonal alchemy occur throughout the novel. Caroline calls on her own self-knowledge in helping Janet resurface from a traumatic experience: “Janet stabbed the earth with her spade a couple of times. Caroline recognized her difficulty. A depressed person often finds it hard to converse or to initiate ideas. She made herself be patient” (279). Mary similarly supports Caroline: “Caroline’s whisper came out in bites. It meant the depression had gotten worse; Mary knew. She squeezed Caroline’s hand” (302). Interestingly similar to the mysterious workings of the scroll itself, some of these interactions involve physical presence, others subtle presence.
Mary’s interactions with Sam, a young man who wants to help her solve his brother’s murder, also show the less comfortable side of interpersonal alchemy, opening a similar view into her own shadow: “Sam glanced down. Mary had a flash of seeing herself through him: an old woman with tired eyes” (182). The relationship also confronts Mary with her own unconscious racist assumptions:
“Sam, it’s not that I don’t value your help. My business, the Agency, is so new. I don’t know how to look after someone like you.”
Shocked by her own words, Mary spoke quickly.
“My…our Agency has debts. This is our first big case. It’s make or break for us.” (191)
Though they may cause us to cringe, Mary’s realizations – and her willingness to face them – constitute the most potent alchemical cure for the historical racism that has been passed down concurrent with the Alchemy Scrolls’ tradition, pointing again to the grievous misconceptions of those who wish to harvest their imagined “antibiotic” properties. Her inner-discomfort is also projected onto Anna in an interesting way of capturing the interpersonal fallout from inner work: “How can we trust you when you set fires and steal priceless scrolls. How can we trust you when you don’t trust yourself?” (338; italics original). In an inversion of Anna’s imagining of Caroline, Mary makes this critique of Anna, which is valid in terms of their relationship, partly because it is also valid as a mirror of Mary’s own interiority.
The links between inner and interpersonal work and historical “alchemy” blur the scrolls’ subtle properties with the transformations of historical discovery: “You’d be surprised at the potency of old papers” (230). Some historical characters live lives of cultural alchemy, learning across supposed gender, cultural, and religious boundaries: “That great pair of alchemists, Francis Ransome and Roberta Le More, believed the work they did affected the world’s spirit, the anima mundi. The Native Americans they met believed they too could and should interact with the Great Spirit. They lived with reverence for the land and all its peoples, the ancestors, the animals, the rocks, the trees, mountains” (328; italics original). Parallels emerge between understanding one scroll’s roles in the witches’ worldview and the discovered lives of its makers, both having been obscured by prejudice and materialism (263-8).
These layers of transpersonal alchemy in the novel are similar in some ways to Jung’s conception of “acausal connection” that he named synchronicity. This manifests, on the one hand, in small nuances described by the characters: “Asking about Caroline did not go as Mary expected. The air around Anna bruised.” (196). However, it also relates to seemingly random events that reconnect the central characters to one another, maintaining the forward movement of the plot, for example, the somewhat homeopathic way Anna’s own theft of one scroll is discovered: a strange man who “followed lots of women in the airport and then got nabbed for photographing without permission” (257). The plot also relies on characters focused on disconnection, whether hospitals denying psychiatric patients necessary medicines, companies functioning as “financial predators” and coercively funding academic programs (276), or even a “scholar” misrepresenting alchemy itself as “once a pure Aryan science” (184).
These pervasive clashes on the thematic level relate to the most organic form of alchemy in the novel, its participation in the aspects of its alchemical legacy that involved creative writing: “Instead of names, the herbs had pseudonyms such as ‘snakeheart tree,’ or metaphors like ‘root of living gold’” (283). These organic connections between “alchemical” work and the creative aspects of psyche manifest in the novel in several ways.
The plot itself can be seen as a series of alchemical processes, underlined by the section titles that draw from them. For example, Caroline and Janet, go to the basement to hear Janet’s story of becoming Key Keeper of one scroll, as if descending to an underworld where information hidden by surface machinations could be recovered. The drugged and sleeping Agnes also takes on transpersonal qualities, awakening to tell them to “Trust Anna,” who no one yet knows is there to save them (158). The sleeping Agnes presents another voice of unconscious connection between the characters involved in the rescue, the scrolls, the narrative itself, and the scene to and from which it delivers them. Through the narrator’s alchemy, the fire set by Anna and the underground scene itself provide the means of a logically improbable escape through Anna’s recklessness, Janet’s intuition, and Agnes’s unconscious guidance. Where there is no conscious escape “above ground” a deeper consciousness intervenes.
In this example the narrative mirrors the scrolls’ own macrocosmic quality of transpersonal healing. Such linkage is also present within the novel’s own text, for example in the reconciliation between Anna, Caroline, and Mary. Anna claims,
“You know I…kept going…on the case. I didn’t give up…on our plan”
“We know,” said Mary, quietly.
“Even when I thought you both…hated me.”
“Never…”
Mary held up her hand to stop Caroline. It was Anna’s turn.
“Is that…love?”
Mary was startled. Caroline brushed away her tears. (340)
Take note of the ellipses in Anna’s working through what she has learned – and how they recur in Mary’s mirroring of this process of self-reflection in conversation: “’If I try to imagine where we’ve been on this case…’ she couldn’t believe what she was about to say, ‘then we’ve been…well, I suppose, connected. Perhaps there’s a kind of trust that goes on even if there is…a lack of…consultation’” (340; italics original). On one level, the mirroring in the pauses shows the characters reflecting one another’s reflective behavior, a very organic form of relative self-transcendence that speaks to the previously noted deeper connection through shared narrative – both the literal novel and its evocations of the intertwined nature of life stories per se. Further, the overlap between the scrolls, the novel, and the other forms of alchemy they integrate are then represented textually in the ellipses, the gaps that allow the acceptance of newness that makes possible this conversation, the rebirth of the characters’ “family.” The ellipses represent doorways into the conscious control of the characters, yet they are also literal gaps in the text itself, through which the novel’s own Mercurius may enter and transform.
This is all in keeping with the scrolls’ interacting with aspects of the universe that materialistic science can’t explain – aspects that materialistic people can’t even effectively steal. These layers of reality correspond to historical perspectives that have yet to be fully incorporated due to various forms of difference and prejudices against them. The subtle resilience of these forms of synchronistic connection are evoked in the transcending metaphor of the dragon, which appears on the back of one scroll, and again in the narrative of the forest fire from which Mary and Caroline seek to rescue Anna: “Those dragons had feet of fire; the horizon glowing below their scaly clouds of ash” (308). The narrator has already made use of fire to describe various experiences of consciousness. It evokes Mary’s empathy: “The hurt in Sam’s voice burned into Mary” (191). Caroline, whose relationship with Anna was marred by the hospital fire, attributes a psychic reawakening to the same paradoxical fire: “[I]t reminds me of how Janet changed when we thought we’d die in the fire. She found she wanted to live. She had to save her friend, Agnes. In an odd way, the fire resuscitated her” (276). It even describes Anna herself: “Anna never had a childhood. She had lived – no, existed, from one trauma to the next. She was a wildfire who could never really be contained” (339; italics original).
And…just one more thing: In the alchemical tradition, the dragon, or Ouroboros, is an icon of a snake eating its own tail that symbolizes the cyclic nature of death and rebirth. Jungian psychology incorporates the image to represent psyche’s capacity – and need – for similar processes. Much of the narrative alchemy in the novel seems to facilitate such processes of loss, pain, reflection, and rebirth among its interconnected characters, though it certainly is not blind to the human capacity to disrupt natural healing: “’It’s California, they have wildfires. It’s the way the land works,’ Mary whispered. She wasn’t convinced. This is not a usual fire season; it’s global warming, the news said” (310). Fire, an ancient metaphor for consciousness, serves as an aptly paradoxical connecting thread for both the healing and destructive alchemies in the novel, as well as their psychological and literal conflagrations. It also serves as a subtle conduit between consciousness and unconsciousness, which collaborate in mysteries of their own not only in the solving of immediate crimes in this “depth enquiry” – but also the interwoven crimes of the history.
You can find the book here: https://www.amazon.com/Alchemy-Fire-Murder-Wandwalker-Mystery/dp/1685031293
Michael Collins’ poems and book reviews have received Pushcart Prize nominations and appeared in more than 70 journals and magazines. He is also the author of the chapbooks How to Sing when People Cut off your Head and Leave it Floating in the Water and Harbor Mandala and the full-length collections Psalmandala and Appearances, which was named one of the best indie poetry collections of 2017 by Kirkus Reviews. He teaches creative and expository writing at New York University and is the Poet Laureate of Mamaroneck, NY. www.notthatmichaelcollins.com
.
.
North of Oxford 