Book review: The Comet Seekers by Helen Sedgwick

For a novel that quietly and poetically reflects on the nature of human existence, and the way in which we are either adventurous wanderers or quietly domiciled, The Comet Seekers pulses with a relentless energy, a ceaseless push-and-pull quest for belonging and relevance.

That energy largely comes from the remorseless trajectory of the comets whose often erratic but never less than forceful rush through the galaxy, and in particular our solar system, provides the timeframe on which rests the narrative of this wholly beautiful, deeply-immersive debut novel by Helen Sedgwick.

Focusing on two individuals, Róisín and François, who are separated by geography but inextricably linked by shared passion and ties of which neither are fully aware, The Comet Seekers takes us on an extraordinarily unique journey from 1066 and Halley’s Comet through to 2017 and Comet Giacobini.

In-between these two years, we witness at key intervals how each comet provides the backdrop for wars and pogroms, for family dramas big and small, and how family and the bonds they generate endure down through the eons whether we are aware of them or not.

In the case of Frenchman François, the links are more palpable than most, although he is personally unable to appreciate how much they manifest in the present day.

“He doesn’t want to take his eyes off the sky. He doesn’t want to move. He watches the comet for a long time – longer than ever before. They lie side by side and stare at the sky and Liam wonders if staying perfectly still is the way to live in one week, in one moment, for the rest of his life.” (P. 31)

A chef who has stayed near his home town of Bayeux to be near his mother Severine whose odd behaviour – she is often found talking to herself, playing hide-and-seek with no one and setting the table for extra members of the family who are no longer alive – he believes is the result of mental illness or dementia.

The truth is that Severine is the latest in a long line of members of her family who can see the ghosts of departed family members, all of whom gather in a ragtag group each time a comet is near Earth, including Ælfgifu, a woman who perishes shortly after the Norman invasion of 1066 but not before saving her daughter, through to Severine’s own grandmother who was more of a parent to her than her own distant, grief-scarred mother.

For Severine, these spirits are and always will be her family and though she is torn and regretful that she cannot travel – she must remain in Bayeux where the spiritual energy is strongest, effectively shackling to her home – and wishes she could take François on all their promised adventures, she takes her role as caregiver to these sometime conflicted family spirits seriously, foregoing her own life’s passions for their needs.

There is a constant struggle between Severine’s lonely and yet never-lonely duty to the dead, and her role as a mother to a very much alive François who dreams of going to the rainforests of South America or to Antarctica, one that define both their lives for better or worse.

The same struggle defines the relationship between Róisín and her cousin Liam who grow up in the same village in Ireland and develop an extremely close bond that pays little heed to societal conventions.

But where Liam craves the simple pleasures of life on his family farm which has seen better days but remains home, Róisín is always looking, quite literally, to the stars, passionate about pursuing a career in astrophysics that will eventually take her to New York, Toronto and a slew of other places to which Liam will never want to travel.

These two people, and their relationships with those living and dead, form the narrative backbone of the novel which tells their stories through each of the comets featured over an almost 1000 year period.

Apart from providing a vast chronological backdrop with which to tell her story, the comets illustrate with bold and beautiful determination how great is the tension between wanderlust and staying at home, between setting out to see the world in all its glory and being content with its smaller realisation in the places you have always known.

Neither mindset is given precedence over the other with Sedgwick beautifully underlining how each has its place and its value and how each can be both liberator and prison warden, often at the same time.

“Ælfgifu stands in the corner, less giddy than the rest, with her daughter on one side and her soldier boy on the other; the love that started it all. Severine doesn’t think she’s ever felt that type of love, but it’s OK – she is full to bursting with other kinds.” (P. 267)

What gives her philosophical such power and emotional heft is the exquisitely beautiful way in which she writes – not only is the language perfectly measured and judiciously-used but she invests every moment with a real emotional resonance, with a real understanding and expression of what it feels like to be conflicted, to want two things at once and to only ever be able to realise one with any effectiveness.

Such are the limitations of one life and mortality and while The Comet Seekers does acknowledge a life beyond the one we know, it doesn’t romanticise this, realistically according to it limitations and parameters of its own.

Lest it come across as some sort of futile, nihilistic rumination on the exhausting torment of being alive, it is anything but, fully embracing the passion and wonder of being alive and pursuing your dreams as it is does the limitations on this endeavours.

In the end, it celebrates the power of belonging somewhere and to someone, seeing the decision to prioritise that state of being as not a loss or a settling but rather as the way things are, a decision that defines life which is never perfectly-realised but always a series of compromises and back-and-forth steps that nevertheless can still bring great happiness, along with the regret and loss.