(courtesy Harper Collins Publishers Australia)
All of us, to some extent or another, come to appreciate through the course of our lives just how the present owes to the past.
It’s not simply that one leads to the other though that is very much a part of what takes place in the emotionally impactful beauty that is The Phoenix Pencil Company by Allison King.
Rather, it’s that far from being two fixed distant points which feed one into the other, you never really leave the past behind and that even decades after certain events have taken place, we are still living it and its aftereffects.
You are never far from who you were or where you were, as Monica Tsai begins to discover when she begins to search frantically for her grandmother’s long-lost cousin Meng, a woman who in late 1930s/WW2 Shanghai China was more than a sister to the woman who raised Monica when her own father could not.
Or rather would not; Monica owes everything to her deeply loving, resilient and idiosyncratically wonderful grandparents, who settled in Cambridge, Massachusetts after the war, and she feels she owes it to them to use her prodigious computer coding skills, presently being used on a platform that seeks to connect people through the thoughts they share online, to engineer a meeting of the past and present.
Well, at least one in the physical realm of the here and now; in truth, Monica’s grandmother never left those years behind and has thought long and hard in the intervening years.
‘I guess it’s just a pencil,’ I said, hoping she would not be too disappointed.
To my surprise, she barely reacted. She set it aside, then sat down on my bed. She pulled a shirt out of my bag and began refolding it from a crumpled mess.
‘What do you think the pencil means?’ I attempted.
She glanced briefly at it.
‘I’m not sure yet.’
What Monica discovers as she digs into her grandmother’s little-discussed past, an endeavour aided and augmented by Louise, a woman Monica is connected to by her tutor’s nascent platform and who rather miraculously has met and knows Meng, is nothing short of outstanding.
While the family to which Meng and Monica’s grandmother belonged definitely ran the pencil company which gives this near-perfect novel its name, the pencils they created did far more than simply record thoughts on paper.
Those very pencils, once returned to the women of the gift, would impart by a literal magic known as reforging, what they had written; the paper might be long gone, but the “heart” of the pencil remained and could be bled for the words contained within.
Finding this out, and discovering that she is capable of exercising that gift, rocks Monica’s world while drawing her closer to her grandmother at a key moment when she is losing her memories to dementia, a disease so pernicious and scouring that not even a magical pencil can rescue them.
Or can it?
What the pencils can do is bring once-lost thoughts back to life but as Monica quickly discovers, she needs the context and the history that only her grandmother can provide and that in-between the rescued words lives a truth and a reality that she can only rescue by growing closer to her beloved grandmother.
A story about connection and how powerful it can be even after multiple decades have elapsed, The Phoenix Pencil Company sears its truth into you word by gloriously evocative word.
King has a gift for connecting the past and present and as the book moves seamlessly between them, there is none of the usual jarring that can occur in stories that exist in two distinct time periods at once.
There is a never a sense that one time period is more fascinating or moving than the other, and no time when The Phoenix Pencil Company lags or feels like it is overstaying its welcome.
In fact, the more that Monica discovers about her grandmother’s past, the reality of that time brought to life by an ongoing letter that she pens to Meng as she attempts to explain and atone for a painful past full of mistakes and understandably errant decision, the more the novel comes gloriously alive and you see how the past and present feed back and forth into each other in a hugely affecting loop.
Just as her grandmother is losing her memories of the past and descending into the lost landscape of dementia, so Monica, with Louise by her side, literally and figuratively, the two women rapidly far more than just co-researchers and friends, are rediscovering it but in a way with profound importance to them.
The Phoenix Pencil Company explores how we never really lose the past or the memories that flow from them, and while the pencils make that a literal truth, it’s true in other ways too.
To understand somebody else so thoroughly, no matter how briefly—it truly is magic.
As Monica beautifully underscores with her desperate, loving attempt to uncover who her grandmother was before it is lost to who she now is, The Phoenix Pencil Company becomes a love letter to the need to make sure you remain deeply connected to the memory holders of your family.
As you race through the day to day and let the rat race pummel and push you forward, it’s easy to forget that a great many moments, thoughts, deeds and feeling led you and the antecedents to this point.
What The Phoenix Pencil Company does is bring the importance of holding onto those memories, and how precious they become when they might be lost to time and tide in the cruellest ways possible, to the fore, commenting as it does on the way history shapes us and how, if we are vigilant, we can hold onto the past so we better understand and can value the present.
This is even more emphatically necessary for Monica as the grandchildren of immigrants who left their homeland behind them and forged a new life in a country that welcomed them after so much trauma and loss had preceded their arrival.
As you lose yourself in the past and the present, in old memories and those just now being forged, The Phoenix Pencil Company comes gloriously and movingly alive, peopled by characters with vibrancy, depth and longevity who come to understand that though the past may live in a country far away, it is always close to us and by embracing it, we can make the present more alive, more meaningful and far more, well, present.