3.5
The Lime Twig
ByPublisher Description
An English horse race, the Golden Bowl at Aldington, provides the background for John Hawkes' exciting novel, The Lime Twig, which tells of an ingenious plot to steal and race a horse under a false name.
But it would be unfair to the reader to reveal what happens when a gang of professional crooks gets wind of the scheme and moves to muscle in on this bettors' dream of a long-odds situation. Worked out with all the meticulous detail, terror, and suspense of a nightmare, the tale is, on one level, comparable to a Graham Greene thriller; on another, it explores a group of people, their relationships fears, and loves. For as Leslie A. Fiedler says in his introduction, "John Hawkes.. . makes terror rather than love the center of his work, knowing all the while, of course, that there can be no terror without the hope for love and love's defeat . . . ."Download the free Fable app
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesThe Lime Twig Reviews
3.5
“This is it. My favorite novel. It's always difficult for me to describe the things I love the most. It's partly why I started this account: to share the books I love with strangers, and to share my reasoning, the "why" of it all.
To begin with: A lime twig is a trap for birds.
The Lime Twig is about the entanglement of Michael Bank, and later his wife Margaret, into a scheme involving the theft of a racing horse (renamed to Rock Castle) so that it may participate in The Golden Bowl. Ostensibly it's a crime novel. This is what the novel reads like:
"Each morning when the steam locomotive began shrieking out of Dreary Station the boy knelt on the stones in the leakage from the barrel and caught the puppy by its jowls and rolled its fur and rubbed its ears between his fingers. Alone with the tar doors dripping and the petrol and horse water drifting down the gutters, the boy would waggle the animal's fat head, hide its slow shocked eyes in his hands, flop it upright and listen to its heart. His fingers were always feeling the black gums or the soft wormy little legs or quickly freeing and pulling open the eyes so that he, the thin boy, could stare into them. No fields, sunlight, larks--only the stoned alley like a footpath on a quay down which a black ship might come sailing if the wind held, and down beneath the mists coming off the dead steeplecocks the boy with the poor dog in his arms and loving his close scrutiny of the nicks in its ears, tiny channels over the dog's brain, pictures he could find on its purple tongue, pearls he could discover between its claws. Love is a long close scrutiny like that. I loved Mother the same way."
What we have here is some primo Gothic modernism: assured, textured, tactile. It has sentences that I can lose myself in. It is both detailed in its imagery and diffuse, dreamlike. I first read The Lime Twig twenty years ago. I was confused, because the book is confusing, it's plot is meant, I think, as a conveyance for Hawkes' distinct prose. The meat of this brief novel is in its poetic echoing of imagery and symbolism. Birds, horses, angels, recur. A strange kind of magic is happening.
Even though The Lime Twig is a crime novel in which a gang makes a plan with dire consequences, it operates with the logic of a grim fairy tale. The first chapter is the narrated by Hencher. It goes into his youth with his mother, circulating in and out of lodgings, the bombings in London during WW2 (whose stain permeats the novel), his gratitude towards the Banks'. He want to help them fulfill their dreams.
And he does. Rock Castle, the horse, is the mechanism through which dreams become flesh. The first thing it does is crush Hencher. Dreams come at a cost after all. Later on Michael Banks has improbable sexual encounters with three different women. He doesn't know it, but at the same time his wife is being tortured by a gang member named Thick:
"Once he stopped to increase the volume of the radio, but returned to the bedside, shuffling, squinting down at her, his mouth a separate organ paralyzed in the lower part of his face..."
Hawkes has a gift of describing things in a way that is slightly surreal. Horror writers could learn a thing or two from him. The two chapters, the torture and Michael's escapades, are connected by the call of a bird. A warbler calling for its mate. This non-linearity is another thing Hawkes is gifted with, both events occur simultaneously, adding a grotesque element, as well as a thematic touch.
Hawkes is not a sentimental writer. The events in his novels are cruel. Hope is a weak wounded thing in his universe. His plots often proceed with a calloused kind of logic. So what does it all mean? As I said earlier, a lime twig is a trap. Early in the novel Margaret goes out in search of Michael because of her love for him, and she is captured by the gang. Hencher initiates the Banks' into the whole ordeal because of his love for them. Love is the trap that ensnared them.
Here Hawkes is doing something that reveals my own weakness: beautiful prose about horrible things.
This review was soundtracked to:
Agalloch--The Mantle”
About John Hawkes
John Hawkes (1925–1998) was a postmodern novelist born in Stamford, Connecticut, and educated at Harvard University. He was noted for his unconventional style and views on the creation of literature and was admired by Flannery O’Connor, Robert Penn Warren, Saul Bellow, Anthony Burgess, Jeffrey Eugenides, and Donald Barthelme.
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