Marian Leatherby is 92 years old, living in Mexico City with her son and his family in the suburbs of Mexico City. One day, her friend Carmella gives her the gift of an ornate hearing trumpet made of horn, and once she puts it to her ear, the once-nearly-deaf Marian can hear at last what her family thinks of her: she's a nuisance and a burden, and the sooner they can put her in an old folks' home, the better. The home turns out to be a strange place called Santa Brigida, where a dozen eccentric old women--a blind painter, a fake spiritualist and murderer, a real spiritualist, a man pretending to be a woman--live in concrete huts shaped like mushrooms and boots and things. At Santa Brigida Marian, with her trusty hearing trumpet in tow, suffers with the other women under the scrutiny of the moralistic owners, but the new company of these women will open up new avenues in her life she had not yet imagined.
It's hard to talk about The Hearing Trumpet without spoiling it, because its most remarkable and essential quality is its transformation from one kind of book to a very different one. (Though I would suggest that this quality is so remarkable, you can't really approach it without an appreciation of that fact, so feel free to read on.) The Hearing Trumpet begins as a wry comedy about a little old lady discovering herself at last and becomes--perhaps you can guess--a novel about the end of the world, in which the earth begins to reverse its polarity after the release of the destructive horned god Sephira, who must be appeased with the return of the Holy Grail.
How does it this strange little book get from A to B? Well, at Santa Brigida, Marian is fascinated by the hanging portrait of a medieval nun who seems to be winking. She discovers that this portrait is of the Abbess Rosalinda, a Spanish occultist who spent her life hunting down the Grail itself, as well as a magical ointment associated with Mary Magdalene called musc de Madeleine. The Abbess, though sanctified by the church, really spent her life working against it, infiltrating the Knights Templar in order to pinch the grail and deliver it to the pagan Gods that Christianity has chased into exile. At Santa Brigida, Marian happily enlists in the cult of this Abbess, as many of the other residents have done, and it's their collective efforts that help bring about an apocalypse.
In one scene, a newly informed Marian descends the stairs of the great tower at Santa Brigida where the god Sephira has recently emerged, like an egg. At the bottom she finds herself, stirring an enormous pot of stew. Her doppelganger demands that she must decide which of them is the true Marian by way of climbing into the pot, or refusing to do so, and when Marian climbs into the soup, her consciousness is instantly transferred to the witchy doppelganger. This moment is The Hearing Trumpet in a nutshell: an old woman, comfortable but bereft of agency, refashions herself in opposition to the oppressive forces of Christianity, of family, of culture. The Hearing Trumpet is a book about the radical rejection of systems and creeds, and the embrace of something both ancient and feminine that lies within.
Putting a high gloss on it can seem silly, though, because the book itself is essentially silly, an exercise in joyous camp. Carrington saves one of her finest jokes for the very end, when an old friend of Marian's appears on a sledge--the reversing of the poles has turned Mexico into a snowscape, you see--with his new wife, the Queen of the Wolves, and her wolf army. Together with the old women and a platoon of bees, they defeat the Catholic Archbishop and restore the grail to Sephira--something which takes place in a single paragraph, like something written by a student who got bored at the end of their creative writing assignment. I like to think that the book steps up to the line of something very conventional--a Hollywood-style fantasy--and stops short, content to be the weird, winking, humorous thing it is.
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