The Silk Road by Kathryn Davis

Human beings have always moved from place to place, whether by design or due to the unforeseen, droughts and wars, pestilence and persecution, the Silk Road they traveled on a conduit not merely for precious commodities, for spices and jewels, mirrors and honey, but for everything strange or unknown, a variety of alien gods and ideas, an unbounded universe with nothing outside it, the dung-covered eggs of the silkworm. This was our birthright, this easy assurance that whatever we wanted was ours, both to have and to bestow. We knew nothing about privation and adventure, as Jee Moon liked to remind us. It was common knowledge Nanny had spoiled us rotten.

Kathryn Davis' The Silk Road begins with a yoga class at the end of the world. A set of siblings, known only by professional titles--the Astronomer, the Archivist, the Botanist, the Cook, the Iceman, the Geographer, the Keeper, the Topologist--have arrived here after a long journey on the Silk Road to get away from a rapidly spreading plague. The class is led by Jee Moon, a mysterious figure they've either just met or who has known them all their lives. When someone dies in the yoga class, it's not clear which one it is, but the grief of it complicates the safety of arrival, the safety of the arctic labyrinth.

The Silk Road is as close to Joy Williams' Harrow as anything else I've read. It operates at a high level of abstraction, in a world of myth and symbol rather than a world of logic or causality. Images of the quote-unquote normal word peek in, especially in flashbacks of the sibling's childhood in suburbia, but the Silk Road on which they walk is more like the Camino de Santiago, or the Stations of the Cross, a journey whose meaning unfolds as they walk it. The siblings enter a dreamy hospital, where one of them is seductively drawn further into the darkened rooms; is this a metaphor for death, loss, grief? Is it not enough that death haunts the end of things, does it have to haunt the journey, too?

Like Harrow (an unfair comparison, The Silk Road came first), cataclysm and disaster are what seem to have loosed the world from the grip of realism. For Williams, it's always ecological disaster; for Davis, it's a recurrence of the bubonic plague, complete with fleas, that gives the events of the novel, such as they are, a kind of medieval flair. (About six months after its publication, the first cruise ships were being quarantined after the appearance of a novel virus thought to have originated in China.) As the siblings flee, they must let go of their ideas about the world, just as they must let go of their ideas about themselves. Their titles cease to have any meaning (though it's not clear to what extent they ever did) as the journey across the Silk Road transforms them:

The thing is, he wasn't himself or what he thought of as himself, just as the farther we walked along the trail the less we knew of what we thought of as ourselves. It was disconcerting, our titles having been so deeply imprinted in us to become identities. The Cook hadn't cooked anything in a long time; the Iceman had abandoned his quest for permafrost. If the Archivist was going to turn into something like a fish, no one was going to find it strange. It was all right, as long as he eluded the lure.

I was bowled over by Davis' novel Labrador when I read it five years ago. I've been chasing that high ever since, and the results have been a couple of pretty good novels (The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf and Versailles) and a couple that didn't really work (The Thin Place and The Walking Tour). The Silk Road is somewhere in the middle, but I haven't done it any favors by comparing it to Harrow, which strikes the balance between the real world and the symbolic one more effectively, in my opinion. But then again, it's one of Davis' strengths that the symbols and images of her novels often seem not to cohere into something usual or expected. That Davis can make you care about these characters, whose identities are so surface-level--and to open them up so the surface can be punctured--is really an achievement.