Lyrical, poetic, and ephemeral as its title suggests, Pariat’s novel Everything the Light Touches is an opus-like work of literary fiction. Readers who enjoy historical fiction that spans generations, speculative fiction like Cloud Atlas where the narrative leaps from one place and time to another, and botanical themes will find Everything appealing.
The novel begins in the present, and is set in India — Shillong — a region tucked between Bangladesh and Myanmar. Readers will find that this novel of India encompasses cultures and communities beyond the typical novel set in India; these are the borderlands, an India not usually seen or heard in literature or popular media. Pariat uses this site of unexplored India to their advantage. The result is a novel and mysterious India which does not resort to orientalism to achieve a sense of exoticism.
Everything straddles multiple sites and periods, setting the reader down in India’s high colonial period, taking a step back into 18th century Europe with Goethe, and bringing the author back to the present. We see Shillong through multiple eyes, filtered through multiple histories, both Indian, indigenous, and European alike.
This wide range of periods and foci make it difficult to pin down what exactly the book is about. As its title suggests, it is about “everything”, but of course, it can’t be literally. The novel is about the metaphorical and physical connection between that which light touches: the soil and earth, plants, leaves, and humans. Across space and time, the characters of Pariat’s novel are connected together, sometimes loosely as though through a vine of time, sometimes tightly as a result of proximity or intimacy. Each of the main characters is searching for something, a connection to someone else — marriage, love, parent, child — and also to the earth and its progeny, plants.
This botanical theme vines through each section of the novel. In the present it is about conservation, resource management, and exploitation. In the past it is about botanical science and the essence of growth and life. It is about humans and humanity finding a place for ourselves in the jungle mess of our lives, and about many of us finding that the jungle mess is more orderly than we thought — if we just pay closer attention, the answers are so simple: love, loyalty, and love again — in its myriad of forms.
The prose of the novel mimics the wilderness it highlights; Pariat’s text is sensuous in parts, alluring and floral and fern-like in its delicacy. Yet, simultaneously, Pariat’s prose is structured as a plant cell, symmetrical as a leaf. Some parts are even wild in being tangential and unexpected. There is a section devoted to poetry, but poetry is written all through it. This is a novel for the literary fan; while it is propelled by a plot and a structured narrative, the novel is also deeply rooted in its characters’ flaws, desires, and personalities.
Dr JoAnn LoSavio 