Bellman & Black
by Diane Setterfield
Emily Bestler Books, Atria, Simon & Schuster
HC, 328pp, $26.99, ISBN: 978-1-4767-1195-9
A Review by Gene Stewart
A memento mori presented as the life of William Bellman, who makes the fatal error as a boy of killing a rook, an act which haunts him ever after. We see his childhood, his adolescence, and his youth, then watch him apply remarkable ability at analysis to move from working at a fabric mill to running it to, eventually owning and transforming it.
Along the way we witness his hardships and struggles, his challenges, triumphs, and abject failures. We see how hard life is, even for those we’d otherwise call successful. We see how tiny influences have huge ramifications and consequences.
William Bellman is inclined to vertical integration. Black is his color, once his main adult idea flocks to him. An emporium focused on providing all the needs and wants of those in mourning, he realizes, will thrive because death is always thriving. He becomes expert in black, aware of more variations of the color, and its absence, than the Inuit know of snow.
At this stage, the book brings to mind Selfridge’s store and success, without the man’s dissipation through gambling. Bellman is all work, no waste, even as his daughter, terribly afflicted, almost wastes away until, somehow, she changes yet again.
Written crisply, with a focused, elegant, and concise prose both well-paced yet brisk, caring yet astringent, expansive yet telescoping, Bellman & Black rises from eerie mystery to literary soul-searching. Epic living is presented in only 300 or so pages. Life in all its circuitous, meandering, whimsical, and perverse layering comes alive for us in William Bellman and those around him. There is not a false step. Setterfield grants access to myth, too, and the plain magic of the workday world. Occasional excursus pages of information about ravens, blackbirds, crows, and other corvids provide counterpoint reminding us of time passing and eternity motionless and watching it all. The fall of a sparrow comes to mind, as does geological epochs.
The tone is unemotional throughout, often presenting gut-wrenching scenes with an almost placid precision that evokes eerie detachment, as if we’re seeing this all from above. From, say, a bird’s eye view.
While there is no overt manifestation, the novel is infused with the supernatural. Dark lurks, shadows influence, and people divert mysteriously into stretches of life or death that cannot easily be explained, yet that seem perfectly natural in the course of things. Context matters.
Bellman & Black is a joy to read, to savor. Beautiful sentences, scenes, and chapters are offered like gems on black velvet. Nothing strikes as ill-considered or ad hoc. Woven tightly, life in Setterfield’s hand and eye is inevitable, even as it is surprising, at times shocking, and always comes with a touch of glossy dark whispery winged magic.
Strongly recommended for those poised for dark flight.
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