Sparks of Bright Matter is Dublin-born Leeanne O’Donnell’s exceptionally promising debut novel. O’Donnell began her storytelling career making radio documentaries. In turning her talents to the novel, she offers a gift to lovers of literary historical fiction suffused by the powers of the unseen.
Following the entwined fates of well-heeled natural scientist Peter Woulfe, street hustler Sukie Bulmer and her bean feasa aunt, Bridey Leary, Sparks of Bright Matter travels elegantly forwards and back through the 18th century, moving between the wild west Cork hillside of Mount Gabriel – ancestral home of the main characters – and the reeking, savage streets of London, where Peter and Sukie live out their very different lives. Uniting them is their infatuation with an ancient and mind-altering alchemical text. Its coloured plates of naked men and women over furnaces, distilling elixirs in alembics, overseen by fiery angels, initiate the illiterate Sukie into her genetic inheritance of witchly power; and drive Peter on endlessly in his laboratory, attempting to achieve the ‘Great Work’ of turning lead into gold: both literally, in terms of matter, and allegorically, in terms of soul.
Think Hilary Mantel, Neil Gaiman and Susanna Clarke crossed with Liam O’Flaherty, Lady Gregory, WB Yeats and the Celtic Revival – all expertly blended into a cracking page-turner that’s as exquisitely deep, beautiful and metaphysical as it is fast-paced and brilliantly plotted. Sparks of Bright Matter will have a particular appeal to occultists, esotericists and aficionados of Irish mythology (from which it expertly draws); but anyone with a yen for historical mystery fiction will be transported by this novel’s magic.
What I find especially fascinating is how O’Donnell takes two distinct spiritual traditions – that of European alchemy (which in the 1700s still bore the esteem of a science), and ancient Irish pagan animism – and combines them into a tapestry whose threads lead to the same immanent, transcendent, sublime divine source.
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An alchemical book itself, Sparks of Bright Matter can be read in two ways: as compelling literary entertainment; and as a transformative text that can break open individual human consciousness into vastly more-than-human expanses. As an author, O’Donnell has an unusually broad imaginative reach. It will be interesting to see – and to read – where it leads her.
