A universal tale of mystery and enlightenment: Elizabeth Gilbert's The Signature of All Things

Published 1 October 2013
This review first appeared on We Love This Book.

From the author of the multi-million bestselling memoir Eat, Pray, Love, comes something quite its opposite. The Signature of All Things is an epic, universal tale traversing the 19th century on a voyage of mystery and enlightenment, taking in multiple continents, scientific theories on evolution and the entire spectrum of human experience – including birth, love, death, heartbreak, religious doubt and sexual turmoil.

The novel tells of the bold, brilliant Alma Whittaker, blessed not with beauty but with a formidable intellect and a voracious desire for knowledge. As she immerses herself in scientific pursuits, her botanical specialism in mosses leads her to revelatory ideas about time and evolution. These ideas are challenged by the man she falls in love with, and Alma’s all-encompassing need to seek answers impels her to investigate the enigmas of her own lover’s past.

Gilbert uses Alma’s science to enrich her human plight, rendering one person’s instinctive, evolutionary battle for survival into a compassionate, tender account of unerring fortitude. There is something of Jane Eyre in Gilbert’s heroine; Alma’s plainness is negated by her resilience and enduring faith in life.

Gilbert’s prose is not perfect – she occasionally labours a metaphor or employs a clunky turn of phrase that seems almost to complement Alma’s own unwieldy demeanour. And the plot is absorbing, but occasionally one can feel a little like Alma, adrift in a tempestuous sea of subtle narrative hints: ‘all she had ever wanted was to know things, yet […] all she did was ponder and wonder and guess’. That said, however, The Signature of All Things is an accomplished and irresistible novel. Expertly researched and exquisitely realised, it compels the reader to adopt Alma’s own unquenchable need to know everything, from the minutiae of her world to the grand narratives that inform it.

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