REVIEW: The Martyrs, The Lovers by Catherine Gammon

Disclaimer: Bridge Eight published Catherine Gammon’s previous novel China Blue, winner of the Bridge Eight Fiction Prize in 2021.

Fiction. 316 pgs. 55 Fathoms. March 2023.  9781942797333.

When you read a book by a writer with whom you’re familiar, it can be difficult to fully engage with the text, but Catherine Gammon’s new novel The Martyrs, the Lovers weaves so effortlessly forward, a reader like me forgets the author exists at all.

Catherine Gammon writes with a dream-like fluidity that muddies the truth and leaves a reader ungrounded, but swimming in delight. Jutta Carroll’s death is mysterious, but this is not a mystery. We don’t need to know what actually happened, because what might have happened is just as interesting to parse.

The Martyrs, The Lovers is a slithery novel disinterested in linear storytelling or reliable points of view, which makes it a delightful exploration of our character, Jutta Carroll: political star, paranoid activist, and starved romantic. Jutta is frustrating, in the ways we all are, and it’s both her desperation for love and her agonizing over her need for it that make her so compelling to follow.

How can someone so committed to “good” be so flippant with the lovers in her life? How can her peers, the people committed to real change, be so unwilling to do the work required of enacting that change? Even as we’re reminded of her imminent death, or that it’s already happened in the mind of the reader, we can’t help but be drawn to her plight, her quest, and the turmoil that boils underneath from the very start.

An admission: this is my second attempt at writing this review. The first draft was lost to an older computer and as I try to remember the meat of what I wrote, all I’m left with are the impressions I was hoping to make. Like the recollections and speculation that make up this novel, impressions are all we have sometimes, and maybe the accuracy of the details don’t matter much at all.

The impressions left by Jutta Carroll, and by Catherine Gammon’s prose, are well worth the price of admission.

There are times when the changes in point of view can disengage a reader because we have to take the time to realign ourselves with the narrative; however, those disengagements cause for pause and reflection. This is a novel whose prose tempts you into reading in one swift sitting, but the pauses are worth it, and maybe even necessary. Breathe, dear reader, and give yourself a moment to feel the time that passes by.

If obscure history matters to you, Jutta Carroll’s life is loosely based on German Green Party founder Petra Kelly, who died under similarly tragic circumstances. Gammon uses these historical moments and true events to ground us in a fully-formed landscape, giving her free reign to swim on a line level. The further into the book we go, the looser that grip on reality becomes, and the more unhinged (in a beautiful, experimental way) the prose becomes.

Soon we are all swimming, adrift, only left with those aforementioned impressions. I feel all the better for having read it.