Graduating with a degree in early renaissance art, Ann Stilwell leaves Walla Walla, a “dusty single-story town in southeastern Washington” for a summer internship in the Metropolitan Museum of Art but ends up in The Cloisters, a branch of the Met devoted to the art and architecture of Medieval Europe. There, with curator Patrick Roland and his enigmatic and powerful assistant, Rachel Mondray, Ann dedicates herself to a forthcoming exhibition on Divination.
Sequestered from the thick humidity and crowds of a New York summer, Ann and Rachel pore over the museum’s archives, examining manuscripts, translating multiple languages as they mine for evidence of early modern efforts to foretell the future. Discovering a hidden deck of 15th-century tarot they conspire to keep it secret so that they can cement their academic futures.
Katy Hays taps compelling material in this debut, the obsessive pursuit to understand the limits of human choice, what might already be written in the stars, our endless search for signs: flight patterns of birds; the markings of soil tossed to the ground; entrails of sacrificed animals; movements of planets; the spread of tarot cards.
Gothic cloisters capture dark academia’s concerns with hermetic worlds and human transgression. Rich, sensuous detail is heightened by Hays’ industry knowledge as art historian and curator. Gothic arches, creeping ivy, rare manuscripts and tapestries, courtyards and medieval gardens brimming with poisons and remedies used in magic and occult practices – mystery and menace lurk in every shadow. Tension heightens as, increasingly, the boundary between the research and practice of divination blurs.
While brimming with intrigue and mystery, the novel ultimately sounds a slightly empty bell: everyone is out for themselves. Motivations are revealed too late, and it’s hard to root for Ann, a self-described outlier in terms of social class who becomes subsumed by academia’s imagined brutalism. “That was, after all, what being an academic was all about.” She vacillates; then, when she does act, it is wholly self-serving. We are reminded of the first tarot she drew, the Fortune card illustrated by the ouroboros, the snake eating its own tail; instead of rebirth, it signals the myopia and self-consumption that ultimately prevails. An atmospheric debut with a gripping premise, but the bleak nihilism is missing the internal conflict, the humanity, that might offset it.
