Douglas Bruton’s novel Hope Never Knew Horizon connects three well-known cultural relics: George Frederic Watts’ painting "Hope," Emily Dickinson’s poem "'Hope' is the thing with feathers" and the Natural History Museum’s iconic blue whale skeleton. Bruton connects these disparate relics not just by interweaving their complex histories but through commentary on their shared theme of hope. While each of the three stories is presented separately, Bruton’s delicate and humane exploration of hope helps each story illuminate the others. His carefully-drawn characters act like museum pieces in a shared cabinet, revealing both their personal intimacies and the longer shadows of the nineteenth century under which they live and love. Similarly, the voices we encounter in Hope Never Knew Horizon, while sharing the page with familiar figureheads of the era like George Bernard Shaw and others, are largely those that popular history has left unheard: the maids, the artist’s models, the working people. In this sense, the fact that Bruton’s stories are not biography but invented fiction – with some liberties taken with the intimate histories of once-living people – invites a number of questions. To what extent can objects in museums or galleries successfully connect us with historical truth? Does our prioritisation of the "special" or "genius" work to obscure the uncelebrated "ordinary" in our history? And might hope as a phenomena, like Emily Dickinson’s quiet and forceful poems, be something we manufacture for ourselves? Bruton’s novel does little to answer these questions but it does show that to live among the relics of our painful and irrecoverable histories is itself to live in hope.
Joe Bedford is an author from Doncaster, UK. His short stories have been published widely and have won numerous awards, including the Leicester Writes Prize 2022. His debut novel, A Bad Decade for Good People, was published by Parthian Books in 2023.
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