The Chess Garden
or the Twilight Letters of Gustav Uyterhoeven
By Brooks Hansen
Farrar Straus Giroux, 496 pages, $22
Brooks Hansen has written a wonderful novel, rich and strange, certain to delight lovers of storytelling and lovers of games. His narrative makes lively theater of truths we all ought to recognize, even those of us with no time for games and no patience for tall tales. Hansen shows us how serious play can be, how the most outlandish fables and fairy tales have more uses than those who prefer fact could imagine.
The two-part title of “The Chess Garden, or The Twilight Letters of Gustav Uyterhoeven” foreshadows a split narrative. One part of the book (all that pertains to the title’s first half) is the story of Dr. Gustav Uyterhoeven, an eminent Dutch pathologist, who planted himself in Dayton, Ohio, in 1873. With his wife, Sonja, he bought a boarding house and established almost by accident a tremendously popular chess garden. This story, though fictional, is sunk four-square in the world of fact and presented according to the familiar conventions of realist historical fiction.
The other part of the book is pure, exuberant fantasy. In the fall of 1900, the 77-year-old Dr. Uyterhoeven leaves the chess garden to voyage, all alone, to South Africa, where he volunteers his services as a doctor at the pestilential refugee camps set up by the British military to house the legion of Boers, mostly women and children, whose homes the British have systematically burnt to the ground.
Over the course of the next eight months the doctor sends home to Dayton a cycle of twelve letters, which his wife reads aloud to their assembled neighbors and friends. In these “twilight letters” the doctor recounts his fabulous adventures in a magical land called the Antipodes, a place inhabited by game pieces: chessmen, checkers, dice, darts, playing cards, cribbage pegs–all come to life.
Children crowd the front rows when Sonja schedules a reading. And much of what she reads is ideally suited to a child’s fancy. In the Antipodes you can take a walk in an evergreen forest and encounter a nest of small glass marbles “lying in the roots of the trees like mushrooms” or see larger marbles “rolling across the needlebed, kissing each other” as they go. Dominoes “are a migratory creature, much like geese or ducks.” They’re acrobatic performers, too: whenever they find a suitable spot, they “spend the day lining up in all sorts of patterns and then `tipping’ in much the manner we all associate with dominoes.”
The logic of the game board, tweaked a bit by Hansen’s imagination, rules the land. Chess is the dominant motif. “Teams” of animate chess pieces inhabit the villages and towns–teams as various as the exotic array of chess sets you would find at a first-rate chess shop. Dr. Uyterhoeven wanders about like a tourist at first, but soon he is caught up in a bizarre plot heavy with metaphysical implications. He discovers a conspiracy to destroy all the “goods” in the Antipodes. A “good” is any object, like a thimble, say, that embodies the very essence of its kind–the essence, for example, of thimble-ness. When one of these Platonic “goods” is destroyed, all memory of the object’s proper use is erased. Were the “good” thimble destroyed, all other thimbles would become curiosities, useless knickknacks.
The conspiracy of the “vandals” is no game. It seems, on the contrary, to have apocalyptic overtones. As he investigates, the doctor’s epistolary reports take on a menacing tone. The Dayton neighbors begin to worry if the Doctor’s tale is suitable for kids.
Between letters, Hansen doles out information about Dr. Uyterhoeven’s early life, about his courtship and marriage to Sonja, about his scientific career. As a bonus, the reader gets treated to a refresher course in European intellectual history, with emphasis on the development of scientific rationalism. The doctor, though proud of his “orthodox empiricism,” is leery of the claims of rationalism and outright contemptuous when science seeks explanation instead of restricting itself modestly to observation and description. Despite the scorn of his colleagues, he remains stubbornly agnostic when it comes to “the eternal and unfathomed ellipsis which exists between every effect and its cause.”
But then the Uyterhoevens’ only child, a 5-year-old boy, dies suddenly, and in the ellipsis between that tragic effect and its unknowable cause, Dr. Uyterhoeven finds room for God. Within a few years he has given up science in favor of the teachings of Emanuel Swedenborg, the brilliant and eccentric 18th-Century theologian who claimed to have attained direct access to the spirit world.
Tantalizing parallels emerge between the enchantment of the letters and the story of the doctor’s “real world” progress. The succession of surreal encounters in the Antipodes is a looking-glass version of spiritual awakening. Hansen underscores the fit between the two parts with a charming narrative twist: tokens of the doctor’s Antipodean adventure appear as if by magic in and around the chess garden, so that Sonja’s readings become, for the younger children, a mysterious treasure hunt.
Adults, meanwhile, may wrestle with questions philosophical and theological. The truth, for Dr, Uyterhoeven, is always immanent, everywhere around us.
“I think we do better,” he tells a young skeptic, “to address our attention to what is apparent to us; that we not try looking through things or behind things . . . or to see things we cannot see or hear things we cannot hear.” The doctor wants everyone to greet the miraculous in the ordinary and everyday.
The biographical elements of the novel tend to be stiff and self-important, especially in contrast with the freewheeling imaginative play in the letters. And the fantasy of the letters is sometimes a bit too bizarre and mythy, as though Hansen thought the suggestive power of cryptic folklore more important than the humble satisfactions of a neatly plotted tale.
I sympathize with the many readers who may feel a little overwhelmed by the intellectual challenge on the one hand and the imaginative gymnastics on the other. It’s worth the extra effort. Out of all this complexity comes a startlingly powerful and unfussy conclusion that brings us back with a jolt to the basic situation: an old man with vigorous convictions about God’s immanence leaves behind his comfortable life and his beloved wife to tend the sick and the dying in squalid camps.
The camps remind us of what’s yet to come in our bloody century: genocide and an endless march of refugees. By going to Africa, the doctor confronts the kind of cruel, irrefutable fact that challenges even the most flexible theology. Though he does not speak of it in his letters, he has crossed the ocean to face demons.
Dr. Uyterhoeven needs to write his “twilight letters” as much as his wife and the chess garden regulars need to hear them. Of the many uses for storytelling, perhaps the most important, for the doctor, is healing; for his charmed listeners, safe and sound in Dayton, community is what’s important, hearing together a wise man’s magical tale.
