THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, October 9, 1994 TAG: 9410080187
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY LYNN DEAN HUNTER
LENGTH: Medium: 71 lines
ANABASIS
A Journey to the Interior
ELLEN GILCHRIST
University of Mississippi Press. 305 pp. $23.
``The quest for truth the only journey I am interested in going on.''
Ellen Gilchrist
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Ellen Gilchrist's wide-reaching new novel, Anabasis: A Journey to the Interior, is a departure for the Arkansas-based writer.
Readers looking for characters, themes and settings familiar in Gilchrist's earlier fiction (In the Land of Dreamy Dreams, Drunk With Love, I Cannot Get You Close Enough, Net of Jewels, Star Carbon) initially may be disconcerted: Anabasis is neither Southern nor contemporary; it involves none of the eccentric Hand-Manning clan - no news of Lydia, Phelan, Miss Crystal or Olivia De Havilland Hand - nor does it pursue the usual Gilchrist theme, which the author has defined as ``looking for love in all the wrong places.''
In short, Anabasis: A Journey to the Interior enters new territory. And, as Rhoda Manning, the wild protagonist of Net of Jewels, might have said, ``Travel is so broadening.''
Set in ancient Greece at the time of the fall of Athens, and written in Gilchrist's powerful, clear prose, Anabasis (defined by Webster as ``a going up, ascent, advance to the interior; from the Greek `ana,' up, and `bainein,' to go.'') is a historical novel that traces the progress of a young woman named Auria from slavery to freedom. Anabasis succeeds as a novel about the female experience of gender and power, and as an allegory of the quest for truth.
As history, Anabasis shows the fine details of life in ancient Greece: how cloth was made, what treatments physicians used, how food was prepared. Gilchrist has done her research. She has also defined the issues of the day, returning continually to two philosophical questions: ``What is freedom?'' and ``What is tyranny?''
Like much contemporary fiction about women (Nadine Gordimer's A Sport of Nature, Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior), Anabasis develops a powerless girl into a dynamic woman. On the way to womanhood, Auria encounters and defies slavery, rape, passivity, dependency. She is aware of her sex as an opening for weakness. When she marries, it is a union of equals, but she is still on guard:
``. . . I have done this thing a woman does and mixed my history with this creature who does not even know how to read and can make me feel inferior and like a slave if he stops looking at me for a moment.''
As an allegory, Anabasis, like Pilgrim's Progress or Siddhartha, traces Auria's growth from seeker to keeper of the sanctuary. As she moves from student to apprentice to teacher, her quest is for knowledge, not religion. Raised by a philosopher and man of science, Auria is full of wondering questions. The clouds are made of water, she knows. The world might be round. People may have been fishes once. Sometime, she daydreams, we will know everything. MEMO: Lynn Dean Hunter is a fiction writer and book critic who lives in
Virginia Beach. ILLUSTRATION: Photo
FRANKE KEATING
In ``Anabasis: A Journey to the Interior,'' Ellen Gilchrist departs
from her usual settings to explore ancient Greece.
by CNB