The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Tourmaline, by Joanna Scott
reviewed by Trey Strecker

Joanna Scott. Tourmaline. Little, Brown, 2003. 279 pp. $23.95.

In Tourmaline Joanna Scott’s lustrous Mediterranean landscapes echo the shadowy Italian romances of Nathaniel Hawthorne and John Hawkes. Inspired by her own extended tour of Italy, Scott weaves a simple tale with a mysterious and seductive allure. In the 1950s Murray Murdoch and his family flee his American past for the island of Elba, infamous as the land of Napoleon’s exile, where he expects to lead a simpler life. A financial failure, Murray searches for a fortune in semiprecious tourmaline, which he expects will redeem his ruined reputation, but he becomes engulfed by the investigation into the disappearance of an entrancing local girl, Adriana Nardi, and the scandalous rumors that circulate about their illicit relationship. But Murray’s misadventures are only part of Scott’s story. More interested in “the murky private work of consciousness,” Scott brilliantly orchestrates a multitiered narrative, relating many scenes through the contemporary perspective of Murray’s wife, Claire, and his son, Oliver, as they struggle—often against each other—to compose a meaningful account of the family’s life on the island from isolated fragments of memory and dreams. Throughout Tourmaline’s elegiac evocation of family and belonging, Scott writes crystalline prose that absorbs, reflects, and refracts the complex light of human desire and emotion.