Partial eclipse

Inga Simpson’s The Thinning owes a literary debt to the American nature writer Annie Dillard’s evergreen essay ‘Total Eclipse’ (1982). An account of the solar eclipse that Dillard observed on 26 February 1979, ‘Total Eclipse’ aims not merely to narrate experience but also to impart the shock of estrangement. It is an essay in awe, shot through with verbal echoes. In the moon’s long shadow, Dillard glimpsed an otherworld in which the hillside’s ‘hues were metallic; their finish was matte’, in which the living appeared as if preserved within ‘a tinted photograph from which the tints had faded’. When perfectly aligned, the moon and sun come to resemble a ‘thin ring, an old, thin silver wedding band, an old, worn ring’: a partial eclipse’s relation to a total eclipse is the relation of ‘kissing a man’ to ‘marrying him’. What Dillard knew well, and what her sentences know best of all, is that there is a patness to causal narrative that impedes the expression of a genuine revelation. No amount of careful set-up can quite account for the new.