Michel de Montaigne advised that we dull death’s novelty and strangeness by imagining it daily. Kathryn Heyman’s Circle of Wonders takes that counsel seriously, returning again and again to the ordinary, awkward, sometimes comic ways people live alongside the experience of dying.
Set over a lunar cycle, the novel follows its characters through acts of care, evasion and belated repair, attending closely to the small, luminous details by which a life is measured. It is less concerned with transcendence than with what can be mended at the edge of things: the injuries we inflict, the grudges we keep, the difficult piecemeal work of forgiveness.
Review: Circle of Wonders – Kathryn Heyman (Fourth Estate)
Circle of Wonders arrives at a moment when public conversations about death often emphasise choice, control or dignity. The novel offers a quiet corrective, insisting that dying is also relational, compromised and shaped by histories that cannot be set right in time.
Roni has terminal cancer. She returns home from a healing centre with plans to die on her own terms. Her eldest daughter Belle, newly out of rehab, nurses her with a vigilance that tips easily into irritation, as if each action carries an accusation. Pip, a longstanding friend, safeguards Roni’s peace, her own tolerance strained by the small eruptions that punctuate the days.
Anna, Roni’s emotionally guarded younger sister, returns from London to be with their dying mother, Sylvie, who is long estranged from Roni. Conversations stall and flare; old grievances surface in sideways remarks.
Roni’s ex-partner, known only as “the Drone”, is a constant needling presence in the home, upsetting any brief moments of calm. Roni, meanwhile, holds onto the hope that her youngest daughter, Shanti, sent to Canada years earlier, will return in time to say goodbye.
The novel’s emotional centre is Roni’s “Book of Wonders”, a notebook she fills with fragments, brief observations, fleeting reflections: “Sharp wind. Blue cloud. White rock … Here the world is. Full of wonder.”
At one point, she spies an albino kangaroo caught in “shimmering light” before it is surrounded and protected by a grey mob and they bound into the scrub – a vision both unique and already vanishing.
The novel’s meaning surfaces through these halting acts of attention, creating pauses within its human endeavour.
Accusations and absolutions
In Circle of Wonders, family is not a refuge but a disturbance – something jagged, misfiring. Belle’s question to her aunt – “What’s it like, having iced water in your veins?” – has the offhand manner of a cruel joke; it freezes feeling even as it names its absence.
“God I’m sorry,” Roni says later in the novel. “I’m so slow.” Belle’s reply refuses the apology, while quietly redirecting blame toward the older injury of abandonment: “Please don’t apologise. Not for this.” The line absolves and accuses at once.
Anna’s arrival sharpens the atmosphere. “Anna. You troubled yourself,” Pip says, the sarcasm striking before any reconciliation can begin. Rummaging her memory for Pip’s name, Anna recalls instead the community centre “that smelled of instant coffee and microwaved soup”, and the women with their “cancerous breasts”. The memory is vivid but displaces the personal; Anna remembers the smell, not the person.
Roni’s attempt at an explanation of their awkward sisterly relationship – “we sort of grew up in different families” – suggests not estrangement alone but a retrospective effort to make their differences accountable.
A living wake
Late in the novel, Roni stages a living wake. She asks mourners to write on her cardboard casket and carry something of hers away. “I want to do this bit right,” she says. “Better.”
Around her, the others circle. And while their past resentments and failures continue to flare, they too seek something more. Their attempts at atonement are careful and provisional, shaped less by resolution than by improvisation – small gestures rather than lasting reparation.
What emerges in the novel is not the easy claim that everyone missteps, but something more exacting. Each character registers, imperfectly, the limits of their own understanding. Pip’s thought – “it would go, this joy, this human music” – is momentary, almost weightless, yet admits both transience and wonder.
As Roni’s death draws closer, and the Drone continues to cast a shadow over daily life, Anna begs Belle to let her sleep beside her sister. Later, together with Pip, the three listen to Roni’s rasping breaths. Their shared ritual is intimate and bodily, yet attentive to the failing rhythms of life.
Heyman resists moral tidiness, allowing her characters to remain faltering. They are flawed and emotionally compromised, yet the novel recognises what persists – this fragile, passing, “human music”.
“I failed them,” Roni says about her daughters. “Both of them. I chose the wrong thing”. But her confession does not redeem her; it names what cannot be undone. The knowledge arrives too late, but it is knowledge, nonetheless.
Shifting thoughts and hestiant actions
Where Montaigne urges familiarity with death, Heyman presses familiarity with human uncertainty. Her prose tracks her characters’ shifting thoughts and hesitant actions.
In Circle of Wonders, grief is inconsistent and human intention stalls or doubles back on itself. Memory does not clarify but blurs, introducing a faint but persistent doubt about what is being recalled and why.
Heyman is particularly alert to the minor abrasions of intimacy, frustrations that spark and burn, and the moments of tenderness that remain. Her prose bleeds meaning. A line such as “The room was dimly illuminated by the slender moon, its thin light peeling the gums like fruit” is characteristic. Its strangeness lies in an unsettling comparison – light does not simply fall but seems to strip and expose.
For Heyman, the natural world is a force that broadens perception, not just soothes. Attending to it places the human in a larger planetary frame that hints at the eternal. Friendship, like family, is something fatigued but durable, sustained less by harmony than by continued consideration.
Heyman has written several novels, a memoir, a poetry collection and drama, and has mentored multiple authors. In Circle of Wonders, her authority is evident in the pressure she applies at the level of the sentence. The novel resists easy consolations and stays with states that do not settle.
The narrative achievement lies in the particularity of Heyman’s noticing: grief unfolds unevenly; love survives only with effort. What the novel finally permits is not reassurance but recognition, earned moment by moment. Even a brief flicker of wonder feels contingent – almost accidental – and therefore more credible, more desired, for being so.
Life in all its ordinariness, Heyman suggests, is astonishing.
Catherine McKinnon does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
