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  • The present meets the past in an open grave on the moor
  • Meryem Udden
Ian Reid. A Thousand Tongues. Ardross, WA: Framework Press, 2019. 263 pp. n.p. ISBN: 978 0 648 52230 0

What do a conscientious objector, two graduate students, and a murderer have in common? A conscience. Interweaving three different narratives that span three centuries, Ian Reid's latest novel, A Thousand Tongues, embarks on a journey to understand the role of the conscience in our past and present.

The first narrative follows Gavin Staines, a college lecturer who refuses to fight in World War I and is imprisoned at Dartmoor in 1917. Stoic and taciturn, Gavin has a complicated past that haunts him as he endures the brutal consequences of refusing to serve in the war effort. His love for Shakespeare is his solace, escape, and even at times, his defense for choosing to live a nonviolent life. In an article on war and peace in Shakespeare's plays, Gavin argues, "Although we can hardly claim Shakespeare as a fellow pacifist, his plays (and poems too, with their recurrent motif of 'wasteful war') do show that he could express eloquently what anyone sickened by the violence of warfare has felt" (228). Despite his convictions, Gavin is torn into a "thousand several tongues" (260). Labeled a coward for refusing to fight, guilt-ridden over a past romantic relationship, inhumanely treated as an objector, in the end with no friends, no family, and no work, Gavin has an experience like the wall and road he helps build while imprisoned at Dartmoor—a wall that has no purpose and a road that leads to nowhere.

A century into the future, two graduate students, Tim Holmes and Valerie Morton, study together at uni in Perth. The two friends are almost a modern-day Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. They both have mysteries they are trying to solve: for Tim, his family's ancestry, and for Valerie, the murder of a refugee friend-writing tutee. While investigating these cases, their discoveries make them begin to question the motivations behind their graduate research and their own personal beliefs about history, race, relationships, and academia.

Tim and Valerie's friendship is the most developed in the novel. While the other narratives are in the distant and unfamiliar past, we can relate to Tim and Valerie as they try to find their place in the modern academic world, stressing over seminar papers, making new friends on campus, questioning their beliefs, and doubting their research capabilities. The dialogue between the two students is a commentary on the other two narratives, as Tim and Valerie try to make sense of the historical artifacts and documents they find in their research.

Josh Dunn's narrative enters the novel briefly. It is Victorian England, and Josh, a Black former circus worker, is sent to Dartmoor prison when he defends his pregnant sister from an assaulter, unintentionally killing the man. Josh's story centers on the unjust treatment of Black people in England. While slavery has been abolished [End Page 445] by this time, Josh's treatment highlights the racism pervading the country. Josh's narrative is the least developed, which leaves the reader a desire for more of his story. Perhaps that want is a reflection of the fact that contemporary readers know little about the Black experience in Victorian England.

While at first the different narrative threads appear unconnected, Reid subtly intertwines their stories through setting. The three narratives largely take place in Dartmoor, a vast moorland in southwestern England. The landscape is like an open tomb above ground, ready for a historian to visit and discover its past. Each stone on the moors has many stories to tell. Tim describes the moors as "forlorn" and "an almost ageless place" (152). Gavin's fellow prisoners call the rock faces on the moor "primeval giants" (34). Josh calls the moor a "desolate place" one night during a storm when he finds shelter in an open ancient grave (195). Tim's, Gavin's, and Josh's experiences on the moors, while occurring at different points in history, connect in that each one must confront an adversary, whether that be...

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