An Alchemical Fable

Review of The Singing Tree: An Alchemical Fable, by Bruce Donehower (Sage Cabin Publishers, 2021), 332 pp.

by Frederick Dennehy

This is one of those rare novels that draw you into an imaginative world whose ways you find you already secretly know. It is a story about Hannah, a thirteen year old girl coming of age somewhere in our time, and her counterpart Hanna’el, advancing on a quest in a land out of time. Both girls, seeking a lost father, become destined to find and heal a Tree that holds the hope of restoring not only the remembrances, but the worlds that have been lost to humanity.

The Singing Tree is a work of what Novalis would have called “magical idealism,” a tale that touches us at the deeper roots of our souls and stirs the same sense of recognition evoked by the Märchen of long ago. What emerges—unlike so much of contemporary fantasy literature, where tired caricatures of good and evil get to play dress-up in contemporary settings— is a marvelously unanticipated image of what being human may truly be like.

But The Singing Tree is not a novel of ideas. It is a tale of magical adventure. For such a tale to draw the reader in, the hero has to be appealing, and Bruce Donehower has given us a wonderfully engaging Hannah/Hanna’el to connect with throughout the story.

When Hannah was just a young girl, her father left her to discover the last unknown country in the world.

This is how the story begins, and it remains in a delicate balance between the possible and the impossible until its last sentence.

The Singing Tree is subtitled “An Alchemical Fable.” Written in the book of the same name that is given to Hannah for her thirteenth birthday is the inscription (attributed to the Rosicrucian alchemist Nicholas Flamel) “Operis Processio Multum Naturae Placet” (the procession of the work is greatly pleasing to nature). Tellingly, the words in the book given to Hannah never remain the same, and it becomes clear that the book is not only to be read, but to be written by her.

The book tells Hannah that every sickness is a musical problem whose cure is a musical solution; that practice and attainment are one and the same; and that she must meet a Master of Memory. She will meet such a master, in the figure of a talking fish named Walter, who swims in a pond of memory, and among her medley of adventures she will encounter “the seven Friedrichs,” a wonderfully comic brotherhood who huddle together in an antiquated bookstore, out of the Zone of Night.

And most consequentially, Hannah will begin to come together with the mythic land where her parallel self, Hanna’el, is making an epic journey to the edge of a visionary world to try to heal the Singing Tree. It is this enchanted world of Hanna’el that carries most of the narrative of the novel. It is a land of kings and queens, princes and princesses, wars and warriors, thieves, imps, master singers, treachery, magic, and untold possibilities.

Through all its tuneful turning, The Singing Tree visits the mysteries of memory, not some fictional storage center of the brain, but an active intuition that wins its way through deeds and sufferings until it realizes destinies.

The novel searches into the art that Novalis termed “schweben” or “hovering,” the skill of staying spiritually afloat. In Owen Barfield’s terms, this is a form of attention that allows the practitioner to remain in the tension between polarities without either embracing the one and discarding the other, or forcing them both into a counterfeit reconciliation. In The Singing Tree it operates as the key to the recovery of memory and the return of lost worlds. It may also be the locus—in the silent poise of “inbetweenness”—of the authentic self.

The mark of a good fairy tale, or, for that matter, any story, is its ability to draw you into itself, to make you have to know what comes next. In The Singing Tree we are drawn into two entwined stories—a tale of coming to maturity for Hannah through mystery, and one of realizing destiny for Hanna’el. Each story offers unexpected gifts for the reader, and each, like its central character, remains faithful to its open secret.

Frederick Dennehy is associate editor of being human, a retired lawyer and active thespian, and a class holder of the School for Spiritual Science of the Anthroposophical Society.