It is ironic, is it not, how everything seems so poetic in death, yet we rarely see the poetry in life?

I couldn’t think of a more truer statement than this, spoken by a God-like king on the first page of Cheryl Anne Gardner’s book, The Splendor of Antiquity.  True, we’d expect our Gods to say such profound things and the narrator of  this book does not disappoint with such expectations. After all, he has been dead for centuries and our lead female, an archaeologists named Joliette Deneauve, is about to dig him up.

Gardner has magnificently given the book a theme about faith. The reader will know that right from the start.  But this is also a book about passion, and there are two kinds here.  First the passion, both physical and emotional, felt between two people.  This is evident between Joliette and her fellow archaeologist named Olivier Botton. But then there’s the feeling of passion that one has when they find themselves so truly captivated by some thing that also steals their heart away.  For many, this second passion is the love and faith one feels for God, or should I say a God. And so Joliette finds herself torn between the two.  She struggles against her connection with Olivier and is overcome with passion for the dead king she discovers deep in the Siberian mountains.

Tittering on the brink of fantasy, Gardner presented herself with quite a challenge when writing this book. Olivier and Joliette are both human so conversation between the two would obviously come quite naturally.  However, remember this book is narrated by the dead king. Though he speaks to the reader, he cannot verbally speak to Joliette.  But the one sided conversations Joliette has with his skull will send shivers up your spine.  In Chapter 5, Joliette uses technology to sculpt a model of what the king might have looked like, a beautiful metaphor for God breathing life into each of us, but held at bay by the fact Joliette uses technology, science, to recreate the features of the king:

“In the simplest and most poetic of terms, she believed, devoutly in her heart, that a thing, once created, should never die. “Doesn’t matter what that thing is: flesh, stone, or bone,” she said. “Even the idea that sparked the courage to create in the first place has merit beyond the moment and should never fade from the world. Neither the memory nor the emotion behind it should ever be cast away and forgotten as if it had never existed, as if it had meant nothing.” Everything means something in a metaphysical sense, even the trivial things. At least they did to Joliette. Restoring to me my face, my name, and my honor was the least trivial of all.

I loved the fact that this book was also not too philosophical despite the boundaries of both religion and science that are explored. Yes, Joliette is consumed with her work as a scientist and shows great passion for her work, but her obsession with the king and with finding out who he is also consumes her.  Just as churchgoers long to be closer to God but denounce the scientific explanations behind who we are or how we got here, there’s always that boundary between stories.  Joliette never sways in either direction. We are a culture of secrets and history.  Gardner reminds us that societies long before us bury their secrets, their sadness, and their past, only to have later societies dig them up all over again:

Over the course of a lifetime, one might never be able to calculate how many tears could be shed on account of death.

When Olivier reveals that their research has not brought them any closer to the real identity of the king, Joliette vows to return to the dig site in an attempt to learn more, growing even more obsessed with the unnamed king.  The king tells us he’s already been haunting her dreams, but Joliette returning to his grave is the chance he needs to finally reveal himself to her. Joliette’s fate is oddly revealed to the reader early on in Chapter 2:

As the passing of the world slips down through fractures in the muck-covered gravel of time, everything is absorbed into everything else. Every bit of matter, whether it be rock, stone, or bone becomes a part of antiquity. Mist, magic, or trembling lips, everything transcends in an elemental eclipse

Everything.

Every atom, every slight or obtuse particle of dust, and every swirling cloud of detritus will eventually posses the memory of everything else, etched into its core.

And so it’s not about having to choose between what we believe and what we know is real. Joliette simply accepts her fate and succumbs to it, but not before her and the king share a secret that Joliette chooses to keep to herself. Despite research, despite science, despite the opportunity to be known for something great, sometimes it is just about faith and that which we hold so dear inside ourselves.

This is the second book by Cheryl that I’ve read.  I love the nontraditional 8×5 size she uses, which is offered by CreateSpace.  It’s perfect for a novella and gives the book a nice pocketbook feel to it that I really admire. For authors publishing work under 200 pages, you should definitely give this size some consideration. And while you are at it, you should invest in a copy of Cheryl’s book simply as a guideline to following for formatting.  The front matter and body of text are flawless. Great story!  Great physical book!  Indie authors should take note because this is a perfect example to follow.

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Ever lived in an apartment where the walls were a bit too thin and you often overheard music from the next apartment?  Did you ever wonder who was listening to that music and why?  What did the music do for them?  How did it make them feel?  What were they doing while listening to it?  Did you ever overhear too much of a conversation?  Or maybe you just heard bits and pieces and you were left to fill in the missing pieces?

Did you ever overhear an argument that sounded detrimental to someone, and yet your curious mind just listened instead of turning up the television?  You didn’t do anything to stop it.  Did you ever wonder if someone was on the other side listening to you?  While the majority of my questions suggest you could somehow judge Cheryl Anne Gardner’s book, The Thin Wall, by its title, if you did you’d be wrong.

At 124 pages, Gardner embraces the novella format, a particular type of book I have to admit I haven’t read in a while.  And in her book, the reader is treated to those brief scenarios, those un-muffled pieces of conversation you could hear through the wall once you turned off your television.  I was constantly eager to turn the page to find out what would happen next, only to find the characters in a new setting and having new conversations on a different day without any of the “in between” movements that often push a longer novel along.  Gardner has whittled the story down to its bare essence and given you, quite purely, only what you need to know.

The story revolves around five friends and the relationships that mingle between them, and Gardner does not just scratch the surface of their friendships. She tunnels through the very veins of each of these characters, carefully dissecting the differences that lie between their hearts and their souls.  Laleana O-Reilly, a librarian slightly obsessed with the Marquis de Sade, finds herself torn between two very different men.  To make things worse, the two men are close friends within the group of five.  Julian,  the dominant one of the bunch, visits Laleana’s bed with maddening “monsteresque” fury.  The two explore the brutal realms that lie between pleasure and pain.  But their blood-laced habits soon run Laleana spiritually dry, and she finds herself bored with Julian’s lust as her heart desires something much much more.

The “something more” is a shy introvert named Ioan.  He’s quiet.  He’s an artist.  And he spends his nights burning his paintings of nude women because he just “can’t get the blood right.”  Might I add that several of these paintings are portraits Laleana herself has posed for.  Between posing for Ioan, having afternoon tea with her girlfriend Cecile, and hanging out in the projection booth of  a porn theater with an addict named Tom, Laleana ignores their warnings about Julian as they spy the healing cuts on her back.  But an awkward and intense moment shared with Ioan one night will soon change everything.

Brimming with passion and sexual tension, their story lines often reveal more to the reader than what is written right on the page in front of you.  Laleana’s love for literature and her own writing habits give the book a certain depth outside of the submission and dominance her and her friends explore.  The book even ends with a short story written by Laleana entitled “The Muse and the Alchemist.”

By blatantly presenting her characters with such honesty, Gardner commands her readers to question their own inner identity, as presented in these lines from the last chapter:

A person is defined by what they do and what they don’t do. It really is that simple.

Our lives belong to us and no one else.

Were we better people for the self-imposed trials and tribulations we had endured? Had we gained anything appreciable from the choices we had made, the blood we had shed, the secrets we had chosen to reveal, or the shadows we had confronted in blind faith?  We would all like to think so.

True salvation lies in this knowledge.  It lies in the cruelly eroded crevices of a cold thin wall.

Cheryl Anne Gardner tears those walls down!  She has given us a brilliant character study focusing on where the lines between sex and friendship blur.  It’s a place you don’t want to go to, a conversation you don’t want to overhear, but curiosity will have its way with you.  And when it does, The Thin Wall is the book you should treat yourself to.

Visit Cheryl on the Web!

Read a preview of The Thin Wall!

Search inside this book at Amazon!

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