First, there is the image, then the thought about what we are looking at, followed by any associations that form from what we are seeing. Or, perhaps, puzzlement about what it is we have been shown and an eventual realisation, aided by a caption. Add resonant words and the memory and mind are soon reaching towards ever more associations, both logical and illogical; intensely personal or generally agreed.
When reading 'Florilegia' by Annabel Dover, such a thought process forms on a meta-level because the book itself consists of images and words which depend on associations formed by dates, places, memories, all of which quickly bring forth other associations and which then begin to work on the mind of the reader whose own reflective thoughts begin to form a highly personal reading of the book based on loosening further memory knots.
The continuous element of the book - though it is by no means a linear narrative - is the discovery by Anna Atkins of the printing process known as Cyanotype, by which method she could produce beautiful, cyan blue images of plants. Enough of them were eventually made to allow her to publish the first-ever book of photographs, 'Photographs of British Algae: Canotye Impressions', in 1843.
Details of Atkins life appear throughout the book, but so too do many other lives glimpsed briefly through a telling episode, including imaginings of Henry James and the death - possibly by suicide - of his grandniece Constance Fenimore Cooper in Venice; of Joe Orton, as told by his maid and of a family which may be that of the author. It matters little to the reader who can enjoy the details of parents, both singular and startling.
My mother often amused my friends when they came over. She would do handstands at tea parties (in sheer knickers). She would wail if we cut ourselves and run away crying. We would trap spiders for her as she bit her knuckles and whimpered. She would put crisps in the oven until they went soft and call them 'game chips'. She marvelled that we could cook an egg or cut bread. She would slam doors if she was excluded from a midnight feast. She would sleep until midday and faint upside down naked on the stairs. My father would tread carefully over her, his moccasin tassels touching her hair. She had fainted in Harrods food hall too and at a Francis Bacon private view where she clung on to a painting. The gallery assistant had run towards her and peeled her fingers off the frame.
On almost every page, there are also small photos that never relate directly to the text on that particular page but whose subject may be obliquely referenced at some later point. Others float independently, forming an alternative, more speculative narrative consisting as they do of objects fused by the nuclear bomb in Hiroshima, stills from the films Rebecca, Picnic at Hanging Rock, Grey Gardens and Orphée, along with details of paintings, a Mae West Lips Sofa, the Contents of an Ostrich's Stomach and many other peculiar and arresting images. Not, as might have been expected - except in a couple of instances - images produced by Ana Atkins.
What all of this forms and fuses into is a completely beguiling book (who knows or cares how it might be defined) that fires unexpected connections in the mind, creating moments of genuine surrealism when a thought locks with a suggestion and forms something hitherto unthought of. The quick jolt that happens between paragraphs and the reproduced images can set this process on its way or, it can occur within the text itself. This is the case in one, especially remarkable passage consisting of apparently banal, quotidian observations - if taken individually - but which, when run together, form a bizarre and wonderous amalgam.
My mother yelped with excitement and the dog gulped and wagged her tail and ran towards her. The cat jumped off my bed. I saw her sandy tail aloft and her pink anus disappear downstairs. There was a little boy on the esplanade on the patch of grass where I played with my Native American play people. He was in a blue cardigan and a Star Wars tee-shirt, the kind my boyfriend Philip had worn at my birthday party and my mother had called cheap. Later she said Philip's whole family had square heads and my sister agreed. The little boy was wet all over and was strapped into a mud filled pram. His shoes must have been ruined. His mother and his sister had been rescued at Birkenhead. He had been pulled down by the weight of the pram. The police put a tent up on the Navajo Plains. It looked like it was made of bin bags and was like the ones the electricity people put up but a different shape and not striped. It reminded me of the black uniforms SS guards wore in films, and the door flapped open like a large leather lapel. People crouched down and went in and out of it wearing the same suits the Rentokil people wore when they killed the rats. Each rat was inflated except one that was in perfect condition. She had dried out like a kestral in an Egyptian tomb and I kept her for several years under a Tiny Tears pillow, her whiskers stuck out behind Baby Louise's blonde plait in the wicker pram with the seersucker curtains. I never told my friends when they pushed the dolls around. The rat only got discovered when I hid a quarter of a packet of custard creams. I don't like the taste of the biscuits, but I like the embossed fern croziers that pattern them.
The cat, the rat, the biscuits. How did we get there? And what of the boy in the mud-filled pram? We'll never know. As is often the case with books, there is a paragraph in which the book itself is perfectly described. In this case, it is right at the end when the author is quoting Anna Atkins musing on the etymology of the word Algae: "It may come from alliga, meaning binding and intertwining", she tells us. Binding and intertwining are exactly what Annabel Dover does with the many stories and images she presents us with, giving us readers an experience, both exceptional and enjoyable so that although the book is short, the act of reading it may be lengthy because of the time needed to pause and reflect on where we are now in minds set racing by the everyday strangeness of the experiences, imaginings and perceptions we have encountered in this extraordinary book.
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