Natural Elements

Now in his dazzling new novel Mason writes about mothers and daughters; aging and death; memory and longing; history and narrative; and about the high-stakes, full-tilt embrace of life.

The setting is London. The time is the present.

Mother and daughter are choosing an assisted-living facility and have come to The Albany, a late-nineteenth-century Victorian mansion, the flagship property of the TranquilAge™ chain of nursing homes.

The mother, Joan—eighty years old, a gifted amateur pianist denied the pleasures of performance by arthritic hands—has recently been experiencing a rich inner world that she hides from her daughter, a world gained access through the (seemingly magic) pedals of her piano: a portal to adventure. She dreads the prospect of leaving her apartment, but her daughter has decided that she can no longer live on her own.

The daughter, Eloise—forty-eight, a hedge fund manager, two decades in commodities—long ago rejected the possibilities of motherhood and has lived enviably free of responsibility.

At her pressure-cooker job, Eloise has bought up $130 million (a quarter of the hedge fund’s money) of osmium reserves—a transition metal—based on a casual remark by her former lover, a French metallurgist, a genius of sorts, with whom she lived and whom she almost married in Paris in the 1980s.

He’s been working for years on the development of the compound, which will be tougher than diamonds for industrial use and is only months away from trials. If successful, it could more than double the value of the fund Eloise manages.

While mother and daughter are on the trip-of-a-lifetime to the South African capital of the old Orange Free State, the city of Joan’s girlhood, Eloise gets a frantic phone call. The price of osmium is in free fall; the fund is off-loading. . .

Fighting panic with a coherent strategy, Eloise puts in motion a bold gamble that risks all—her future, the fund, her mother’s well-being.

As the stories of mother and daughter intersect, each in a race against time—Joan struggling to live in the present (she cannot believe her days will end in an institution); her daughter racing at breakneck speed toward the precipice of disaster—the novel rushes to its stunning conclusion.

In this moving, layered novel of memory and family, celebrated author Richard Mason tells the story of a mother and daughter, one caught in the past, one racing toward the future.
 
Joan is eighty years old, a gifted amateur pianist who can no longer play because of her arthritic hands. Joan’s daughter, Eloise, is an ambitious hedge fund manager who has decided to move her mother to an assisted-living facility. As a last hurrah, Eloise plans a trip to Joan’s childhood home in South Africa. What Joan discovers there summons long-buried secrets and opens up an entirely new world. Natural Elements is a dazzling tale of history and longing, and the high-stakes, full-tilt embrace of life.

The Washington Post - Jonathan Yardley

Natural Elements is a mature, inventive, ambitious novel. Among other things, it is about investment bubbles and the workings of the commodities markets; scientific research and the perilous paths down which it can go; retirement communities, nursing homes and other institutions into which we dump people for whom we do not have, or to whom we do not want to give, sufficient time; the tensions within families and the ties that somehow survive them; the aftershocks of a distant war that brutalized innocent people and left memories haunted by loss. To all of this Mason brings a clear, inviting prose style that resists at every turn the temptation to be showy.

Richard Mason was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, and grew up there and in London. In 1999, Mason started the Kay Mason Foundation (www.kaymasonfoundation.org), which helps disadvantaged teenagers in South Africa attend the country’s best schools. Mason lives in Glasgow, Scotland.