Mind Picker: This Other Eden

It’s Apple Island! It is Apple Island!

Benjamin Honey looked at his wife crying to him — fierce and true. But she was wrong. His orchard, so fair in appearance, was a folly; his half-remembered Eden no sooner restored than carried off by a little wind and rain.

This Other Eden opens with an epigraph that states: Malaga Island was home to a mixed-race fishing community from the mid 1800s to 1912, when the state of Maine evicted 47 residents from their homes and exhumed and relocated their buried dead. Inspired by this historic tragedy, author Paul Harding imagines his own such mixed-race community — the first settlers, a runaway enslaved man and his Irish wife, having arrived on the fictional “Apple Island” in 1792 — and although, by design, the reader knows where the plot must lead, Harding seems to be using the storyline merely as a scaffolding from which to hang his incredibly pretty words. On the one hand: I am a sucker for just this kind of rhythmic and lyrical wordcraft; and on the other: knowing that this was based on true events, I don’t know if Harding did right by the memories of those whose lives he mined for inspiration. I savoured the reading experience, but it left a sour taste in my mouth; my heart wanted to round up to four stars, but my brain says three.

Terrible, she thought, making her way home as Charlotte and Tabitha and the Sockalexis children criss-crossed in front of and between the line of adults walking away from the schoolhouse along the path. Terrible how terribly good intentions turn out almost every time.

As the novel opens in the early twentieth century, there’s something like sixteen residents living on Apple Island: all of mixed race and a range of colours; many the result of inbreeding, consensual and otherwise. In the first scene, we see the Honey family (the direct descendents of the island’s first settlers) as they tell stories and try to keep warm in their crude cabin; cold, hungry, threadbare, but loving. We eventually meet Matthew Diamond: a retired minister who comes to the island every summer in order to teach its children, and although he appears to be a charitable and Christ-like man, he will eventually reveal a hidden ugliness. If Apple Island is Eden, Diamond is the serpent; his proffered fruit of the knowledge of good and evil necessarily leads to the Fall. Yet: if Diamond is the villain for eventually bringing government inspectors (and their new excitement for eugenics) to the island, Harding doesn’t exactly portray the pre-contact society as a paradise. The inbreeding has had an effect on some of the residents (one little girl seems little more than animal), they are living hand to mouth in unhygienic conditions, and summer school doesn’t seem sufficient for the handful of students that, somehow, include a maths genius, a Latin scholar, and an artistic savant. The fact that intervention (as per other information in the epigraph) leads to bad outcomes for some residents doesn’t actually seem to argue against the need for some kind of intervention. This would have been more tragic if Harding had made the islanders seem more like ordinary people who simply chose to live apart from society — if their mistreatment had been more clearly linked to racism or paternalism or eugenics — instead of peopling this outpost with the old man with a religious mania for carving Biblical scenes on the inner walls of the tree he lives inside, or the man who wears his dead mother’s dress and dead father’s clerk apron and obsessively acts out what he remembers of their roles in life, or the little girl who won’t eat people food but bites the heads off snakes and vermin. I guess what I’m saying is that there’s nothing philosophically interesting about the plot — because of the way that Harding used his source material — and ultimately, that didn’t feel respectful to those who actually lived this.

As for the wordcrafting, many, many scenes play out like the following; odd phrasing and syncopation that worked for me (but could wear on another reader, for sure):

Put the haystacks in the sky, bristling and sharp, rasping across the lowering blue. Stack the clouds in piled rows across the meadow, simmering, hovering, combed fog stitched by the bottom to the short shorn grass, vegetal, green, drying in the day, dehydrating in the sun, sweet and wet then dry and sweet and perfuming the meadow, the deep gray purple morning clouds with the shorn dark green morning grass waving like tide grass in salt creeks then leaching white and straw as light sheers to high white noon and hangs from the pinnacle of the day, suspended in the heat and high white and white hay, suffocating, asphyxiating in breathless angelic light. How to get dawn, noon, and dusk all at once. How to get the heat. The forms and light and colors describe themselves to Ethan with perfect clarity and harmony, without explanation or reason, and he copies them down onto the canvas with the paints.

There is a nice bit in the middle that sees this self-taught painter — Ethan, who can pass for white — sent away for instruction by the meddlesome Matthew Diamond. But as much as I was enjoying the change of scenery, we are eventually brought back to Apple Island and the eviction of its residents, and I don’t know if at all hangs together. But again: This really isn’t about the plot; it’s about words and rhythm and mood and I felt like Harding succeeded in what he was aiming for. But again: Knowing that this was based on the lives of real people, it leaves a sour aftertaste. Art, but problematic.