Mind Picking: Happy Halloween XI

 

Every year I say, "I don't have an appropriate Halloween post for this year," and every year, something falls into my lap. For 2023, I think this will do: Kennedy and I went to see a panel discussion at the end of August — Margaret Atwood in conversation with Mona Awad and Naomi Alderman on Gothic literature — and in the course of their discussion, each author told a personal ghost story. (And as many of my Halloween posts have involved reporting the ghost stories of others, I reckon anything shared in a public forum is fair game for my use.)

Mona Awad went first: When I was living in Providence — the land of Poe and Lovecraft — and working on my MFA, I woke up one night from a dead sleep and saw the shadowy figure of a woman standing at the foot of my bed. She was wearing a long, dark dress and I remember her hair was up and she had spectacles on — the spectacles really stand out in my memory — and I jumped out of bed to confront her. I remember standing there, saying, "Who are you?" and then I just fell backwards into my bed and woke up some time later.

Atwood asked if the figure had felt malevolent, benevolent, or neutral, and Awad answered that it was merely ambivalent — that the figure didn't really seem interested in her at all — but that it did frighten her at the time and gave her chills to even remember.

Naomi Alderman went next: Shortly after my partner's father died, we were at my inlaws' family home in rural Northern Ireland — think of fog and mountains; actually the mountain we could see out the window was used during the filming of Game of Thrones — and we were staying in the room in which my father-in-law had died. Being adult humans, we turned out the bedside lamp and started to engage in relations, when suddenly, the light turned on again. Once again, we turned out the lamp, resumed relations, and the light turned on again. So we unplugged the lamp, and when it turned itself on for a third time, we looked more closely at the lamp, and, yes, it was an old type of thing with some kind of transformer switch on the cord — it was maybe possible that it stored enough current to turn on by itself — but we ended up putting the lamp in the hallway and having words with what we were convinced was my father-in-law's ghost, explaining that we were sorry he had died but that we were still alive and were going to continue on with doing the things that living human adults will do.

Margaret Atwood explained that while she had never had direct ghostly experience, she lived for ten years in an 1835 farmhouse and many people — family members and visitors — had reported seeing a woman in a long blue dress who would climb the stairs and turn off the corridor at the top into a very small room that Atwood thought might have been used as a nursery once. She also shared the spookiest story that had ever been told to her: This woman from Georgia said that a friend of hers from college had committed suicide by "blowing her head off with the family shotgun". This woman went to visit the friend's family some time later and was disturbed to see that the dead girl's bedroom had been kept exactly the way it had been in life, with all of the girl's things still on display. She joined the family for tea, and as she sat in a little alcove that was not totally visible to the family, she was horrified to watch as the lemon on her saucer rose into the air, turning end over end before coming back down to rest. This woman said that she had to fight the urge to look behind her for the dead friend because she was terrified she would be there, and be headless.

And that reminded Alderman of one more story: I was in England and teaching a residential creative writing course at a building from the eleventh century — imagine, a building that has been continuously lived in for a thousand years — and while these courses are usually for adults, this time it was a special course for eleven and twelve year old girls. And what a magical and mystical age that is for girls! Before the course began, the instructors were all warned to never speak of ghosts — to deny that they might exist and to refrain from even using the word "spooky" to describe the old building — because these girls were at such a vulnerable and suggestible age. Even so, one morning, a pair of girls — who had been assigned a small former servants' quarters in which to sleep — came to me and said that in the middle of the previous night, they had both awoken to find themselves standing up in the middle of the floor, with the distinct and nagging feeling that someone had called their names. I had been forewarned that some of the girls might have this exact experience — it happens every time someone stays in that room — and I had been coached to explain that a creaky old place like that makes a lot of noises in the middle of the night and that it's perfectly normal to have nocturnal noises disturb one's sleep.

When this portion of the discussion was over, Atwood realised that her microphone was dead and a tech had some bit of trouble getting it to work again. (And at the end of the event, the host came out to say that Alderman had used the name of "the Scottish Play" during the sound check, and we could make of that what we would. Ghost or curse or complete coincidence, it added to the Gothic fun of the event.)

So, while this post feels a bit brief, it ought to serve as my annual reminder that there just might be something more to this world than what we can predict, poke, and measure; and isn't that worth thinking, talking, and writing about?

Happy Halloween!


Strange stories from previous years:

Halloween I

Halloween II

Halloween III

Halloween IV

Halloween V

Halloween VI

Halloween VII

Halloween VIII

Halloween IX

Halloween X

How to Build a Boat

 

The currach’s skeleton of sally and hazel rods is in the middle of the workshop floor and it really does look alive, and the centre laths makes it look like a boat now, I will admit this, and I admit to feelings of excitement just looking at it, maybe a mixture of nerves and excitement, which are perhaps the same thing, and the vast expanse, all the huge space its frame is taking up,

it’s greater than all of us.

My favourite quote from author Elaine Feeney’s interview on the Booker website is: As for my fiction – I write what I know – and then I tell lies. In this spirit, How to Build a Boat is based on Feeney’s real life experience — of living in the west of Ireland during turbulent socio-political times, of having taught in an all-boys’ school, of raising a child with unique abilities (as per that interview: hyperlexia) — and as she has worked primarily as a poet, the best bits of her writing here represent a poetic insight into the human condition as well as a poet’s precision of language (I realise that I’ve chosen quotes that all have poetic line breaks, but it really doesn’t happen all that often). Yet: I don’t know if these disparate bits add up to a totally satisfying novel. The plotline (and its moral) was fairly predictable, I was not moved by the characters’ predicaments, and often, I found that Feeney was using this space as a soapbox (which I understand is what every novelist is ultimately doing, but there was little subtlety to it). This was a fine read, probably three and a half stars, but I’m not moved to round up.

The cathedral bell rang out fast.
Bell | bang | bell | bang
Half past the hour.
It knocked a start out of Jamie who was stood in line behind other boys in blazers and school bags clasped to them. A few leaves whipped up in the rusty gulley at the entrance and a bird perched on the head of a marble statue. A full-sized laminated picture of Jesus was nailed to the main door, his heart plucked out of his chest and rainbow shards of light shooting from him. This was new and it threw Jamie. He memorised it for tomorrow. Eoin warned him that there could be new things. He said not to panic if this happens. But Jamie preferred when Eoin said nothing. Saying not to panic was like telling him not to think of an elephant in a tutu.

As the novel opens, we learn that Jamie is being raised by single dad, Eoin — Jamie’s mother having died in childbirth when his parents were still teenagers — and as Jamie is neurodivergent in some way (from the interview: Feeney refuses to categorise his condition, “the not labelling was an important consideration”), Eoin has always been indulgent and overprotective, but now needs to relinquish some control as Jamie starts secondary school at the local all-boys Catholic college. Jamie is immediately bullied and overwhelmed, but is rescued by his English teacher, Tess — who had provided extra support for special needs students until that program was suddenly cut — and although Tess is under immense pressure in her home life, she has the knowledge and inclination to take a kid in need under her wing. Eventually, Jamie catches the attention of the new woodworking teacher, Tadhg, and with a kind of outsider, folksy wisdom, Tadgh recognises that the boy would benefit from redirecting his obsessive energies into working methodically with his hands. And when Tadgh learns that the math-minded boy dreams of building a perpetual motion machine (that in some quasi-mystical way would connect him with the mother he never knew), Tadgh directs Jamie in the building of a traditional Irish boat (a “currach”) that invokes the ancient concept of “meitheal” (communal effort: many others will join in on the building of this boat, and Jamie will ultimately find a place in the community). POV rotates between Jamie and Tess — with Tadgh serving as the link between their stories — and despite some barely developed background characters attempting to thwart their efforts (while demonstrating all that’s wrong in modern Irish society), the lives of these three were nicely developed.

Stood there, Tess thought about Tadhg walking out to the Forge, alone, about Jamie and his machine, about how fulfilled she was being among them and how naively Jamie was hoping, the bright hope he had, that the energy, wherever it would manifest from, would be enough to connect everyone, the living and the dead. But there was nothing for the half-living, Tess thought —

Nothing at all for the dead walking among them.

There were many things that I didn’t understand in this story: Why was it set from autumn of 2019 to spring of 2020 without any mention of the pandemic? Why would there be an implication that a student shouldn’t be left unchaperoned with the bombastically misogynistic President of the college if nothing ever comes of that? Why would this same President (who warns boys not to work on the boat, because working with one’s hands is “common”) have hired a woodworking teacher in the first place? Why did every main character have to have been raised by a single parent? On the other hand: I did like the experience of being inside Jamie’s and Tess’ heads; these are interesting and complicated characters navigating difficult lives — lives made more difficult by their own decisions and behaviour — and the characters (if not the plot) are worth the read.

Booker Prize Longlist 2023

A Spell of Good Things by Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀’

Old God's Time by Sebastian Barry

Study for Obedience by Sarah Bernstein * My favourite of the list

The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng

If I Survive You by Jonathan Escofferey

How to Build a Boat by Elaine Feeney

This Other Eden by Paul Harding

Pearl by Siân Hughes

All the Little Bird-Hearts by Viktoria Lloyd-Barlow

Prophet Song by Paul Lynch

Western Lane by Chetna Maroo

In Ascension by Martin MacInnes

The Bee Sting by Paul Murray

The Trojan Horse and Other Stories: Ten Ancient Creatures That Make Us Human

 

In many ways, the Aeneid tells a tale of change and transformation, propelled by the inscrutable forces of fate towards a preordained telos (end) — the foundation of Rome. This is a world in which opposing forces ultimately cancel each other out or supplement each other to constitute a newly unified whole. The Trojan horse is central to this endeavour. It represents both Greek ingenuity and Greek deceit, the end of the story of one city and the beginning of another, and human, divine, and animal identities. Above all, however, Virgil includes it as part of a narrative in which Sinon’s false story matches the concealed human contents of the horse to form a compelling strategy by which the Greeks trick their way into the city. And yet, unlike his Greek counterparts, Aeneas, the hero of Virgil’s Aeneid, cannot boast about having been one of the fighters hidden in the horse. His humanity emerges when he flees the horse’s deadly human cargo — and turns a story of destruction into a story of a new beginning.

Author Julia Kindt is a Professor of Ancient History at the University of Sydney (among other roles and distinctions), and in her Preface to The Trojan Horse and Other Stories she writes that this is meant to be an examination of animal-based stories from antiquity as “part of a larger endeavour to reveal some of the foundations on which Western humanism rests”, and with the “general reader” in mind. And as interesting as that sounded to me, this general reader didn’t get much out of this. Each chapter read like one of my university essays — an introduction that sums up what is to come, a body that contains many ideas and supporting references, followed by a summarising conclusion — and while the information wasn’t over my head, this felt too academically-formatted to satisfy my general-interest curiosity, and too basic to satisfy an academic audience. There were fewer classical animal stories than I expected, and despite the circling and summarising and drawing together of disparate threads, I never really understood the overall thesis here. I was often bored. I appreciate the effort and expertise that went into this, but it just wasn’t for me. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

Humans, in their interactions with non-human creatures, continue to grapple with the ambiguity at the heart of the human condition: we are indeed animals, but animals that like to think of ourselves as different. The resulting paradoxes haunt us up to this day. They are fundamental to the human/ animal story as the medium perhaps best suited to explore the shifting ground of our humanity: between the wish to be different from all other creatures inhabiting this planet — and the ultimate realization that we are not.

This (the paradox of humans knowing we’re animals but feeling separate from the animal kingdom) is what I anticipated the thesis to be, but despite going back several times to Aristotle and his argument that logos (reason or intellect) is what elevates humans above brute animals, Kindt doesn’t really make her case based on the animal stories she shares; and it was the animal stories I was here for. Even the Trojan Horse itself is discussed as merely a symbol (or synecdoche) of the long and brutal war — but despite examining the horse culture of the Trojans, the role of Athena in its construction, or how Virgil repurposed Ovid’s brief reference to the Trojan Horse in order to prove the “deceitfulness” of the Greeks, even this titular story didn’t serve the thesis to my satisfaction; it circled and circled without drawing a picture. There were several bits that did intrigue me throughout, as in this aside found within the discussion of the famous tale of Androclus removing a thorn from a lion’s paw:

Greek and Roman literature holds plenty of examples in which animals are used to act as a mouthpiece and channels of communication for the oppressed. The ‘father’ of the fable, Aesop, was himself a slave and some of the tales attributed to him (and other ancient authors) used this genre as a form of social critique. In other words, the oppression of certain animals serves as a means to address the oppression of certain humans. In this way, the story anticipates a more recent acknowledgement: that the oppression of women, people of colour, and animals shares the same roots by being grounded in the same conception of the human.

On the other hand, there were whole chapters that held little interest for me — the fact that we have always thought of honeybees as monarchical (even if in antiquity they imagined a King bee ruling the drones); Socrates referring to himself as a gadfly at trial (and the link to modern day “goads” like Edward Snowden and Julian Assange) — and overall, I can’t say I learned much. Not for me.

Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in My Country

 

In the first two years of the drug war, Simon killed two more men. By kill, he meant he pulled the trigger. He had other roles in other operations. He conducted surveillance. He acted as a lookout. He drove the getaway van. There was very little he was unwilling to do, because success at what he calls “the job” meant one less criminal threatening the future of his children. Simon claims he was never paid, but he stayed on anyway. He believed in the cause.

“I’m really not a bad guy,” said Simon. “I’m not all bad. Some people need killing.”

Filipina journalist Patricia Evangelista was working for the online news agency Rappler as Rodrigo Duterte (known by many nicknames from his days as a small city mayor, including “the Butcher'' and “the Punisher'') was running for and then won the Presidency of the Philippines in 2016. From day one of Duerte’s reign, both police and vigilante groups began lethally enforcing his promised war on drugs throughout the country, executing purported drug users and drug pushers — on the flimsiest of evidence and rumour — and Evangelista found herself joining the “night shift”: those brave journalists who arrived at the sites of these executions, looking for the truth and recording the stories of the dead. Evangelista began working on Some People Need Killing during a nonfiction writers’ residency in upstate New York in 2018 (an effort she describes as objective reportage, “cold and precise”), but she eventually returned home to Manila, continued to collect the truth, and has crafted her narrative into something more than mere reportage: “This is a book about the dead, and the people who are left behind. It is also a personal story, written in my own voice, as a citizen of a nation I cannot recognize as my own. The thousands who died were killed with the permission of my people. I am writing this book because I refuse to offer mine.”

Some People Need Killing is a remarkable work of witnessing: Evangelista brings many of the forgotten dead out of the shadows — often poor young men who had used drugs at some point; often shot point blank by police officers who would then plant a cheap gun on the victim and report that he had shot first — and she tells the stories of the people who loved them and the lack of consequences for their murderers. And this matters — not just because the world should be aware that this was happening (how did I not know that this was happening?), but because despite losing his bid for reelection in 2022 (to Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos; son of the corrupt and brutal dictators), Duerte still rides a populist wave in his home country (I googled Rappler and a tweet from them today reads: “In a rare move, party leaders of the House of Representatives pushed back against former President Rodrigo Duterte’s violent tirades against Congress, its leader Speaker Martin Romualdez, and for threatening to kill one member.” How does this man still walk the streets?) Truth matters and witnessing matters and getting a warning out to the rest of the world matters, and Evangelista has written a harrowing, sensitive, and fact-filled account that ought to matter to everyone. Highest rating and recommendation. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final form.)

Rodrigo Duterte was not the first politician in the world to declare war on a domestic issue. Wars on poverty, pornography, hunger, obesity, cancer, and drugs have been launched and fought by presidents and potentates long before Duterte moved into Malacañang Palace. None of these wars have so far been won. None of that matters, because for the politician, the declaration is a victory all its own. The headlines are printed. The campaigns get their slogans. The solution is left to whoever comes next, or to God. But metaphorical wars were of no interest to Rodrigo Duterte, as he is a man who has no love for metaphor. He declared a war on drugs, and when he said kill, he meant dead.

In the course of detailing Duterte’s rise and reign, Evangelista shares the history of the Philippines — from its “discovery” by Ferdinand Magellan, through its “liberation” by the USA, and the string of strongman rulers seen over the past few decades (googling the Philippines' current president, I learned that two days ago Bongbong cancelled the annual public holiday that commemorated the toppling of his father’s reign) — and she shares enough about herself (I especially enjoyed her story of winning an International Public Speaking Competition in the United Kingdom as a college sophomore; leading to brief fame and strangers calling her a “national treasure”) that we understand she is an engaged citizen who loves her country and who was appalled by the frequent “extrajudicial killings” she was witness to in the course of her reportage. Nearly half of this book is made up of footnotes and attributions, and each section is finely detailed (for instance: “The district of Santa Ana, population roughly 195,000, was established by Franciscan priests in the sixteenth century in the name of Saint Anne. The police station, PS-6, hunkers under the stone shadow of the Church of Our Lady of the Abandoned, whose bells rang to signal the Philippines’ liberation from the Japanese occupation.”) and I believed every bit of it. Evangelista also discusses grammar and vocabulary in a few places (for instance, using the verb “to salvage” in the Philippines to denote a summary execution), and while I see some reviewers think this is extraneous information, I appreciated it: the truth matters, and how one writes about it matters, too.

I cannot, with any certainty, report the true toll of Rodrigo Duterte’s war against drugs. Numbers cannot describe the human cost of this war, or adequately measure what happens when individual liberty gives way to state brutality. Even the highest estimate — over 30,000 dead — is likely insufficient to the task.

And mostly: This is the story of President Rodrigo Duterte’s war on drugs; where life became cheap, ordinary citizens were conditioned to believe that “some people need killing” and that, as Evangelista writes, the unending executions by police officers and vigilante groups was “the natural consequence of violent rhetoric from above and wholesale impunity below.” This is a horrifying work of witnessing and I am grateful to Evangelista for risking her life to write it all down.

I want to note here, because it didn't have a home in the review, that as a Canadian — as someone who is aware of Filipinos coming to Canada to work as caregivers and cleaners; as my husband's company actively recruits from the Philippines to work as butchers and packers — I thought that people came because they were poor and were looking for jobs abroad to support families back home. I did not realise the fear, the corruption and brutality, that Filipinos live under. I do remember hearing some time ago that the president of the Philippines was threatening to execute drug dealers, and as we have a drug crisis here, too, I have to admit to maybe agreeing that "some people need killing". But I didn't know that he was talking about the police dragging poor drug users from their homes, hog-tying them with duct tape, and shooting them in the back of the head. I thought he was talking about trials and capital punishment for the worst of the worst drug lords. Evangelista writes that many people who voted for Duterte didn't realise what he was talking about either: up to 30 000 citizens killed, and none of them a drug lord. Drug use continues; the war is lost but the battles rage on. I am humbled and grateful to now better understand the Filipino struggle.

The Bee Sting

 

Good man, Dickie, they said. Maith an fear Good man. The only dampener was the bee sting; she was still wearing the veil. At the same time, was it the worst thing? It suggested a hint of sorrow remaining beneath the surface; it silenced any voices that might otherwise have found the celebrations unseemly, too joyous. In Imelda’s veiled face, anyone who wanted to could divine the pain you had suffered, what it had taken you to get here.

At first, The Bee Sting reads like an ordinary contemporary family drama — beginning from the POV of a teenage girl in her last year of high school, acting out as the aftermath of the Irish recession puts immense financial and social pressure on her bickering parents — but this is a long book (656 pages) and author Paul Murray has plenty of time and space to make this something other than ordinary. After giving each member of the Barnes family a section in which to introduce themselves, Murray rewinds to the childhoods of the parents, narrating the remarkable story of how this unsuitable couple got together, and as the timeline pitches forwards and backwards, we learn the secrets hidden in the heart of each character and grow to understand that no one can ever really know anyone else at all; we can barely know ourselves. The character growth was remarkable, and the plot was compelling, but this is, at its heart, a social issues novel with some trickiness to its construction that will either annoy or impress the reader. I loved many bits of this — I wouldn’t say I loved it overall (even if I could totally see it winning the Booker this year) — but I was definitely impressed. I’ll try to avoid spoilers.

Many of them felt that Imelda was to blame. Dickie made a fortune and Imelda spent two — that was what people said. Imelda, with her cheekbones and her Italian leather boots, got up like the Queen of Sheba just to drive to the supermarket! Giving the poor manager an earful because they didn’t have star anise or tamarind or whatever was supposedly all the rage in New York! It’s a long way from tamarind she was reared, they told each other darkly. It’s a long way from underfloor heating and orthodontists or any of that palaver. Well, look at her now.

Despite Ireland easing itself out of The Crisis (Dickie’s father insists that the recession is over and there’s no reason for the car dealership he founded and left in his son’s hands to manage should still be losing money), Barnes Motors is under threat of closing and Dickie’s family is feeling the pinch: wife Imelda is forced to sell off her designer clothes and furnishings on ebay; daughter Cass doesn’t see the point of studying for her Leaving Exams if there’s no money to send her to Trinity College in Dublin in the fall; and twelve-year-old son PJ is unaccountably worried that he’ll be sent to boarding school if things don’t turn around. In reaction, Dickie spends more and more time in the woods, working on a bunker for his family’s future security. In the beginning, watching this plotline unspool seems to be the point — and as everyone seems privileged and self-centred (except for PJ), I wasn’t sure that I even wanted to commit to this brick of a novel. But things aren’t really what they seem: everyone has pain and repressed desires; people misrepresent themselves (especially on social media); hammers are swinging every which way; black dogs forewarn danger; even a bee sting isn’t what it seems. This really isn’t about the Barnes family at all.

Several times throughout this novel, Murray references an Irish fairytale about a man who joins a fairy feast inside a hillside and discovers the next morning that he’s been missing for a hundred years. Time slippages — as well as fate and fortune telling and repressed memories — feature throughout, as when Dickie takes Cass on a tour of Trinity College and remembers his own days studying there:

Even on a normal day, he remembers, passing beneath that arch had always felt like going through a portal — like you were leaving one city and entering another that lay in its midst, a place of pure past. Yet looking at it now he feels as if no time has elapsed at all — as if his own life were still there, continuing somehow untouched by the years, in some eternally resonating present.

This is Imelda considering the vagaries of time (and I see reviewers calling this a Molly Bloom-like stream-of-consciousness, but sections from her POV are really just missing the end-stop periods; her sections do have question marks and exclamation points where appropriate, so I thought of this as something else; a mind basic and untrained?):

Time doesn’t do what you think it will does it You get your turn But they don’t tell you that’s all it is a turn a moment Everything explodes you’re nothing but feelings Your life begins at last You think it will all be like that Then the moment passes The moment passes but you stay in the shape you were then In the life that’s come out of the things that you did The remainder of that girl you used to be is gone They don’t tell you How could they How could anyone make sense of that

And the following is from a guest speaker at Trinity, and in my opinion, is the heart of the whole thing:

Global apocalypse is not interested in your identity politics or who you pray to or what side of the border you live on. Cis, trans, black, white, scientist, artist, basketball player, priest — every stripe of person, every colour and creed, we are all going to be hit by this hammer. And that is another fact that unites us. We are all alive together in this sliver of time in which the human race decides whether or not it will come to an end.

It seemed to me that Murray introduced us to the Barneses, and made us understand and care about these people, just to stress that their lives don’t matter in the depths of time; that they are just more human parasites on the planet Earth’s resources. And then, seemingly out of nowhere — just as the climactic scenes are being set up in the final one hundred pages — a paragraph that sounds like it’s a message directly from the author himself appears:

Today, in the developed world, the great threat to political order is that people will pay attention to their surroundings. Thus, even slaves have access to entertainment. You could even say we are paid in entertainment. The novel was the first instance of what in the twenty-first century has become a vast and proliferating entertainment industry, an almost infinite machine designed to distract us and disempower us. We are presented with a virtual world powered, literally, by the incineration of the real.

From this point on, there is much dramatic irony as each character marches inexorably toward danger of their own making — each of them running in a dark wood towards a squirrel trap — and the plot becomes a little breathless and over-the-top, and I started turning the pages faster, wondering if Murray had set up humane traps or if he would swing the hammer down. And I see that some readers think he nailed the ending, and others think he flubbed the ending, but I think he constructed everything very purposefully towards that ending. If a novel is nothing but an example of “an almost infinite machine designed to distract us and disempower us”, what does that say about the kind of reader who has the leisure time to read a brick of a novel for ten or twelve hours? As we march inexorably towards the consequences of our Earth-imperilling lifestyles, couldn’t we be marching in rallies — marching for change — instead? I got the sense in the end that this book is so long — and culminates in scenes that are breathtakingly engaging — to leave me with the feeling that I had been fiddling while Rome burned around me. And I appreciated the trick that Murray pulled off to make me feel that; I’m left impressed.

Booker Prize Longlist 2023

A Spell of Good Things by Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀’

Old God's Time by Sebastian Barry

Study for Obedience by Sarah Bernstein * My favourite of the list

The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng

If I Survive You by Jonathan Escofferey

How to Build a Boat by Elaine Feeney

This Other Eden by Paul Harding

Pearl by Siân Hughes

All the Little Bird-Hearts by Viktoria Lloyd-Barlow

Prophet Song by Paul Lynch

Western Lane by Chetna Maroo

In Ascension by Martin MacInnes

The Bee Sting by Paul Murray

Every Living Thing: The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life

 

Could a single person possibly write an account of the entire Kingdom of Creation? To the man in Uppsala already attempting to do so, this did not read as hyperbole. Up until now Linnaeus had garnered critics, not competitors. Buffon had ample resources to command — his own fortune, his large staff of assistants and subordinates, and the prestige and backing of King Louis XIV. French naval officers now had standing orders to collect specimens for the Jardin during their voyages; all French physicians working abroad were strongly encouraged to submit specimens as well. Linnaeus had a significant head start, but Buffon could simply outwork him, fitting all the pieces together in a more consistent and logical manner.

Every Living Thing has everything I like going for it: It’s a well-written and fascinating history of those rarely-examined events that led to the society in which we find ourselves today. As it happened, both Carl Linnaeus in Sweden and Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon in France determined to name and categorise every living thing on Earth (after all, how many could there be if they could fit, in pairs, on the Biblical Ark?) in the mid-18th century, and each of them would go on to spend their entire lives in the effort. Author Jason Roberts weaves a compelling biography for each of these proto-biologists — they couldn’t have come from more different backgrounds, and Roberts has a clear favourite between them — and as their legacies unspool into the modern day, it’s discouraging (if not surprising) to learn why the lesser, more cumbersome/inaccurate system for categorisation became our standard. This is exactly to my tastes and I could not have asked for more. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

In this new age of expansion, classification became another form of conquest. What better way to “civilize” a region than to inventory its flora and fauna, scouring them of native names and naming them anew? British naval ships, less burdened in peacetime, now had ample room for naturalists to accompany them on voyages. British citizens abroad, a rapidly growing colonial class, shipped thousands of specimens homeward. Seeing the value of aligning political interests with developments in natural history, the British government threw its support behind the Linnean Society.

I don’t think it’s necessary to recount here the biographies of Linnaeus and Buffon — other than to note that neither were good students, but while the former was poor and striving, the latter inherited lands and titles that afforded him the freedom to become a gentleman thinker; and when each of them found themselves in charge of public gardens, they separately had the inspiration to improve on the disorganised methods of naming plants and animals in their day — but it should be noted how restricted each of them were by the Church at the time. And while Linnaeus toed the line on Church thinking (regarding species as fixed since the day of Creation, not subject to evolution or extinction), Buffon — through observation and meditation — wrote of deep time, the natural process by which the solar system was created, the extinction evident in fossils (which Linnaeus dismissed as natural and coincidental rock formations), the obviousness of incremental evolution of species (including a common ancestor for primates; when Charles Darwin learned of Buffon’s writing over a century later, he remarked, “whole pages are laughably like mine”), the lamentable fact of human-driven environmental change, and despite very rudimentary microscopes at the time, he had ideas about cell theory, the ubiquity of single-celled organisms, and early musings on gene-like mechanisms. (But when he would write of such ideas, Buffon would then dismiss them in his next paragraph as contrary to revealed scripture and therefore absurd musings, quipping privately, “It is better to be humble than be hung.”)

It was Linnaeus who came up with the binomial naming standard for species which is still employed today, as well as the hierarchical kingdom-phylum-class-order-family-genus-species taxonomic system that we’re taught in school (even though, in his day, this nested-box system was dismissed by Buffon and others as cumbersome, unscientific, and not actually reflective of the relationships between species). Linnaeus was also the first to divide humanity in races (which Buffon also disputed as unscientific), ranking them in a hierarchy with Causasians (naturally for him) at the top. The history behind why Linnaeus’ system prevailed is a fascinating one (with colonialism and empire-building on the one hand and the French Revolution erasing the legacy of the ennobled on the other), but it’s even more fascinating to consider that we’re still clinging to this ever-more inefficient system to this day; a system so strict and moribund that while species are routinely moved around as genetic information proves relationship ties that weren’t obvious by mere observation in earlier times, there’s no process for changing the names of species — not even those misspelt when first officially recorded; not even those named after Hitler by Nazi scientists. The direct line proven between how we came to adopt this one system and the negative, and mostly unexamined, effects that this system has had on our society (even Lincoln was a Linnaean with racist beliefs that he thought were based on science) makes for the best kind of investigative nonfiction.

An NSF project called Dimensions of Biodiversity is using gene sequencing to identify species down to the microbial scale, and while it will take years for full results to emerge, project members already estimate the total number on Earth is more than twenty orders of magnitude greater than previously understood. “Until now, we haven’t known whether aspects of biodiversity scale with something as simple as the abundance of organisms,” reports Dr. Kenneth J. Locey, a postdoctorate fellow at Indiana University and a Dimensions of Biodiversity researcher. “As it turns out, the relationships are not only simple but powerful, resulting in the estimate of upwards of one trillion species.” One trillion species. That would mean we’ve discovered and recorded only one-thousandth of one percent of all possible entries in a catalogue of life.

In the end, not Linnaeus nor Buffon (nor any one person since Adam) could possibly have named every living thing on Earth; not the multitude of specimens sent to them by wide-ranging apostles, nor more particularly, the innumerous species not obvious to the naked eye (and by this I mean not only the microscopic or hidden deep ocean species, but also the fact that it took until genomic analysis in 2021 for us to realise that the “common giraffe” — named Giraffa camelopardelis in 1758 by Linnaeus himself — is actually four distinct species, “not only incapable of breeding with each other, but genetically distinct for at least a million years.” How could we have known that by physical examination — the Linnaean standard — alone?) On the other hand, this was the early days of the Enlightenment and both Linnaeus and Buffon laid the groundwork for what would become the modern field of biology; it seems a pity that of the two, it’s Linnaeus whose legacy is better known, but I am delighted that Roberts has written a book that aims to reclaim Buffon from the dustheap of history. I loved everything about this — from the narrative style to the small details and the overarching whole — and hope that it gets the audience and attention that it deserves.