Leaving the Witness: Exiting a Religion and Finding a Life

If not for all that had happened here, I would not have left my religion. I would certainly still be a Jehovah's Witness had I not come to this country and learned its ways. Perhaps I would have been happier. But no matter what it took to get here, to this breezy corner, or how alone I was among these 1.3 billion people, I felt ecstatic to be free, to have this life. I didn't know who to thank anymore, so I thanked the sky, the trees, the smiles, the sounds – the things I knew to be true.

There was a group of Jehovah's Witnesses that came around to call on me when I was a young mother – smiling sweetly at my girls as they tried to convince me to let them into my home for deeper talks, month after month – and because I believed that they were honestly interested in the state of my soul and salvation, because I believed that they honestly feared for the everlasting future of my children, I couldn't bring myself to be rude to them beyond saying no thank you to more information, I had my own beliefs, thanks; they persisted until they didn't, but I was never mad at them for trying. Amber Scoran kind of sours that memory for me with Leaving the Witness – describing the JWs as a cult whose members would have thought of me as a "worldly" mouthpiece for Satan; people who were mostly interested in logging their obligatory monthly proselytising hours, knowing we apostates were actually beyond saving. 

Scoran herself seems to have given up on converting hopeless Westerners, and because she had been taught that Armageddon couldn't come until Jehovah's word had spread all around the world, she decided to learn Mandarin and take the message to untapped China – a move that involved a three year stay for her and her husband in Taiwan for language lessons, and then a covert move to establish themselves in Shanghai, where the Chinese government had outlawed the organisation. Because the JWs in China had to operate in secret (with fewer meetings and virtually no community oversight), Scoran found herself no longer under the direct mind control of the Governing Body, and after making an online connection with a man who forced her to confront the fact that she was, indeed, in a cult, she was compelled to take the frightening move of leaving her church, her husband, friends and family – being disfellowshipped for apostacy meant that everyone she ever knew (all of whom were JWs) were no longer allowed to acknowledge her existence. Not only was she now utterly alone, in Shanghai, but Scoran had the niggling fear that she had actually made a mistake and shut herself out of paradise. I can't imagine the bravery that it took Scoran to leave everyone and everything behind.

As a narrative, Leaving the Witness gives some biographical information about Scoran's upbringing in Vancouver, a bit of the history of the Jehovah's Witness organisation and a look at life inside its culture, quite a bit about how hard it is for Westerners to learn Mandarin and adapt to Chinese life, and because Scoran found a job on an early podcast (and eventually launched her own popular podcast on adapting to life in China called “Dear Amber”), there's some interesting info about that industry. Eventually Scoran does leave everything behind, and the end of the book jumps ahead months and years at a time to share how her life has worked out – if I had a complaint it would be that she glazed over so much at the end that had obvious dramatic impact (and I don't know if I was interested in everything she had to say about China), but it's Scoran's story to tell and she told it well. Introspective, candid, written with refined prose, it's hard to believe that Scoran left her church with no higher education (what's the point in pursuing a profession or saving for retirement if the world could end any day?), and the obvious improvement in her intellectual engagement with life is enough to argue that she's better off out of the JWs. With the insight Scoran gives here into how life operates as a Jehovah's Witness – the control, the sexism, the clamping down on curiosity and participation in society – makes me think that when those seemingly sweet women used to come to my door, I should have shouted at them, “You're in a cult and you're not taking us with you!” (But, of course, that would only prove that I was speaking for Satan.) Overall, a fascinating and well-told life story. I'm just going to preserve here some of Scoran's most startling passages:

• I knew that my explanations of the world made more sense than anything else I had come across, if only I could find someone who had the right heart and would listen. I was as confident in my mission as a suicide bomber is of his: God would help me, and one day I would be in paradise for having done it.

On the fact that there's an organisation through which JW's can buy a fake university degree for $3000 in order to work in foreign countries:

• In fact, it was encouraged by some of those in higher-up positions, who reminded us of a Bible principle I have since seen the Governing Body use to lie in child abuse court cases: theocratic warfare. Meaning, if being dishonest will do something to advance Jehovah's will, then it's okay to make an exception and keep one's clean conscience.

• One night, when I had a particularly long-lasting case of insomnia accompanied by my usual terrors of the Armageddon I heard so much about during my visits to the Kingdom Hall, I went out to my dad in front of the TV and asked him if he might be able to spank me, since crying myself to sleep had generally worked well in the past. This was the only kind of help I knew to seek from my parents.

• Witnesses were the only ones who would be allowed out of Hitler's concentration camps if they would renounce their faith. And they didn't. In China, a Jehovah's Witness missionary had been imprisoned in solitary confinement for years in the 1950s, for preaching after Mao came to power. Kids with cancer chose death rather than take a blood transfusion. My culture was one of biblical proportions: men sacrificing their own child at God's request, fathers that allowed angry crowds to rape their daughters to protect God's angels.

On the affair that sealed her break from her husband and church:

• My apocalypse hadn't looked like I thought it would: no oceans turning to blood with every piece of clothing taken off and pushed onto the ground, no skies turning darker with each penetration of my body, no giant hailstones raining down through the roof, no vultures picking clean the bones of our violating carcasses. It had been a fevered drive on a dark highway, fast, muddled bodies, a shower smelling of unfamiliar soap, an earring left behind on a black sheet. The closest thing to the Four Horsemen was a Trojan condom wrapper on the floor.

Recommended for fans of Tara Westover's Educated, Jenna Miscavige Hill's Beyond Belief, or Miriam Toewe's Women Talking, Leaving the Witness was a fascinating and enlightening read.

Humans: A Brief History of How We F*cked It All Up

The story of human progress starts with our capacity for thinking and creativity. That's what sets humans apart from other animals – and it's also what leads us to make complete tits of ourselves on a regular basis.

Author Tom Phillips studied Archaeology, Anthropology and the History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge University and has worked as a journalist, a humour writer, and as the editorial director of BuzzFeed UK. All of these skills and influences are apparent in Humans: A Brief History of How We F*cked It All Up, and if you're the kind of reader who thinks you might enjoy a chronology of humanity's biggest mistakes, told with ironic humour and f-bombs, then this pop-history just might be a perfect fit for you. As for me, the humour here didn't actually make me laugh out loud, I was familiar with many of the stories, and I'd prefer more of a connecting thesis than, “Humans are stupid and selfish and always have been; probably always will be”. Still, Humans is very readable – an ultralight version of Jared Diamond or Yuval Noah Harari – and it's always the right time to stand humble before humanity's many flaws. To begin, an example of the humour:

Australia's rabbit problem is one of the most famous examples of something that we've only figured out quite late in the day: ecosystems are ridiculously complex things and you mess with them at your peril. Animals and plants will not simply play by your rules when you casually decide to move them from one place to another. “Life,” as a great philosopher once said, “breaks free; it expands to new territories and crashes through barriers – painfully, maybe even dangerously. But, uh, well, there it is.” (Okay, it was Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park who said that. As I say, a great philosopher.)

(And incidentally, this scourge of rabbits [and cane toads] unleashed on Australia is also an example of the kind of story most people have heard before; if the tone in a nonfiction work isn't academic, isn't attempting to support some new theory with long-accepted facts, I think all of the information should at least be new and surprising.) Humans is divided into chapters on our brains (going over confirmation bias, the Dunning-Kruger effect, and other ways that we convince ourselves we're right when we're wrong), the mistakes of the Agricultural Revolution and the domestication/resettling of animals, the rise of leaders (and all the horrible ways they have taken advantage of their positions, no matter the political system), the evils of colonisation and war, mistakes of diplomacy, and the unintended consequences of technological breakthroughs. Along the way, there were many stories that were new to me – Scotland's attempt to build an empire in Panama, Kessler syndrome (that could see us “trapped on our planet by a prison we've made from our own trash”), or the avoidable decimation of the Khwarezmian Empire – and I liked these bits very much; the brand of humour didn't speak to me but Phillips is an excellent storyteller.

If there was a theme running through this book, it would be throwing shade at Donald Trump without ever once mentioning him. One chapter is titled “A Dummies' and/or Current Presidents' Guide to Diplomacy”, a parenthetical note in the prologue states, “at the time of writing this, there's a broad awareness that the only thing that stands between us and annihilation is the whim of one petulant man-child or another”, and after a passage that outlines how “Hitler was actually an incompetent, lazy egomaniac and his government was an absolute clownshow”, Phillips concludes: 

Many of the worst man-made events that ever occurred were not the product of evil geniuses. Instead, they were the product of a parade of idiots and lunatics, incoherently flailing their way through events, helped along the way by overconfident people who thought they could control them.

And if that level of subtext is too understated, Phillips concludes the bit about Scotland's doomed empire-building with:

As a tale it lends itself to metaphor. I mean, it's the story of a country turning away from a political union with its closest geographical trading partners in favor of a fantasy vision of unfettered global influence promoted by free-trade zealots with dreams of empire, who wrapped their vague plans in the rhetoric of aggrieved patriotism while consistently ignoring expert warnings about the practical reality of the situation. Unfortunately, I can't think of anything that could be a metaphor for right now.

So, that running theme is either interesting to the reader or not – I found it a little juvenile; a distraction from any legitimate connections Phillips might have been trying to draw between the failures of the past and the dangers of the present. 

Whatever our future holds, whatever baffling changes come along in the next year, the next decade and the next century, it seems likely that we'll keep on doing basically the same things. We will blame other people for our woes, and construct elaborate fantasy worlds so that we don't have to think about our sins. We will turn to populist leaders in the aftermath of economic crises. We will scramble for money. We will succumb to groupthink and manias and confirmation bias. We will tell ourselves that our plans are very good plans and that nothing can possibly go wrong. Or...maybe we won't?

As a collection of anecdotes about human failure, Humans is trivia-rich and easy to read (even when describing horrible abuses or modern threats, the tone is light but respectful). I understand the truism that history is repeated by those who fail to study and understand it, but also know that we humans are wired the same way today as we were the first time someone murdered, lied, or stole to advance a selfish cause – who knows what the future holds for us? Unlike Diamond or Harari, Phillips doesn't even hazard a guess.

Three Women

It's the nuances of desire that hold the truth of who we are at our rawest moments. I set out to register the heat and sting of female want so that men and other women might more easily comprehend before they condemn. Because it's the quotidian moments of our lives that will go on forever, that will tell us who we were, who our neighbors and our mothers were, when we were too diligent in thinking they were nothing like us. This is the story of three women.

Three Women is an odd little book: Author Lisa Taddeo writes that she spent eight years and crossed the US six times (often temporarily living in her research subjects' hometowns for a while in order to embed herself in their daily lives) so as to write a book on human desire. While at first she was drawn to the power of men's stories, she eventually began to find them all the same (“the man's throttle died in the closing salvo of the orgasm”), and she switched her focus to women; and in particular, stories in which “desire was something that could not be controlled, when the object of desire dictated the narrative, that was where I found the most magnificence, the most pain.” And so, from initially casting a wide net for stories of “human desire”, Taddeo eventually settled narrowly on the experiences of three women – who, while their individual stories were quite dramatic and well told, were in the end, three very similar stories. All three women desired married men, experienced scorn for that fact from fellow women, and each of them could trace their current behaviours to childhood traumas. I suppose from the blurb I was expecting a sex-positive look at the variety of female desire, but this reads as a commentary on game-playing men, shame-throwing women, and the helpless women stuck in the middle, beholden to their desires, even to their own detriment. Odd little book. (Note: I read an ARC and passages quoted might not be in their final forms.)

The problem, she's starting to understand, is that a man will never let you fall completely into hell. He will scoop you up right before you drop the final inch so that you cannot blame him for sending you there. He keeps you in a diner-like purgatory instead, waiting and hoping and taking orders.

The three women: Maggie had an intimate relationship with one of her high school teachers, and at twenty-three, finally realised that what she thought in the moment was love, was actually a sick manipulation that had lingering psychological effects on her. Her narrative switches back and forth between the details of that relationship and the court trial in the present that she has initiated. This storyline was highly dramatic and I couldn't help but feel sorry for Maggie, watching as the teacher groomed and used her. Lina was a lonely housewife with a frigid husband who decided to add some spice into her life – contacting her high school boyfriend through Facebook and arranging to meet him for hookups. Despite him being married with young kids, Aidan meets with Lina – always on his terms and not looking like any kind of prize to the reader – and although other women tell Lina she's crazy to be involved like this, she feels fully alive for the first time in years. This story also struck me as sad – after Lina separates from her husband, I just wanted her to find someone who could be fully present for her (but then needed to self-interrogate whether what I was actually feeling was fingerwagging scorn; I don't think so.) Sloane is rich and beautiful, co-owner of a Nantucket restaurant with her talented and rugged husband – a man who likes to watch as his wife has sex with other people. Sloane also desires this lifestyle (she realises after reading Fifty Shades of Grey that she must be a submissive and following her husband's sexual orders is what most fulfills her and brings the couple closer together), and I wouldn't have been shocked by her story too much if she hadn't also involved a married father of young children. (And then when you get the complete picture of Sloane's childhood, you have to wonder how much she's a free spirit submissive or to what degree she's a damaged soul with low self-esteem; but again, who am I to know or judge?) 

So, three stories of highly manipulative men and the women who believe that they consent to their situations (except for Maggie, of course, who realises after the fact that as a minor, she didn't have the maturity or power to give consent). And throughout every narrative, there is much commentary on the persisting patriarchy:

There are men and there are women and one still rules the other in the pockets of the country that are not televised. Even when women fight back, they must do it correctly. They must cry the right amount and look pretty but not hot.

And:

One inheritance of living under the male gaze for centuries is that heterosexual women often look at other women the way a man would.

And throughout, there is much commentary on the role that women play in keeping each other down; talk about the betrayal of “the sisterhood”; a heartbroken wife confronts Sloane saying, “You're the woman and you let this happen. Don't you know you're supposed to have the power?”; the author's own mother gave her this lesson at the end of her life:

Don't let them see you happy, she whispered.

Who?

Everyone, she said, wearily, as though I had already missed the point. She added, Other women, mostly.

I thought it was the other way around, I said. “Don't let the bastards get you down.”

That's wrong. They can see you down. They shouldsee you down. If they see you are happy, they will try to destroy you.

Overall, I enjoyed Taddeo's writing style – the flips between the three stories and the way she narrated them – but every now and then, curious phrasing and word choices would bring me out of the narrative in a way that I didn't appreciate in a work of nonfiction: Life knows when to throw in a plot twist. It is an idle but seasoned screenwriter, drinking beers alone and cultivating its archery; The stone streets were naked at that hour, in the toothache of dawn; a grave is described as the cold, bucketing dark. Nitpicking about the writing aside, I suppose I wanted a wider range of stories, but evaluating what I did find here, this is like more than love.

Surrender: The Call of the American West

 

I heard there was going to be an Ecosex Convergence in the woods of Washington state in June – our first summer in London since our return. It was to “bring together wild souls who express a love for Life by stewarding and merging with the Earth through the whole of their bodies, minds, and spirits”. The gathering was to be called “Surrender” and was described as “a cauldron for deep connection, healing, and collective creation where life is sacred, our bodies are sovereign, and the Earth is our beloved partner with whom we collaborate to create abundance”.

Frequently while reading Surrender: The Call of the American West, I would stop and wonder what author Joanna Pocock's overall thesis was meant to be – the chapters detail some of her experiences while living in Missoula, Montana over a course of two years, but to me, I felt the absence of a real connective thread. It wasn't until the afterword – where Pocock notes which of these collected essays were previously published elsewhere – that I even realised these were supposed to be thought of as essays. I begin with that fact because that late knowledge helped to elevate the whole for me (and I hope the knowledge is just as helpful for future readers). Partly memoir, partly investigate journalism, partly a philosophical deep-dive into how one can live an authentic life in false times, I was ultimately won over by Pocock's curiosity, self-reflection, and candor. Four stars is a rounding up from three-and-a-halfish. (Note: I read an ARC and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

The West is one of the last places on earth where thoughts around wilderness as inoculation against the darker forces of modernity are still in the ether, in the discourse, in people's decisions to live off the grid, on the land, in the hoop. For the first time in my life, I was beginning to understand the West and its promise, real and imagined, of freedom, escape, transcendence, and its promise to turn us from predator to prey.

Long an adventurer, London-based writer Joanna Pocock was avid to relocate to the American West with her husband (a filmmaker who was set to research a project there) and their six-year-old daughter; choosing Missoula more or less at random based on vague notions of its writing scene; a place where Pocock might finish the novel she was working on. The city itself turned out to be disappointing – negatively reminding Pocock of her suburban Ottawa childhood – but she was able to use her new home as a base for investigating “the West” itself. Despite stating that she went out of curiosity alone, the essays in which Pocock describes attending a leghold trap certification course and a tour of a proposed copper mine site read like gotcha journalism. And despite the events happening during her stay in Missoula, the parts about family matters back in Ottawa felt out of place in the overall narrative. But the sections in which Pocock meets with back-to-earthers – rewilders, nomads, planters and scavengers – are warm and respectful; the obvious connection that Pocock felt with these people shine through these essays and make them the most interesting and informative to read. (In particular, I was fascinated to learn about Finisia Medrano: a rewilder who lived “on the hoop”; making a nomadic annual circle throughout the American West, foraging for food and replanting the native species that had been lost to human expansion; a “crime” for which Finisia has done jail time.) Ultimately, these travelogue-like essays expose the internal journey that Pocock was traversing:

Sometimes all we can do is surrender, to our circumstances, our desires and fears, our need for escape, our failures, our pain, our inner wildness, our domestication and in turn surrender to whatever essence is at the centre of our very beings. I yearn for the land of the West. I want to obey Finisia's words, to “kneel down and dig”. My conversations there are not finished. There is so much more to say. And I have much more listening to do.

It was very interesting to me that Pocock outlines the ways in which the doomsday-prepper/minuteman movements are akin to the back-to-earthers (with their mutual disdain of laws and government, distrust of modern medicine, preferring to hunt their own meat, homeschooling; self-reliance above all), and while a common theme among all of them is an animosity towards people at large (the Three Percenters might have the AK-47s but Finisia implies that she could murder in defence of the Earth), it was also very interesting that the “Ecosexual” movement (from the first quote) is all about love: love for the Earth, as the ultimate expression of one's sexuality. Pocock acknowledges that as attracted as she is to these rewilding movements, she's also attached to civilisation (even acknowledging the disconnect between deeply caring for the planet and its most vulnerable inhabitants while using a computer whose various metallic components were likely mined by child labourers in developing countries). Examining this kind of internal hypocrisy seems to be Pocock's real thesis, and with the many included quotes from both a lifetime of reading and the interviews that she has conducted over the years, it seems like this has been the central question of her entire life. With all of its information about the ecodisasters looming in the future of humanity, Surrender sure makes it seem that the majority of us are fiddling as Rome burns; Pocock makes the case that we can acknowledge the flames while the tune plays on.

Star-Crossed

It's not as if the horoscopes are...real. They're all just rubbish. What's one random phrase compared to another? What harm could it do?

Star-Crossed was intended as a mindless summertime bookclub pick – looking like an easy-reading rom-com outside our usual fare – but as low as that made my expectations, I don't know if author Minnie Darke even met my lowest bar for a decently written book. Not a total waste of time, but reading the disappointed reviews from regular aficionados of the romance genre, I don't know to whom I could recommend this. (Note: I read an ARC and passages quoted may not be in their final forms. Slightly spoilery review.)

Half an hour later, Leo's latest fax was skewered to the document stake in Justine's office, and the month's horoscopes had been submitted for layout. And if, in the process of transcription, the entry for Aquarius had been slightly transformed, well, Justine considered, the risk was minimal. Twice now she'd got away with her little sleight of hand. And, if Nick Jordan's relationship with his beautiful, lookalike girlfriend was entirely watertight and secure, then the horoscope could have no meaning for him. What harm, then, could a few minor alterations possibly do?

The plot: Justine is a twenty-six-year-old wannabe journalist – working as a copy-runner (glorified gopher) at a popular monthly magazine and waiting for her break – and outside of work, she's in a lonely funk: living away from her family, her best friend has moved away, no love prospects, etc. One day Justine runs into Nick – an aspiring actor, recently broken up with the gorgeous model girlfriend who wanted him to get a real job – and as the two had been childhood friends (and briefly sweethearts) before Nick's family moved away, an easy rapport is rekindled between them. When it is revealed that Nick looks to the astrology column in Justine's magazine before making big decisions (“After all, Leo Thornbury knows everything”), the nonbelieving Justine sees an opportunity to steer Nick's heart in her own direction: If she makes just a few coded changes to his Aquarius entry, surely he'll see that she's the girl for him? Alas, as is the way with such plots, the more Justine meddles with Nick's horoscope, the more he believes that the infallible astrologer Leo Thornbury is telling him to give up acting and return to his ex-girlfriend. In addition to this main thread, Darke adds a large cast of secondary characters: Fellow Aquarians who make life-changing decisions based on Justine's fake horoscopes (and as if to acknowledge that the stars are never wrong, the seemingly unrelated actions of these characters will eventually steer Nick onto the path that Leo had originally laid out for him). 

I guess my biggest problem with the plot is credibility: If there's one thing we know about Justine, it's that, after two years as a dogsbody at the magazine, she wants to be promoted to staff writer. Would she really alter a famous astrologer's column (which took a lot of sneaky skulduggery, even if Justine constantly told herself, “What's the harm?”) and risk her professional future? My biggest problem with Justine herself is that she's an annoying grammar Nazi – carrying a Sharpie to the farmer's market to fix the spelling on produce signs, amending sentence structure on restaurant menus – and to the degree that I think we're supposed to actually find this an admirable trait, I have to conclude that this is Darke's own pet peevery showing through; and grammar pedantry is no more attractive in a novel's plot than it is on a comment thread. (Related: When Justine's father calls her to explain how he had worked through the hardest clue in her magazine's cryptic crossword for the month, I got the feeling that the exchange was only included to give a history of the phrase “hoist by one's own petard”, and then make the overt connection that by meddling with the horoscopes, Justine had thusly hoisted herself; there's nothing subtle or clever about it and I think it was just Darke wanting to work the phrase in without trusting her readers to understand.) And my biggest problem overall is the handling of the astrology elements – it's hard to tell if Darke is a believer (Justine does not believe in horoscopes but her actions are always connected to her Saggitarian nature, except when influenced by her Virgo rising), and the plot elements shift between everything being random and all being fixed in the stars. Even Nick – who doesn't make a move without reading his horoscope first – has a weird initial reaction when he discovers what Justine has been up to:

Yes, she had made an idiot of him, but even worse than that, she had taken something from him. She’d spoiled it: his one little sprinkling of magic in an otherwise pragmatic world – a harmless handful of stardust and mystery, once a month, on the page of a magazine.

I can't remember the last time I read my own horoscope for fun (so I'm not complaining that Darke doesn't take it all seriously enough), but I would have liked her to take a stance one way or the other (she populates the story with so many true believers but Justine's arguments against astrology are more credible than Nick's in favour). What I did like was Star-Crossed's setting in a southern Australian city, and I enjoyed travelling throughout a whole year with Justine as she describes her surroundings:

When Halloween arrives each year, with the bones of the pagan festival of Samhain still visible through its ragged cloak, it prepares the people of the northern hemisphere to hunker down for the life-or-death test that is winter, and reminds them to make their peace with the dead. But in the southern hemisphere, where Halloween comes just before the start of the cricket season, at a time of year when sunscreen sales are on the up, the night of the dead is really just an opportunity to break out an outrageous costume and concoct brightly colored alcoholic beverages.

So, I wasn't completely annoyed by this read even if it sounds like it – after all, my expectations were not high – and I'm looking forward to learning what my fellow book-clubbers made of it.

The Old Drift

I set out for the drift five miles above the Falls, the port of entry into North-western Rhodesia. The Zambesi is at its deepest and narrowest here for hundreds of miles, so it's the handiest spot for “drifting” a body across. At first it was called Sekute's Drift after a chief of the Leya. Then it was Clarke's Drift, after the first white settler, whom I soon met. No one knows when it became The Old Drift.

A sweeping, epic multi-generational story; based on memoir, archives, and flights of fancy; combining historical fiction with magical realism and near-future sci-fi: indeed, The Old Drift is “the great Zambian novel you didn’t know you were waiting for” (as author Namwali Serpell has quipped). I went into this book knowing nothing of Zambia's history, and the story's scope – from the arrival of a real-life British explorer and scalawag to the new settlement of The Old Drift in 1904 (that's him in the opening quote) to the modern Zambia of today and beyond – Serpell does a wonderful job of bringing that history to life through the intertwining stories of the colonisers, the colonised, the later emigrants, plus their children and children's children...epic. Serpell's writing is artful – switching tone and styles throughout the generations and distinct cultures – and as much as I enjoyed each bit of this book, if I had a complaint, it would be that it just took too long to read: I understand that this took twenty years for Serpell to research and write, and I appreciate that she probably needed to cut much of what she wrote over those years, but this could have been much tighter; fewer main characters might have kept me more emotionally engaged (I didn't relish, for instance, the long sections set in Italy and England). Ultimately, though, I'm just complaining about getting too much of a good thing – this book deserves all the honours and attention it's likely to receive.

Every family is a war but some are more civil than others.

The Old Drift is divided into three sections – The Grandmothers, The Mothers, and The Children – and in the foreground, it reads as a domestic drama of how each of these couples meet, fall in love, and pass their genes and ideas on to the next generation. In the background, the British colony of Northern Rhodesia gains independence, renames itself Zambia, struggles with democracy and capitalism, and inspires revolutionaries (and space explorers). Serpell writes about people from all classes and all skin tones, and just the incidental information you get about the types of work that people do adds much to the vivid portrait she paints of Zambia throughout the twentieth century. As we near our own time, there's a bit of alt-history with new tech, and the near-future that Serpell describes – in which China is the modern coloniser, taking over through stealth with its gadgets and goods – seems a frightening and not unimaginable scenario. Holding the entire narrative together is a chance encounter in 1904 that is karmically redressed in later generations, and intermittently, we hear from a chorus of droning mosquitoes that add poetry and humour to the tale:

WeeeeeweeeEEEEweeeeeeEEEeeeeeeEEEEEeeeeWEEEEEEeeeeeeEEEeeee. We. On we drone, annoying on, ennuing on with our wheedling onomatopoeia. Udzudzu. Munyini. Vexatious pests! But better than your barking with wet, pungent holes! We? We sing with our dry, beating wings. A plangent vibration adrift in the air, a song as gracile as the swarm itself, our buoyant undulant throng. Why do we sing? For love, naturally.

Mosquitoes drift in and out of the stories – bringing malaria to the early settlers, sparking a marital war over mosquito netting, inspiring a young engineer – and they're just one of many recurring motifs. Wordplay is frequent (Their marriage had ceased to be conjugal; his body did not conjugate with hers; there was no grammar between them.), yet inasmuch as each instance was inherently delightful, in a long book, they started to wear on me. The whole does build to an interesting and satisfying climax, and I was intrigued by the final message from the mosquito swarm:

Time, that ancient and endless meander, stretches out and into the distance, but along the way, a cumulative stray swerves it into a lazy, loose curve. Imagine the equation, or picture the graph, of the Archimedean spiral. This is the turning that unrolls the day, that turns the turns that the seasons obey, and the cycle of years, and the decades. But outer space too, that celestial gyre, the great Milky Way, turns inward and outward at once. And so we roil in the oldest of drifts – a slow, slant spin at the pit of the void, the darkest heart of them all.

Undeniably epic, I learned a lot about Zambia and its history, and while I was maybe not fully emotionally engaged with The Old Drift, this book is a bold original; totally worthwhile.

Tunesday : White Rabbit

White Rabbit

(Jefferson Airplane)

One pill makes you larger
And one pill makes you small
And the ones that mother gives you
Don't do anything at all
Go ask Alice
When she's ten feet tall

And if you go chasing rabbits
And you know you're going to fall
Tell 'em a hookah-smoking caterpillar
Has given you the call
Call Alice
When she was just small

When the men on the chessboard
Get up and tell you where to go
And you've just had some kind of mushroom
And your mind is moving low
Go ask Alice
I think she'll know

When logic and proportion
Have fallen sloppy dead
And the White Knight is talking backwards
And the Red Queen's off with her head
Remember what the dormouse said
Feed your head
Feed your head

Mallory and I went to the Apollo Cinema to see Jan Švankmajer's film, Alice (the Czech director's surreal adaptation of Through the Looking Glass), and although we knew that it was going to be a trip - told through puppets and stop-motion taxidermy - it was both more and less bizarre than I had been expecting. Reviews from when it was first released in the 80's are telling me that Švankmajer did a fantastic job of capturing the dreamlike story that Lewis Carroll had intended, but for the most part, I just found it a bit sleepy; it was literally putting me to sleep in the theatre.

On the other hand, the opening short film for the evening - Bobby Yeah by Robert Morgan - was hilarious and disturbing, fast-paced and unsettling; everything I had been hoping for. Overall, t'was a fine evening out with a daughter I don't get to see enough of, and I'd sit (and nod off) through any movie to be with her.

Turbulence

What she hated about even mild turbulence was the way it ended the illusion of security, the way that it made it impossible to pretend that she was somewhere safe. She managed, thanks to the vodka, more or less to ignore the first wobble. The next was less easy to ignore, and the one after that was violent enough to throw her neighbour's Coke into his lap. And then the pilot's voice, suddenly there again, and saying, in a tone of terrifying seriousness, “Cabin crew, take your seats.”

I read David Szalay's Man Booker-nominated All That Man Is (a collection of tenuously linked short stories that didn't quite qualify as a novel in my mind), and his latest, Turbulence, is sort of the same: consisting of very brief sketches of (mostly) unrelated character's lives, the actions of each ripple into the next story (each set in a different country), and on and on, like a shockwave of turbulence jolting its way through the entirety of the human narrative. Each chapter may be brief, but Szalay captures a moment of something very true and real in each; the line-by-line writing is precise and flawless. As characters fly around the world, Szalay believably switches up settings and cultures; but as different as these societies are, people are people everywhere. On the one hand, this message is demonstrated well, and on the other, sometimes Szalay's “message” became too overt for me. Overall: a brief read that packs a punch. (Note: I read an ARC and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

Despite the book eventually travelling all around the world, there is one British family that ties it all together – and their diaspora says something interesting about modern life. In the opening piece (and opening quote), an elderly woman is flying home to Madrid after spending some weeks with her middle-age son as he went through radiation treatments for prostate cancer. Eventually, we meet this man's ex-wife – who initially plays a minor role in a chapter set in Qatar – as she visits her adult daughter in Budapest, and in the final chapter, this daughter visits her father at his home in London. Nothing is explained about why this family lives so far apart from one another, but the ways in which they're shown to live their lives speaks volumes about the types of people they are. And if, by the end, the reader doesn't get Szalay's point about how interconnected we all are, he shows the daughter reading the framed JFK quote that her father has always had in his flat:

For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal.

Those particular concerns – the welfare of our children and our own mortality – recur throughout the stories, so it felt a little heavy-handed to me to have this stated so pointedly near the end of the book. I also didn't believe the following, an interaction between two lower-classed sisters in India after one discovers the other's husband has hit her:

She said, leaning towards her sister so that their noses were almost touching, “There's a phrase for this now. It's 'toxic masculinity'.” She said the words in English, and Nalini didn't understand them, so she tried to find a Malayalam equivalent. “That's what they call it now. And you can't just take it,” she said. “You can't. Okay?”

I did like that Ursula (the ex-wife of the British man, above) enjoys showing off her liberal bona-fides to her friends by talking about the fact that her daughter was dating a Syrian refugee (especially ironic in light of the ways that she treats her servants at home in the emirate), and I liked the turn that her attitude took when she discovered that her daughter intended to marry the man:

Ursula wanted to ask her daughter how she could be sure he didn't have a family back in Syria – a wife, kids, whatever. There was no way of knowing. Ursula had thought about it just that morning on the plane from Doha. There used to be a time when flights from the Gulf to Europe flew over Iraq and Syria – that was the shortest way – only now they had to avoid the sky over those places and fly over Iran and Turkey instead. She had watched, on the seatback screen, her own flight do just that this morning, divert around Syria and Iraq, and she had thought of Moussa, of course, and of his unknown life down there, in that secret place – a place so secret it wasn't even possible to fly over it and look at it from ten thousand metres up. What had he left behind there? What ties did he still have? Impossible to say.

As much as I liked the subtle shift in Ursula's attitude when she learns her daughter has become more serious about her Syrian boyfriend, I don't know if I believed that the girl's father, upon hearing the news of the impending nuptials, would blurt out, “He's not some nutcase is he? ...some Islamic nutter?” (Although we are told that he's frightened of his cancer and not quite himself.) So overall: Where Szalay was showing me people living incredibly well-drawn scenes from their lives, I totally got his message about the interconnectedness of the human family – and especially in these days of rapid intercontinental travel. But I didn't need the message stated overtly, and that detracted from my overall enjoyment. Still a four star read.

Lanny

I sit at work in the city and the thought of him existing a sixty-minute train ride from me, going about his day in the village, carrying his strange brain around, seems completely impossible. It seems unlikely, when I'm at work, that we have a child and it is Lanny. If my parents were here, they'd surely say, No Robert, you've dreamt him. Children aren't like that. Go back to sleep. Go back to work.

Lanny is exactly suited to my tastes: Lyrical language that rolls out smooth and not pretentious; beautiful nature writing that waltzes the line between the real and the surreal; a core narrative about human relationships that brought me to gasps and tears; and a plot that somehow felt both timeless and precisely up-to-date, revealing those basic truths about humanity that have always been. Unusual and meaning-packed, this is what I've been looking for. I was totally hooked from the book's opening paragraph:

Dead Papa Toothwort wakes from his standing nap an acre wide and scrapes off dream dregs of bitumen glistening thick with liquid globs of litter. He lies down to hear hymns of the earth (there are none, so he hums), then he shrinks, cuts himself a mouth with a rusted ring pull and sucks up a wet skin of acid-rich mulch and fruity detrivores. He splits and wobbles, divides and reassembles, coughs up a plastic pot and a petrified condom, briefly pauses as a fiberglass bath, stumbles and rips off the mask, feels his face and finds it made of long-buried tannic acid bottles. Victorian rubbish. Tetchy Papa Toothwort should never sleep in the afternoon; he doesn't know who he is.

I went into Lanny not knowing anything about its plot, and I'd recommend the same for other readers: mildly spoilery beyond here, but even mild spoilers might impact another's enjoyment. So, from the warning to the details: Robert (a London-based businessman) and his wife Jolie (a famousish actress who is writing her first crime novel) have escaped to the country and moved to a picturesque village with their young son, Lanny. Lanny isn't like other kids: sweet and dreamy, nature-loving and creative, he floats through the streets singing nonsense songs to himself, attracting attention and queer looks. Dead Papa Toothwort – a Green Man avatar, older than the village itself and of unknown intent – spends his waking hours collecting scraps of human conversation (which swirl and swoop across the pages like jumbled poems) and he finds himself attracted to young Lanny as well: Surgical yearnings invade him, he wants to chop the village open and pull the child out. Extract him. Young and ancient all at once, a mirror and a key. Meanwhile, Lanny's Mom has arranged for the boy to receive art lessons from an eccentric local (“Mad” Pete might be in his eighties now, but he is a contemporary artist of some fame), and Pete and Lanny get on like old friends. The book is told in rotating first person POVs, and for the majority of it, we're in the minds of Robert, Jolie, Pete, and Dead Papa Toothwort. When a crisis occurs, the thoughts and voices of the other villagers are brought into the mix as well (in my opinion, brilliantly). More spoilery from here.

Such a perfect time of day, look at the time, time to bring in the washing, time to go and get Lanny for his tea, time to myself, time it took me to get up, walk around the house, peer into his room, call his name, water every empty patch of the house with his name, he does this every time, sing-song son-time sounding cheerful, calling Lanny-Bean into the garden, walking whistling Lan-Bun into the street, and if I had known then I would barely have been able to crawl across the road let alone stand admiring the light, if I had known. But I didn't know.

How the village at large and the main characters themselves react to the moment of crisis were perfectly revelatory of human nature, and to me, rather the point of the book. On the other hand: I've read a couple of reviews that bemoan the fact that author Max Porter took some lazy Brexit-type swipes – making the ugliest-acting residents charicatures of racist and xenophobic belief (Toothwort collects several out of context conversational fragments of the “they can bloody well go back to their own country” variety) – and I can only add that as a non-Brit, nothing struck me as very political here; there's so much variety in the snippets of conversation and villagers' attitudes that I didn't think they were being portrayed as any one thing or another (and, as a non-Brit, I was admittedly not looking for such socio-political stereotyping; it could well have been there and breezed over my head). I loved the language and the characters; I believed the action and reactions; I was moved and made to feel a range of emotions; I recognised myself and my fellows on the page, and I could want nothing more from a book.

Man Booker Longlist 2019:

• Margaret Atwood, The Testaments 
• Kevin Barry, Night Boat to Tangier 
• Oyinkan Braithwaite, My Sister, The Serial Killer 
• Lucy Ellmann, Ducks, Newburyport 
• Bernardine Evaristo, Girl, Woman, Other 
• John Lanchester , The Wall 
• Deborah Levy, The Man Who Saw Everything 
• Valeria Luisell, Lost Children Archive 
• Chigozie Obioma, An Orchestra of Minorities
• Max Porter, Lanny 
• Salman Rushdie, Quichotte 
• Elif Shafak, 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World 
• Jeanette Winterson, Frankissstein 

Eventually won by The Testaments and Girl, Woman, Other in a tie, my favourites on the list were Lanny, Night Boat to Tangier, and An Orchestra of Minorities. I fear the Man Booker has become too political for me - favouring identity politics over excellent storytelling - and I don't know how much longer I'll think it a badge of honour to keep reading the longlists.

Tunesday : Riders on the Storm

Riders on the Storm

(As Written and Performed by The Doors)

Riders on the storm
Riders on the storm
Into this house we're born
Into this world we're thrown
Like a dog without a bone
An actor out on loan
Riders on the storm

There's a killer on the road
His brain is squirmin' like a toad
Take a long holiday
Let your children play
If you give this man a ride
Sweet family will die
Killer on the road, yeah

Girl, you gotta love your man
Girl, you gotta love your man
Take him by the hand
Make him understand
The world on you depends
Our life will never end
Gotta love your man, yeah

Riders on the storm
Riders on the storm
Into this house we're born
Into this world we're thrown
Like a dog without a bone
An actor out on loan.
Riders on the storm

Riders on the storm
Riders on the storm
Riders on the storm
Riders on the storm
Riders on the storm

This past Sunday was the Tour de Grand - the whole reason why Dave and I bought bicycles, as part of our summer of the Grand River - and as always, once we were off by ourselves, Dave started singing, bits of this song and that. I think he started with In the Ghetto, and as I noted the leafy green tunnel of trees that we were passing through, I remarked that it wasn't feeling very ghettoey. Then he switched to Light My Fire (referencing some scene out of Apocalypse Now because of the trailside marshy/jungly bits), and finally settled on Riders on the Storm as the best suited background song for our ride - and I have to admit that it had a great beat for pumping the legs. So, without him even realising it, Dave chose my Tunesday song for this week - and it's a song I love; thematically close enough.

This was the 22nd annual running of the Tour de Grand, and our first time entering it in our 22 years here. As we were walking our bikes up to the starting area, Dave later told me that he overheard the Marshall telling a man that they expected two thousand riders this year, and that it fulfilled his every hope for getting the community together and enjoying the outdoors; just exactly what Dave and I have been hoping to get out of these experiences ourselves. Because we're newbies - to this event and to cycling in general - I was cautious in my selection of a route for us; and although it was possible to do a road route of up to 175 km (whelp!), I chose the "up to" 25 km rail trail that Dave and I have had a few practise runs on. Because this was the novice option, I knew that there would be plenty of kids with training wheels, parents with bike trailers, and slow moving clumps and groups, and the closer it got to the starting time (and the more I could see that it was basically all families with young kids around us), the more I worried that we'd be stuck going even slower than we'd want to, jamming up at road crossings, and getting frustrated with the crowds. But as we got going, we were soon sorted a little ahead of the slow moving folks, and while every now and then some people (including kids) would pass us, too, for the most part, it felt like we had the trail to ourselves just like it was any other Sunday - as that picture at the top shows.

The weather was ideal - slightly cool with the tree canopy shading the sun when it did peek out from the clouds - and the air was fresh and scented with green things. There are boggy spots along the path - and they add a richer, loamier weight to the air - but there are also many places in this stretch of the trail where the trees open up and the Grand River runs alongside you; green-brown, glassy, and wide; studded with treed islets and busy with waterfowl. The river was, initially, the point of me selecting this particular activity for our summer, and that view alone argued for us sticking to the plan to take the novice path and leave the roadway routes to those whose primary focus was the cycling itself; to me, the bikes were a means to that view.

We rode past the 10 km marker and the 20 km, just a little further to the "Stunning River Vista" turnaround that we knew would total the ride to 25, and Dave and I briefly stopped there; Dave offering to take a photo of a man and his son who had decided to ride that far as well. Soon turned around and returned to the arena - delighted that the few practise runs we had taken were enough to prepare us with plenty of energy left over - we were happy to join in the lunch that I hadn't known was included when I signed us up.

Getting out in the community and taking part in a shared enjoyment of where we live was exactly what Dave and I talked about when we were planning this summer, and from sitting with hundreds of others in matching T-shirts to talking biking with the man who sat at our picnic table to be beside his kids at the next one over, the Tour de Grand provided us with exactly what we were looking for. The event was efficiently run, there was definitely value for the money (the included T-shirts, pre-, during-, and post-run food, free parking), there were police officers stopping traffic to let groups of bikes cross roads unimpeded: the whole event is definitely professionally run, yet still totally appropriate for novices like me and Dave. What more could we ask for on a beautiful Sunday afternoon? I hope it's just the first of many years of participation in the event.