The same three tasks recur across cultures and epochs: to shelter what is precious, to yield what is valuable, and to dispose of what is harmful.
Shelter (memories, precious matter, messages, fragile lives).
Yield (information, wealth, metaphors, minerals, visions).
Dispose (waste, trauma, poison, secrets).
In the underland we have long placed that which we fear and wish to lose, and that which we love and wish to save.
Underland is the first book I’ve read by Robert Macfarlane – a celebrated British nature writer and literary critic who currently teaches in the Faculty of English at Cambridge – so I didn’t quite know what to expect from what looked like a sciencey exploration of the world beneath our feet. I understand now that Macfarlane’s career has concerned a “long-term mapping of the relations of landscape and the human heart” – making this book more sociological than geological – and once I learned to pivot my expectations, I grew to admire Underland for what it is: a poetic adventure-travelogue about underground spaces and the people tied to them. Macfarlane’s lyrical language borders on indulgent at times, and he writes from a decidedly progressive-campus point-of-view, but I found his adventures to be both fascinating and thrilling, and his thesis (This is among the best things we can try to do: to be good ancestors) to be sound. I look forward to reading Macfarlane’s earlier works.
The way into the underland is through the riven trunk of an old ash tree...
Macfarlane travelled widely, over the course of a decade, exploring mines and glaciers and caves and catacombs. In every place, he stayed with engaging characters (and Macfarlane has a true gift for capturing people in a few strokes), and with every experience, he was able to relate the voids under our feet with the oldest tales and metaphors in human culture (from Persephone, Orpheus, and the Minotaur, to Alice tumbling down through the rabbithole, we humans seem to have long been fascinated and repelled by the deep dark). Whether pulling himself through a narrow passage of rock (that necessitated turning his face to the side in order to squeeeeze through) or solo-climbing through a snow-covered pass to find a remote cave (against the emphatic advice of his local Norwegian host), Macfarlane relates some heart-thumping tales of adventure (that always turned my mind to the wife and children waiting for him back home in England). But while Macfarlane quotes freely (and interestingly) from research, literature, and poetry, he sometimes lost me when his own clear prose sprouted purple wings:
I lie down to lead, I follow the thread, and each tiny room in the ruckle opens onto the next as it should, in turn, in order. I pass through the last of the gaps, and as I lift myself into the entry shaft I feel the snap of the black stone’s jaws at the empty air below my toes, and then I am out of the swallet and into the hollow, and warm air is rolling around me, and my bones grow again in the storm of light and ferns furl their green over and into me and moss thrives on my skin and leaves teem in my eyes, and Sean and I sit laughing, knowing for those few moments that to understand light you need first to have been buried in the deep-down dark.
(Another rhetorical indulgence that annoyed: “What was it that Barry Lopez called these old routes of movement and migration within the landscape? Corridors of breath. That was it.” I liked the references but not the faux self-interrogation on the page. I suppose it’s all a matter of taste; it’s not to mine.) And as for the progressive politics: As I said already, I really liked Macfarlane’s ability to capture people’s characters succinctly, but I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the only two people he lampoons – a tourguiding miner and someone burying spent uranium tubes – work at jobs of which he disapproves. Speaking with the mycologist Merlin Sheldrake about the recently discovered “wood wide web” of fungi-enabled, underground resource sharing between trees in a forest, Sheldrake notes, “Politically, I’m obviously inclined to dislike the language of biological free-marketry far more than the socialist version.” Obviously. Macfarlane travels to Norway and meets an anti-offshore-oil-drilling activist, and this bear of a fisherman, Bjørnar Nicolaisen, takes the author out on his gas-powered fishing boat to discuss the evils of oil extraction. Macfarlane joins “urban explorers” as they breeze past No Entry signs and locked gates (even trespassing into a control room at the Tower of London) and notes sympathetically, “At its more political fringes, urban exploration mandates itself as a radical act of disobedience and liberation: a protest against state constraints on freedom within the city.” And while the trespassing itself made me squirmy, Macfarlane has different concerns:
There are aspects of urban exploration that leave me deeply uneasy, and cannot be fended off by indemnifying gestures of self-awareness on the part of its practitioners. I dislike its air of hipster entitlement, its inattention towards those people whose working lives involve the construction, operation and maintenance – rather than the exploration – of these hidden structures of the city. I am sceptical of the dandified nature of its photographic culture, which seems chiefly to refocus the problems of Caspar David Fredrich’s iconic 1818 painting Wanderer above a Sea of Fog. And I feel uneasy at the opportunities urban exploration holds for insensitivity to those people who have no choice but to exist in contexts of dereliction and ruin.
(And again this might come down to taste and temperament: the more one agrees with these viewpoints, the less they might break the flow of reading.) In the end, the very best parts of Underland were the death-defying adventures and the people that Macfarlane met along the way. He didn’t just descend into the Abyss of Trebiciano, climbing down a precarious ladder for two hours to reach an underground river, he did it in the company of a seventy-year-old pipe-smoking gate-keeper whose most frequent reply to any enquiry was, “Allora”. Macfarlane didn’t just follow some map to explore the far reaches of the Parisian Catacombs, he followed a young woman with scarlet lipstick, a quick stride, and an encyclopedic knowledge of that “invisible city”. This ultimately, and compellingly, is a book about the connections between people and underground geographies; a fascination we humans seem to have shared across time:
I think of the black and red hand-prints left on the cave walls at Chauvet, of the red figures of the dancers with their outstretched arms, of the spray-can hand stencil on the catacomb wall in Paris, of Helen reaching a hand down to haul me out of the moulin. I think of the many people I have encountered in and through the underland who have been committed to shared human work rather than retreat and isolation. Many of them have been mappers, really, of networks of mutual relation, endeavoring to stitch their thinking into unfamiliar scales of time and space, seeking not the scattered jewels of personal epiphany but rather to enlarge the possible means by which people might move and think together across landscapes, in responsible knowledge of deep past, deep future and the inhuman earth.
I may have some quibbles with the writing, and it may not have been the book I expected to read, but there is much in Underland that intrigued and enchanted me. I definitely will be picking up more from this author.
They stand and sing with full hearts, “We rest on Thee, our Shield and our Defender!” The melody is beautiful and old. Finlandia. Five wonderful young men stood beside his dad’s plane and sang this hymn that fateful day in early 1956 when they flew into the camp on the Curaray River. Five who knew the terms of their mission. They knew, and still they went. “When passing through the gates of pearly splendour, Victors, we rest with Thee through endless days.”
Based on the true and tragic events known as “Operation Auca”, Joan Thomas’ Five Wives makes for an intriguing read (and especially to someone like myself who didn’t know the story going in) and I’m not surprised that this novel won Thomas the 2019 Governor General’s Literary Award for English Language Fiction. In an afterword, Thomas relates the extensive research that went into this project, and also states that while the principal characters in this book (the five missionaries and their wives) are lightly fictionalised (events are true but conversations and relationships imagined, etc.), Thomas decided to entirely invent the next two generations of their families (out of a reluctance to write about living people). This made for a slightly uneven reading experience for me: the true bits were the most dramatically satisfying (with narratively pleasing hubris and irony and natural suspense), and while I can see the need for the modern characters (to reflect on the tragedy’s legacy and to demonstrate how faith and culture evolve), I found that the invented paled against the actual; I think I would have liked this better if Thomas had stuck to the facts. Three and a half stars, rounded down.
Is it better to have an empty drum of a heart, or to fill it how you can?
As Five Wives opens, the five new widows are given their recently deceased husbands’ notes and journals and attempt to piece together the men’s final days; that a tragedy is at the heart of this story is no surprise, but there are many twists and turns as the timeline jumps back and forth between the mid-twentieth century and today. We learn that these men, and their wives (and the sister of one of the men), are evangelical Christian missionaries, members of the poor but pious Plymouth Brethren. We are privy, in a jump to the past, to the courtship of two of the couples, and it is evident that these are all people of deep belief; people who honestly believed that the members of an uncontacted tribe in the Ecuadorian jungle were doomed to an eternity of hellfire if no one brought them the Word of God. Never mind that this was a notoriously aggressive tribe that had murderously repelled other explorers and oil speculators (the name “Auca” is a slur meaning “savage” that was given to this tribe by neighbouring tribes; they call themselves the “Waorani”, which simply means “the people”), these missionaries believed that God set them on this mission and they were prepared to be martyred in the process. As time jumps around, we see these couples setting up homes in the jungles of Ecuador; having babies and learning the local languages and bearing witness where they can. We see how the men lost their lives, how the women react (mostly praising God’s wisdom and waiting for His purpose to be revealed), how the world reacts (there is a huge boost in missionary zeal and offerings to the Plymouth Brethren), and by bringing the timeline up to the present, we get the benefit of learning everything that eventually came to light about those final days in the mens’ lives and can see how contact has affected the Waorani into today. All of these details are very interesting and worthy of a novelistic investigation, and it must be noted that Thomas’ prose is rich and satisfying.
Turned out that Carol had been raised in a garden-variety evangelical church, not as strict as the Gospel Hall. She was aghast that women were not allowed to join in the hymns in Olive and Pete’s assembly. “Well, we can sing,” Olive explained. “But only in our hearts. We contribute through our silence.”
At least two of the women in this story (Betty Elliot and Rachel Saint) had callings of their own, but for the most part, this is the story of five men who believed they were in personal communication with God and the women who, even if they couldn’t hear God’s voice themselves, followed their husbands because they once made a vow to love, honour, and obey. In the present day timeline, we meet Abby – the granddaughter of two of the slain missionaries – and she is modern enough to both reject the paternalism of her parents’ faith and recognise the arrogance behind her grandparents’ mission: just because the Waorani didn’t worship the Christian God or wear clothes or till the land didn’t mean that they didn’t have a civilisation or a culture. And this is where I kind of had a problem with this: the modern timeline with Abby and her father doesn’t go anywhere – I really think it’s just there to give the enlightened take on colonialism – and while a person could say that Thomas was really fair here and didn’t impose her own views, that’s not really true; any secular person reading about this mission today would likely come to Abby’s conclusions without Thomas leading us there (through what Abby says and what the wives keep to themselves), and that would be a more powerful reading experience.
What happened to the missionaries was indeed a tragedy – made more ironic by information that is eventually revealed – and while I'm willing to believe that their intentions were pure and selfless, their mission led to a tragedy for the Waorani people (turns out that the missionaries unwittingly paved the path for the oil companies to get into the jungle after all) and I appreciate everything I learned here. Great research, great sentences, plot quibbles.
“Love does not change, anger never varies. Hope, desperation, fear, longing, desire, lust, anxiety, confusion and joy; you and I endure these emotions just as men and women always have or ever will. We are a small people in an ever-changing universe. The world around us might be in a state of constant flux, but the universe within?” I shook my head, both admitting and accepting the weakness of man. “No, Serafina. None of these will ever change. No matter how long this world continues.”
A Traveler at the Gates of Wisdom started off really intriguing — with a juddering timeline that sees the main character jump ahead through time and space, the storyline eventually covering two thousand years and most of the globe, his circumstances always proceeding as though he is living the same life (and it is the same life as far as he is aware), and with the people around him slightly changing their names and circumstances to match the change in settings — and while at first I was enjoying the novelty of this, it eventually began to drag; another time, another place, the main character crossing paths with the famed and the ordinary, all in service to some oft-repeated, pedantic lessons from author John Boyne. And I wouldn’t be so disappointed if I hadn’t grown to expect more from Boyne. This was just a total miss for me. (Note: I read an ARC from NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
“Do your memories never surprise you? Do you not dream of the past and the future and recognize both with equal clarity?” He leaned forward and grasped me by the wrist, a hint of his once-intimidating strength returning in that moment as he gripped me tightly. “Your shadow falls both behind you and before you while you stand between the two pretenders, a mask across your eyes.”
The story starts in Palestine in the year A.D. 1, with the main character being born during the Massacre of the Innocents as ordered by King Herod; the baby’s father — himself a Roman soldier — off slaughtering first born sons. The second chapter jumps ahead to Turkey in A.D. 41 (where the boy’s father is a Roman legionnaire), then to Romania in A.D. 105 (the father now a Turkish soldier dispatched by the King to fight invading Roman soldiers), and on and on. In one chapter his mother is named Florina, which changes to Folami, and then to Floriana; the specific details of her life also changing to suit the local culture, but the general circumstances of her relationships and social standing remaining constant; and this was all interesting — there’s no denying that it’s an ambitious project to choose this many historical settings. But the attention paid to time and place completely overshadows that spent on the characters — for whatever reason, Boyne decided that this (unnamed) main character would have no stable relationships in his life (wives die, his brother disappears, his only close friendship leads to a betrayal) and the only thing that’s constant in his life is a devotion to art. Sometimes he’s a painter or a sculptor, sometimes a crafter of amulets or arrows or shoes, but no matter what medium he expresses himself with, in many of his lives, if he touches the right rockface or marble or brick wall, he sees all of these lives flash before his eyes and feels compelled to preserve them somehow (which felt like Boyne explaining the compulsion to write?) With no relatable, ordinary human struggle at the heart of this book — and with all secondary characters constantly changing or disappearing — I had a lot of trouble finding something to engage with.
I could not be other than I was and, awake or asleep, images stole into my mind and I sought to reproduce them, in chalk or stone or wood or metal. I was happy to draw pictures in the sand with my toes if that was all that I had to work with. People I had never known, places I had never visited, all of which seemed entirely real to me. And when they appeared, I knew that I had no choice but to reproduce them before they disappeared like sugar in water.
I get that the message of this novel seems to be that people are the same throughout time and place, but Boyne keeps ringing the same bells over and over: the main character (so. many. times.) would ask an abused wife why she stays with her abuser or why she even married him in the first place if he was such a known brute, and over and over, these women tell him that they have no power within marriage; that no woman even has the right to choose her own husband (and if the main character remembers everything else that happens to him across time and space, I don’t understand why he keeps asking this question). Throughout the timeline, the main character keeps running across same sex couples; and while he understands that there are people who might have a problem with these relationships, it never makes a difference to him (which somehow explains why he never feels the need to protect anyone whose lovelife puts them in danger?) And while this character from the earliest times is a highly moral atheist (the only one who would never lie, cheat, or betray anyone, while denying the existence of any of the various gods we meet), he is very casual about taking lives; and I have no idea how these murders are meant to reflect on his character (and especially in the last chapter — a utopian future on a space station — where humans have done away with gender and marriage and police; there is no crime in this perfect society, but if everything else is constant for this character, has he still been responsible for the deaths of so many people in this future?)
This whole project honestly feels like Boyne’s lecture to the people on right thinking. In the chapter set in 1832, an associate of Walter Scott’s says to the main character (who is a novelist in this timeline), “There have been some people of late writing letters to the literary pages complaining of authors who do not share the same experiences with their characters”, and they proceed to have an anachronistic conversation about the stupidity of accusations of cultural appropriation (which I understand is Boyne’s response to criticism of his last book, My Brother’s Name is Jessica). In the chapter set in 2016, the main character is the only member of his family who isn’t a braindead MAGA-hat-wearing xenophobe watching the American election results and the cartoonish portrayal of these Trump supporters is neither art or social commentary. And as for his future utopia — it’s not my idea of a perfect future world.
So, the format eventually wore on me, the overall plot was neither interesting nor instructive, there was nothing to the characters to make me engage with them, and the ideas were presented with a hammer to the head. I would give this 2.5 stars and am rounding up because John Boyne can write some pretty sentences.
How's that jumper shot of yours? Still silky? I'm coaching the Cascades. Up in Niagara Falls? Scrappy unit. Couple of intriguing kids.
I'm not a dedicated consumer of short stories, but when I read one that fires up a certain frisson in my brain – a sudden connection to my lived experience that makes me think that the story couldn't possibly have been told any other way – then I consider that to be well-written; it's a totally subjective evaluation, based on a physical, rather than some theory-backed intellectual, reaction. And the stories in Craig Davidson's Cascade simply didn't fire me up. Primarily set in Davidson's fictional stand-in for Niagara Falls, Ontario (Cataract City), the “cascade” of the title references the mighty waterfall, the basketball team in that opening quote, but most importantly, these stories seem to focus on moments of decision or action – the brief equipoise of events before they succumb to the brink – and the results that cascade from those moments. These stories were all interesting, but other than a couple of brief emotional connections, they didn't do much for me. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.) The stories:
The Ghost Lights
You were born into dread, my son. Dan said this one night in the witching hour, alone in Charlie's nursery, his voice clear over the monitor in our bedroom. He was right: to have a baby is to be introduced to a depthless well of worry. A dread you could never have guessed at, not in a thousand years.
A car accident on a lonely stretch of snow-covered backroad begins a quest for survival that transforms a new mother's relationship with her son. Nice build of tension that had me choked up at the end.
One Pure Thing
Many things can be built into one moment. Later, you might have lots of time to tease apart the strands of instinct and causation in search of catharsis or clarity, and if you do, you will find that entwined in those strands are the people and places and events that brought you to that point, guiding you to that heartbeat where everything coming before acted on everything yet to come. Human lives can be ruthlessly reduced to such moments, I think. And once they pass, we have to exist with what we've earned inside them.
The story from which the collection's title derives, semi-pro basketball is used as a microcosm for examining life; lots of (unfamiliar to me) basketball jargon is organically sprinkled throughout – adding interest and credibility – and enjoyably builds to the tension of “the big game”.
The Vanishing Twin
You can never guess the change your life might take until that change comes. That's what Charlie says – well, Charlie says until that change darkens your door, which is classic Charlie-talk but anyway, that's what he says and I believe him.
The story opens on a pair of fifteen-year-old fraternal twins and their lives in a juvenile correction facility, and as the narrative progresses, it becomes apparent that a long ago womb and fraternal love is about all the brothers have in common. Creepy good.
Friday Night Goon Squad
It had begun as a morbid joke – sometimes those were the ones that got you through. “Child apprehension with officer assist,” a.k.a.: the Friday Night Goon Squad. You hatch'em, we snatch'em.
There's a sad irony to this story of a burnt out Social Worker, who has been having trouble conceiving, working hard to safely keep kids in less-than-ideal family situations.
Medium Tough
There's an instant in any procedure when you understand that you hold everything in your hand. The God Moment. Each surgeon feels it differently. For me, this was a moment of awesome, near-paralyzing love. Love for the child beneath my blade: for its life and its capacity to do great things – or if not great, then merely valuable. And it was a moment of respect for their bodies, which I must invade, and for their futures, which I am dutybound to honour.
An oddly carnivalesque tale of a man whose mother's gestational alcoholism led to his being born bifurcated – the left half of his body withered but nimble-fingered enough to become a surgeon, while his right side has the beefed-up super-musculature that makes him a champion arm-wrestler – and the story explores these doubling ideas of twinning, before-and-after, cause-and-effect. (Highlighting that these same themes were seen in earlier stories and the Social Worker from Friday Night Goon Squad makes [what seems to be a somewhat out-of-character] reappearance.)
Firebugs
Fire will grunt and growl and come at you with the soft slithering of a snake. It'll howl around blind corners like a pack of wolves, and gibber up from flame-eaten floorboards and reverberate in a million other strange ways besides. Sometimes it sounds like buzzard talons clawing across pebbled glass. Other times, it'll come for you silent as a ghost: a soft whisper of smoke curling back under a doorway, beckoning you to open it. That's when it's most dangerous – when it's hiding its true face.
A fire investigator is flummoxed by a plague of arson ravaging his town: Should he be looking for an individual or a group? Should he delve further into a story of someone who found himself in a trance of pyromania? Or should he be rerouting his investigation closer to home? An intriguing story with some interesting philosophical bits.
In the animal encyclopedia Ben and I memorized, every hierarchy had a name. Every violence a vocabulary. Somewhere, there was a name for our exchange, in a language that was kept from us.
Author K-Ming Chang might be known best for her poetry and that poetic sensibility shines through on every page of her first novel, Bestiary. Filled with myth and allusion, in sentences crackling with lyric inventiveness, Chang explores three generations of Taiwanese-Americans, using the imagery of muck and filth to expose the unacknowledged beauty in otherness (trust me, it works). Employing a variety of styles and shifting POVs, there's nothing straightforward in Bestiary, but I was captivated by these characters and their lives; dazzled by the language. Just a stellar debut. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
In wartime, land is measured by the bones it can bury. A house is worth only the bomb that banishes it. Gold can be spent in any country, any year, any afterlife. The sun shits it out every morning. Even Ma misreads the slogans on the back of American coins: IN GOLD WE TRUST. That's why she thinks we're compatible with this country. She still believes we can buy its trust.
With scenes set in Taiwan, Arkansas, and California, Bestiary describes the evolution of a family that first came to the United States more or less as refugees (if I knew the history of Taiwan better, I'd better understand the forces that led them to flee their homeland), but even the third generation (“Daughter” and her brother, who were born in the States) seem no closer to being fully accepted by their fellow Americans than their parents and grandparents. There are scenes of racism (even within the family, as both the mother and the grandmother regret having married men from “the mainland”; with the grandmother, it's even unclear just how consensual her relationship was with this PTSD-afflicted former Chinese soldier), domestic violence, and crushing poverty. On the positive side, there are also the treasured passing down of Taiwanese myth and legends, moments of loving family connection, and when Daughter's friendship with fellow Asian student, Ben (a girl), blossoms into romance, the connection is deep and redemptive. And throughout, we read the myths and witness fabulous events that temper gritty realism with magical realism and I was strongly reminded of both Akwaeke Emezi's Freshwater and fellow Taiwanese writer Miny-Yi Wu's The Man with the Compound Eyes.
I'm not going to change the sheets for you, not even if you wet yourself. Why do you think you're sweating so much? Because you're sick? It's the sea in you. That stretch of sheet where you've pissed the mattress: a shoreline. The heart's a fish. If you open your mouth, it'll swim out of you, touch air, die. When I say shut your mouth, I mean survive.
The meat of this immigrant story was very interesting to me, but it's Chang's poetic sense that most dazzled. I could have excerpted something from just about every page, so the many following examples I've chosen should be seen as restraint (lol). Some imagery that hooked me:
• Only my mother could call to me like that, a sound worn fist-smooth, a sound I could saddle and ride, relieved for a second of my own weight while she carried me in her mouth.
• She rinsed the dishes so bright we had to squint while eating; she sang to a knife as if auditioning to be its blade.
• She told me she was blowing boys in the woods. And for years I imagined she was blowing them up, shearing open their bellies and burying dynamite inside, necklaces of boymeat dangling from the trees.
Chang describes the sun or the moon or the sky at the opening of most scenes and it fascinated me to see how often she metaphorically tied the heavenly realm to the baseness of human corporeality:
• The night bruised its kneecap moon.
• Ma leaves the house early. Sunup: the sky bleeding where it's given birth.
• It was early in the night and the sky was bad-breathed, freckled with stars like white bacteria on a tongue.
• Above us, the moon was marinating in its own silver sweat.
• The morning we leave, the sun sags in the sky like a scrotum.
• It's summer and the sky is vomiting. It rains in chunks.
Characters become infected by nature (a girl can grow a tiger tale, be impregnated by rivers, swallow a sandstorm) and the natural world develops human characteristics (holes dug in the yard become mouths, eating offerings and regurgitating letters from afar), and while poverty, racism, and domestic chaos all threaten to alienate Daughter and Ben from those around them, when these teenage girls find each other, it makes for a very sweet love story:
The only time the holes were coherent was when Ben and I touched. When we kissed in front of them, they cinched their lips and listened, opening only to say yes, yes. While night erected itself around us like a tent, we sat cross-legged on the soil and its tapestry of worms. Ben laced her legs around my waist. Her mouth so close I could see the serrations of her teeth, sawing every sound in half so that I heard it twice: my name, my name. I leaned forward, flicked her upper lip with my bottom one. We met inside our mouths. I found the seam under her tongue and undid it. With my hands around her, I felt her spine through her shirt, a ladder to thirst. All around us, the holes were full of bright sound, jingling like a handful of nickels.
The love scenes don't get much more graphic than that and I both appreciated that the poetic language elevated these scenes above base mechanics and also that their relationship is unquestioningly accepted by those around them; there are same-sex encounters in the historical myths and stories, too, and it's all just presented as a natural part of life. The nonstop flow of bodily fluids throughout Bestiary might be offputting to a reader, but again, it's all used in the service of lyricism and I simply found it all fascinating. Chang's is a unique and talented voice, and as she made me care deeply about her characters while educating me on their difficult, outsider lives – in strange and engaging language – I'd have to call this novel a success; maybe not for every reader, but it certainly worked for me.
Look through shadows, listen beyond echoes; they have much to tell. Not only of other ways to be human, but new eyes to see ourselves. The most glorious thing about the Neanderthals is that they belong to all of us, and they're no dead-end, past-tense phenomenon. They are right here. In my hands typing and your brain understanding my words. Read on, and meet your kindred.
According to her own website, Dr Rebecca Wragg Sykes is an archaeologist, writer and “creative professional”, with an especial interest in the ancient world of the Palaeolithic, and whose doctoral thesis was the first synthesis of evidence for late Neanderthals in Britain. With such impressive credentials, stated interests in creative writing and the highlighting of women in earth sciences, it's not a surprise that I found Kindred to be such an impressive read; Wragg Sykes not only relates the entire history of Neanderthal research, but in engaging prose, she explains why the story of these hominid cousins should matter to us humans today. I loved all of this, beginning to end. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
Amid ancient surfaces densely spangled by myriad artefacts, fireplaces are like archaeological wormholes, bridging the impossible chasms of time separating us from long-vanished dwellers. As researchers encircle hearths, excavating, their presence is like an afterglow of human attention, reanimating empty spaces. Time collapses, and it's almost as if our fingers reaching out might graze the warmth of Neaderthal skin, sitting right there beside us.
Wragg Sykes shares how evolving scientific techniques have enabled archaeologists to learn an incredible amount about Neanderthal customs and culture, and while my eyes sometimes glazed over with all of the information about flakes and discoids and bifaces, knapped here and carried there – astounding toolmaking evidence that nonetheless became a bit repetitive to this lay reader – I was truly blown away by the microscopic and atomic research that can not only show where, say from a single tooth, a Neanderthal child was born and moved throughout her days, but through the examination of minuscule growth patterns, which were seasons of want or plenty in that shortened life. It all made me think about how much information has been lost over the years because of archaeologists excavating sites before they had the technology to properly preserve the integrity of those sites (which then made me wonder what mistakes future scientists will accuse our generation of making), but I was fascinated by the idea that currently, sites are 3D-mapped by lasers before digging begins and archaeologists have been able to retrieve millions of Neanderthal artefacts from the “rubbish heaps” left behind by those Victorian Age pioneers who sought only bone and obvious tools.
While minds create things, things also create minds in a manner that extends far beyond the individual or even the generation, and can transform whole species. For Neanderthals, new experience or encounters opened up fresh ways of thinking about the world. It's not a stretch to suggest that their technological innovations probably impacted other aspects of their lives. Composite tools are a case in point; the inherent process of joining together must have reinforced concepts of connectedness and collaboration, crucial for hunting and social networks. And since composite tools are made up of materials connecting different places and times, these objects had a unique capacity to act as potent mnemonics, expanding the vistas of memory and imagination.
I also appreciate how Wragg Sykes attempts to revive the Neanderthal mind – with a culture and anatomy much like those of early Homo sapiens (including a brain slightly larger, if differently shaped, than ours), these were no knuckle-dragging brutes; there is evidence that they made art, ornaments, shared their food communally, and participated in funerary practises. There is also no doubt that Neanderthals and early humans interbred (all people except those of Sub-Saharan lineage have Neanderthal DNA) and Wragg Sykes writes that's there's no reason to believe these weren't the couplings of fellow humans who recognised each other as related beings.
By 20,000 years ago, we were alone on the surface of this planet. Nonetheless, the Neanderthals still lived, after a fashion. Even as our encounters fell out of all memory, our blood and our babies still contain the fruits of interactions with the universe's other experiments in being human. Bones and stones long waited underground for us to rediscover our shared future. And when we finally did, everything changed.
Wragg Sykes makes a compelling case for embracing Neanderthals into the human family – not only because “othering” has led to the worst of the ways we humans have treated each other throughout history, but because of some disturbing experiments being done today with Neanderthal DNA: putting the DNA into frogs to try and discover Neanderthals' pain response; putting the DNA into humanoid robots; there's no reason to believe these aren't the first steps on the road to Unfrozen Caveman Lawyers, and is all of this in keeping with the dignity and respect that we purport to reserve for our fellow humans?
From the Victorian spelunkers whose discoveries shook their cosy worldviews to the precision data revealed in modern laboratories, the history of Neanderthal research is a fascinating one; and with evocative and empathetic storytelling, Wragg Sykes reanimates these long-forgotten ancestors. Kindred is an engrossing story, told well.
As a modern, feminist writer, some of Wragg Sykes' ideas challenged me in their wokeness (and by "challenged" I don't mean I vehemently disagree, I just need to think further; she is certainly the expert and I the old-fashioned thinker). A couple of examples:
In describing wear patterns on teeth and varying musculature between samples that lead to proposed gender identification, it's pretty much agreed that male Neanderthals spent most of their time knapping lithics (pounding stones) and women prepared hides (with the wear on their teeth suggesting that they would clamp hides in their mouths to free up their hands to work them.) Wragg Sykes warns against thinking of these gender roles as definitive:
We have little idea how they defined their own categories of gender, which goes beyond the spectrum of biological sex variation. Their social distinctions need not have been binary or mapped directly onto anatomy.
Even acknowledging the presence of Two Spirit individuals in some North American indigenous communities or the hijra in India, the idea of nonbinary people seems like such a newly accepted idea that inferring them backwards to a prehistoric non-Homo sapiens group seems more like political correctness than good scientific reckoning. Without nuanced and enlightened thinking about the self (which apparently even we can only trace back a couple of hundred years), I can't imagine Neanderthals bucking accepted gender roles based on external sex indicators (not that they may not have been confused by a sense of internal mismatching). As I don't think that Wragg Sykes could possibly provide evidence to show that Neanderthals didn't link anatomy to gender, this seems a passage included for the sake of being progressive - which plays mischief with the science. "This tooth shows hide-working wear so we'll say it's from a female." "Wait a minute, it may have been an anatomical male who preferred to present as a female, thereby assuming female duties." How can science proceed meaningfully along those indefinite lines of thinking?
In writing about conjectured encounters that might have led to interbreeding, and especially the fact that the Neanderthal DNA seems mixed exclusively into our matrilineal line, Wragg Sykes writes:
There are hints in the DNA that couplings might have involved more Neanderthal men with H. sapiens women than the reverse, but other explanations for the data are possible. In theorising the social contexts behind all of this, there's been a tendency to assume rape as a primary mechanism; an unpleasant residue from the days when prehistorians and the public regarded Neanderthals as more beast than potential beloved. Chimpanzee males will engage in coercive sex, but not with unknown females (whom they prefer to kill.) It's theoretically possible some of our Neanderthal inheritance may derive from non-consensual circumstances, but xenophobia rather than xenophilia needn't be the default assumption.
I get that a main thrust in Kindred is Wragg Sykes' desire for us to accept Neanderthals as fellow hominids, more like us than not, but if the DNA transfer seems to fairly definitively go only in the one direction, I don't know why she wants to so strongly defend the Neanderthals against the assumption of rape. And if they were more like us than any other species, why would she evoke chimps (and later, bonobos) as evidence in their defense when no one is likely to declare that human males don't "engage in coercive sex with unknown females". Again, this felt like political correctness for its own sake, but didn't bring down my overall enjoyment of and admiration for this book; I'm taking it as food for thought.
Do you ever think about alternate universes?
The Hotel Caiette had been open since the mid-nineties, but had recently been redone in what Raphael called Grand West Coast Style, which seemed to involve exposed cedar beams and enormous panes of glass. Walter was studying the ad campaign photos that Raphael had slid across the table. The hotel was a glass-and-cedar palace at twilight, lights reflected on water, the shadows of the forest closing in.
I must confess that Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven didn't completely work for me, and with that out of the way, I'll happily state that The Glass Hotel totally did. The books feel related – like two sides of the same coin – and while the earlier post-apocalyptic novel felt somehow more realistic, this one (despite ghosts, alternate realities, and liminal spaces) seems to have more to say about our actual world. A thought-provoking meditation on greed, morality, dread, and regret, The Glass Hotel asks if any of us are as bad as the worst thing we've ever done, and encouragingly, opens up the possibility for second chances. (Spoilery from here so I can preserve some of the details.)
Why don't you swallow broken glass.
A lonely man walks into a bar and sees an opportunity. An opportunity walks into a bar and meets a bartender. A lonely bartender looks up from her work and the message on the window makes her want to flee, because the bartender's mother disappeared while canoeing and she's told everyone all her life that it was an accident but there is absolutely no way of knowing whether this is true, and how could anyone who's aware of this uncertainty – as Paul definitely is – write a suggestion to commit suicide on a window with that water shimmering on the other side, but what's driving the bartender to despair isn't actually the graffiti, it's the fact that when she leaves this place it will only be to go to another bar, and another after that, and another, and another, and anyway that's the moment when the man, the opportunity, extends its hand.
The Glass Hotel opens with a short section called “Vincent in the Ocean”, and in a series of brief entries, we learn that this Vincent has fallen off a ship (in 2018) and is able to “move between memories like walking from room to room”. Sections then jump around the timeline – from Vincent's childhood on a small island off Canada's West Coast to the present, flitting in and out of various characters' POVs – and while just about every character muses on the imaginary nature of their lives (living in the shadow country, the counterlife, the kingdom of money), the “apocalypse” this novel centres on (the 2008 economic downturn that collapses a Bernie Madoff-style Ponzi scheme) is all too real...and deadly. I remember when Madoff was arrested and the extent of his scam was revealed (billions in lost retirement funds) and my mother said to me, “I can't think of a worse crime.” And I thought, “You're a woman, a mother, a grandmother, and you can't think of a worse crime than a Ponzi scheme?” As the narrative of The Glass Hotel unspools, we learn how Jonathan Alkaitis first began his scam, how Alkaitis' employees (who had thought of themselves as decent people) were convinced to run the fraud, and how the investors (who really should have known that the returns were too good to be true) deluded themselves in order to keep receiving those big dividend cheques. Most are not as righteous as they like to protest.
Look. We all know what we do here.
He leaves the doctor's office with a sense of unease. He knows he messed up on that last answer, but is it his fault that his life here is so boring that it sometimes takes him a minute or two to snap out of the counterlife and back to reality, if that's what this is? “I'm distracted, not demented,” he mutters to himself, loudly enough that the guard escorting him back to the cell block glances at him. It isn't his fault that his days are so similar that he keeps sliding into memories, or into the counterlife, although it is troubling that his memories and the counterlife have started blurring together.
Is it an injustice that Alkaitis' incipient dementia allows him to escape to a counterlife (ironically transporting him to one of those unreal man-made palm-shaped islands in Dubai) when prison life gets to be too much? Or will the ghosts of they who couldn't survive the loss of their money force Alkaitis to make a reckoning?
It's possible to both know and not know something.
In a parallel version of events he might have run, and in his ghost life, his honourable life, his non-Ponzi life, he was never here at all. But in this world Oskar stopped in his tracks, and standing there on the sidewalk in the first snow of that winter, seconds away from his first pair of handcuffs, he was surprised to realize that what he felt was relief.
Is it better to be someone like Oskar – brought to justice and given a sentence – or someone like Enrico: the only member of Alkaitis' team who thought to disappear and now spending every day – living in Mexico under an assumed name with an oblivious wife and children – waiting for the long arm of the law to clamp down on his shoulder?
What does it mean to be a ghost, let alone to be there, or here? There are so many ways to haunt a person, or a life.
You stare at the road and the road stares back. Leon knew that he and Marie were luckier than most citizens of the shadow country, they had each other and the RV and enough money (just barely) to survive, but the essential marker for citizenship was the same for everyone: they'd all been cut loose, they'd slipped beneath the surface of the United States, they were adrift.
You feel a lot of compassion for Leon and Marie – in their 70s, they lost all of their retirement savings (and their house) in the scheme and now chase casual work around the US in their RV – until Leon fails a moral challenge. But are rules for survival different in the shadow country?
It is possible to disappear in the space between countries.
Imagining an alternate reality where there was no Iraq War, for example, or where the terrifying new swine flu in the Republic of Georgia hadn’t been swiftly contained; an alternate world where the Georgia flu blossomed into an unstoppable pandemic and civilization collapsed.
In the most ironic nod to the notion of alternate realities, we revisit Miranda (and Leon) from Station Eleven (employees of the shipping company responsible for the spreading of the pandemic in the earlier novel), and she wonders what it might have been like if that Georgia flu hadn't been contained. While it isn't always this obvious, throughout The Glass Hotel we are confronted with branching reality: characters make decisions, choices they can't always justify afterwards, and these choices change reality for everyone else they encounter.
Against this big scenario of the Ponzi scheme (and the billions of dollars and thousands of people affected), the (mostly nonexistent) relationship between Vincent and her brother Paul plays out on the small scale, and again, it explores the very human concerns of responsibility, morality, regret, and second acts. Is Paul the worst thing he's ever done? (He doesn't do much to redeem himself, but he may have been doomed from the beginning.) Is it possible for Vincent to reinvent herself? (As the book begins with her gasping for breath in the ocean, it's hard not to think of her as doomed as well.) But as both characters use art to filter their reality into something more meaningful, that seems to bring us back to Station Eleven territory – where art is paramount "Because survival is insufficient". (And come to think of it, as Miranda in this story is too busy being a high-powered executive to create the graphic novels that were so important in Station Eleven, perhaps the main point is that the pursuit of money leads to artifice [like a hotel of glass meant to separate people from the messy reality of the world outside] whereas a more authentic human existence is required for the production of art.) I enjoyed this book at both the sentence level and the overall picture and it leaves me with plenty to think about; what else could I ask for?
No, Strafford thought, there was no sense to it. The thing was entirely implausible, and yet there it was, the deed was done, the man was dead. He felt as if he were stumbling through a snowstorm, the snow dense and blindingly white. There were others around him, also moving, dim grey ghosts, and when he reached out to touch them he grasped only an icy emptiness.
Snow begins like a straightforward murder mystery (“The body is in the library,” Colonel Osborne said. “Come this way.”), and if one were to read it as a straightforward murder mystery, one might be disappointed; the whodunnit and whydunnits are rather easily solved, and as social commentary, this doesn't really break new ground. So I was forced to ruminate on why a Booker-winning novelist like John Banville put this together (and I especially wondered why he wrote it under his own name instead of the pen name, Benjamin Black, he uses for his Quirke series of mysteries), and I came to a satisfying conclusion: This is a very self-aware and ironic piece of post-modernist writing, and while it may not serve to expose something new about the social constructs of 1950s Ireland (even if this storyline would have been absolutely explosive had it been written in the day), Banville creatively employs the tropes of mystery fiction to provide the ultimate overview of those times. Line-by-line, the writing is just exquisite, and in the large picture, something important is achieved; just don't expect a satisfying murder mystery because I honestly don't believe that was Banville's intent. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
Was he imagining it all? There was always the danger, in his job, of seeing things that weren't there, of making a pattern where there wasn't one. The policeman insists that there be a plot. However, life itself is plotless.
Detective Inspector St John Strafford is called to Ballyglass House – the Co. Wexford family seat of the aristocratic Osborne family – to investigate the death, and perhaps murder, of family friend, Fr Tom Lawless. Like the Osbornes, Strafford is from Ireland's mouldering aristocratic class – his posh boarding school accent, tailored (if shabby) clothes, and Protestant upbringing serve to distance the young detective from the locals during his investigation – and the ironic tension of this particular detective investigating the death of a Catholic priest (who happens to have been the son of a notoriously fierce fighter for independence during Ireland's recent Civil War) makes for interesting commentary on the times (I don't think I've ever read a book from this particular POV and I did find it fascinating). Add in the fact that Strafford is practically immune to the Catholic Church's efforts to control the investigation, and this does feel like an original slant on recent Irish history.
In addition to that last passage quoted, characters are forever noting that their situation feels fictional:
• Will you look at this place? Next thing Poirot himself will appear on the scene.
• Another player steps on stage, Stafford thought grimly, though this one would know his part to the last aside.
• You poor man – what you must think of us all! We must seem like the characters in one of those novels about mad people in country houses.
In addition to referencing Agatha Christie (more than once) and Banville's own character Dr Quirke (apparently away from Dublin on his honeymoon), characters freely quote from Joyce and Beckett and Shakespeare (or is that Chaucer?); the effect being a postmodern acknowledgement that we are reading a work of fiction and we are to understand that the specifics matter less than the overall effort. What Snow captures about class and power in 1950s Ireland is interesting enough to have been explored through fiction and important enough to employ these ironic effects to remind the reader that it's also the truth.
And in addition to all that, the small details in Banville's writing are so pleasurable. I especially liked the way he introduces us to characters:
The first thing everyone noticed about Sergeant Jenkins was the flatness of his head. It looked as if the top of it had been sliced clean off, like the big end of a boiled egg. How, people wondered, was there room for a brain of any size at all in such a shallow space? He tried to hide the disfigurement by slathering his hair with Brylcreem and forcing it into a sort of bouffant style on top, but no one was fooled. The story was that the midwife had dropped him on his head when he was born, but it seemed too far-fetched to be true. Oddly, he never wore a hat, perhaps on the principle that a hat would flatten his carefully fluffed-up hair and spoil the attempted camouflage.
Or:
Her skin was pinkly pale, the colour of skimmed milk into which had been mixed a single drop of blood. Her face was like that of a Madonna by one of the lesser Old Masters, with dark eyes and a long sharp nose with a little bump at the tip. She wore a beige cardigan and a calf-length grey skirt that hung a little crookedly on her hips, which were no broader than a boy's. She wasn't beautiful, Strafford thought, but all the same something in her frail, melancholy looks pressed a bell deep within him that made a soundless, sad little ping.
(In a later scene, Strafford thinks of this character, “Her skin had two shades, milk, and strawberries crushed in milk.” Love that.) Again, I wasn't captivated by the murder mystery elements (the solution is telegraphed fairly early on); but again, I don't think I was meant to be – in the end, I'm actually happy to have been underwhelmed by that aspect because it made me stop and really think about what Banville was trying to say. Turns out: it was quite a lot and it all worked for me.
No. That won't fit. That's what I believed before imagining this situation I'm in. But tonight I am in a strange hotel and, therefore, an ulterior me. Yes, that surely makes sense. Unless, of course, in reality it doesn't. After all, it may be the case that the act of leaving him would not have left me changed. Perhaps, by my choosing to imagine coming to this place, I am merely absenting myself from what I don't know how to hear?
I loved Eimear McBride's two previous novels (A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing and The Lesser Bohemians), and for the most part, I loved them because of their charged and creative use of language and their gut-punch of emotional connection; the love was visceral, organ-deep. With Strange Hotel, the writing is still unconventional but this time is more formal; cryptic and cerebral. In contrast to the young women in her first two novels, the main character in McBride's latest is met in middle age (the author has even acknowledged that this unnamed woman could be considered one of her earlier characters, grown), and whether the more formalistic atmosphere is meant to reflect the lifestage of the character or the author's own maturation, the effect was distancing. Turns out, I read with my viscera and I want them to get punched. To be clear: Strange Hotel is still well-crafted – intelligent and purposeful – and the three stars I've awarded it reflects this book's ranking against McBride's previous novels. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
Sometimes she forgets all the places she's been until someone asks and she'll remember then. Then remember that what she's been regarding as bedrock has, in fact, acquired sediment. No, she hasn't been there once but now she has. The time for not knowing about it has passed, and often considerably, on. She likes to think this happens only about countries, allowing her to enjoy recalling that she has indeed travelled and is no longer the girl who's never been anywhere. When this happens, it's a real, and valuable, pleasure but is also not the only occasion it happens to her. She keeps so little of her past bonded close that she frequently has cause for surprise. Here lies a whole slab of your life you've completely left out in the cold. Not on purpose, out of cowardice or shame. Not, in fact, for any good reason she can name. Except there was youth and then there was later but only youth got to dig its claws in.
When we first meet the main character, she is thirty-five and checking in to a hotel in Avignon (with the ironic opening line being, “She has no interest whatsoever in France”). The narrative will eventually jump ahead five or so years at a time – and we will revisit this woman in hotel rooms in Oslo, Auckland, and Austin – and while we'll never learn what causes her to be constantly on the move (something like a hundred cities are eventually named), the settings aren't really that important when we only see these cities framed through hotel windows. What is important is that hotel rooms make this woman introspective – remembering and trying to forget events in her past, and while she's skilled enough at suppressing her memories to make the whole thing totally opaque to the reader, she will also use room-service wine and casual hookups to blot out that past. McBride makes the reader really work to find a storyline in Strange Hotel, but despite my complaint that I didn't emotionally connect with the character or the plot, there is some relief in late hints that she eventually makes peace with her personal ghosts.
The intractable belligerence of this – her memory – is what she's come to hate. How it seems to insist on a future her past has already generated. No corrections. No deviations. Or, more concisely put: a coherent path for a conciliated self – for which she lacks sufficient new evidence to justify a change. She would have once – changed – practically on a whim. But that was before her hard-won victories over the excellent carnage of being young. Nowadays it's just being again, and always again, as you always were. In bleaker moments she wonders whether her very last choice has already been made? And, whatever her disillusion with this, she cannot deny there was a stage when that was exactly how she'd wanted it. Now seems to be the time she has finally grown tired of it: this entombment in more practical, replicable versions of herself, erected on the notion that her past is a secret. And it isn't a secret. It just became the easiest version to be.
I have quoted at length to give some sense of what this book is like – as I don't have the words to describe what I found to be so maddeningly distancing in the writing – and while it is certainly a puzzle to work over, there's satisfaction in that, too. Eimear McBride is no paint-by-numbers artist, and while I wanted more of the same of what I thought I could expect from her, I can't be upset that she flexed her talents in a different direction. I will happily read whatever she comes up with next.
