Mind Picking : Happy Halloween VIII

For the past couple of years, knowing that I've told all of my strange-but-true stories here in Halloween posts already, I've been actively soliciting such stories from others; last year even seeking out my own eerie experience by going on a "Paranormal Night Paddle" with Indigenous guides and then sharing their stories here. Early this year, when our family was planning our annual trip down to Nova Scotia to visit Nan and Pop, and having Halloween in the back of my mind, I suggested that on the way back we could come through Massachusetts and visit Salem (as I've written before, I have a daughter who is interested in witchy things and has always wanted to go to Salem). And then it was March and COVID-19 became a bigger threat and the world shut down, and of course, we couldn't cross into the US and explore Salem this year. But that doesn't mean I don't have some witchy stories to share this Halloween.

It was during the early days of the shutdown that I read an article about "Randonautica", and for those not familiar with the experience, their website explains:

Randonauting is the act of using the Randonautica app to generate truly random locations sourced with quantum entropy. The user can then choose to venture to these locations to see what they find. They often discover that what they see lines up with their intention, which is what they were thinking about when they generated the point. But even if this doesn't happen, it's a way to mindfully explore the world around them. 

As the article explained, people had been having some really weird experiences: users would concentrate, forming an intention, saying to themselves, "I want to see something red" or "something interesting" or perhaps most often, "something scary". When they would then generate a "truly random" set of coordinates through the app, they would often be led to exactly what they wanted to see (even, apparently, some users being led to murder scenes). Now, being the internet, who knows what's real and what's staged, but who wouldn't want to have an interesting experience? To "mindfully explore the world"?

So I downloaded the app and set my intention for, "I want to see something witchy". I was surprised to see that the coordinates I was given were for a house just a couple of streets away, so I put the leash on the dog and went for a walk. And as we walked past this very ordinary suburban home, I opened my mind to my intention, scanned the house and yard and saw...a broom on the porch? Is that something? Was I interpreting the results too broadly in order to get a result I wanted? If nothing else, it gave me something to think about and I kept walking with the dog, mulling it over. 

When I later told my witchy daughter, Mallory, about my experience - thinking she would want to weigh in on whether or not I had had a meaningful experience - she was actually quite aghast with me. She knew about Randonautica, and from the witchy online forums she frequents, she had been warned that playing around with intention like this can be dangerous for the uninitiated. As she explained it to me, putting a request like this out into the universe requires the universe to spend energy replying; energy that it then needs to recover from the user. When someone sends out a request to see something dark or scary, the universe might provide, but it will draw out dark energies from that user. If someone wants to see something happy or positive, the universe will need to drain those positive energies from that user. Even someone like me who had a vague intention and received a vague response would have had to pay a price - and that's not something truly witchy people like to play around with.

But that doesn't mean that Mallory doesn't play. During the COVID lockdown, it was often just Mal and me at home here, and one day she came downstairs to see if I would like for her to read my tarot cards. I said sure and she set up the deck for a simple three card spread. She told me to think of a question that I'd like to have answered - as vague or as specific as I wanted - and to shuffle the deck and deal out three cards. The first card was the Two of Coins - which in Mallory's deck is represented by a male figure - and she explained that it means in the past, everything was dominated by a male energy that was interested in control and order. The next card was an upside-down Three of Coins - represented by a lone female figure, and Mallory was fascinated that these two cards came in sequence after the deck was shuffled - and she explained that since it was upside-down, that means that a female energy eventually came along and overturned the male dominance of the original card, lasting into the present. My last card was the Eight of Wands, and Mallory explained that it means that after a period of struggle, there will be rapid progression towards achieving goals and dreams in the future. I smiled at this reading and Mallory said, "You know, this isn't like a birthday wish that won't come true if you share it. You can tell me what your question was and I could help you to interpret this." I told Mal that my question was simply, "Will my girls be happy?", because that's the only question that's ever on my mind, and she got excited to point out her Dad as the male figure who dominated the family in the past (although I would question that; Dave has never been interested in dominance), me as the one who eventually overturned that status quo, and the future as looking pretty bright. As an amateur tarot reading, and especially as an essentially positive one, I'll take that. But is it something? And now, the story of an actual witch.

Instead of going to Nova Scotia this summer, we rented a cottage on a lake outside of Delta, Ontario - far enough from the crowds for our family bubble to relax together; with plenty of campfires and singalongs, swimming and kayaking and going for walks. Wanting to do something a little different one day, we decided to go for a hike at the nearby Charleston Lake Conservation Area, and on the way, check out the nearby homestead of Mother Barnes, the legendary "Witch of Plum Hollow". And here is her story:

Born the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter in County Cork at the turn of the nineteenth century, Elizabeth attributed her gift of second sight to her mother - rumoured to be a woman with Spanish Gypsy blood. Elizabeth eventually fell in love with an English military man - much to her Irish father's disapproval - so the couple eloped and ran away to Upper Canada, but not long after, the young husband died. Elizabeth then married an American shoemaker named David Barnes, but he ended up abandoning his wife and their nine children, leaving Elizabeth - now known as Mother Barnes - with only her talent for fortune telling as a means to support her large brood. But that's not quite as desperate as it sounds: Mother Barnes set up a room in her attic in which she read tea leaves, and word of her talents soon spread, attracting visitors from far and wide, and allowing her to charge twenty-five cents per reading (which was apparently quite a bit of money in the mid 1800s). Perhaps her most famous visitor was an ambitious young lawyer from Kingston who wanted to know what the future held for him, and Mother Barnes revealed that he would be the leader of a new country some day; a country whose capital would be set in the unlikely rough and tumble lumber center known as Bytown. That lawyer was John A. Macdonald, and in 1867, he would become the first Prime Minister of Canada (whose capital, Ottawa, is on the site formerly called Bytown). As her reputation for eerily accurate fortunes spread, Mother Barnes eventually became known as the Witch of Plum Hollow and she continued to read tea leaves in the attic of her log cabin - even helping the local police to solve mysteries - until her death in 1886. 

 

Knowing this much about Mother Barnes, my own family sought out her old homestead (conveniently located along Mother Barnes Road outside of Plum Hollow), and although the No Trespassing signs kept us outside of the split-rail fence, it was intriguing to connect the solid log cabin in front of us to such a fascinating legend. (I was most amazed at how small the cabin was, and especially for a family with nine children.) As we walked around the perimeter, I noticed something glinting in the hedge, and getting closer, I was bemused to notice that someone had left a crystal on a chain there as, apparently, some kind of an offering to Mother Barnes. I beckoned Mallory over and pointed a finger towards the object (fetish? amulet?), and before I could say anything, Mallory blurted out a warning, "Don't touch that, Mom. We have no idea who left that there and for what purpose." Now, I don't know to what degree I believe in witchy spells and their ability to affect me, but I wasn't going to touch anything. And in a related note: As I said above, Mother Barnes was often consulted by the local police when they had a particularly perplexing mystery, and when a man named Morgan Doxtater went missing, the Witch of Plum Hollow was able to precisely direct the searchers to where his murdered body had been dumped - in Charleston Lake. Now, I didn't know that part of her story before we decided to combine a trip to Charleston Lake with a drive past the Mother Barnes homestead, but as we went on our hike and saw the lake itself, it did feel kind of connected. But is that something?

Setting intentions and invoking hidden powers - whether with tea leaves, tarot cards, or quantum number generators - it would seem that witchy business has always been with us; perhaps always will be. We humans might be programmed to look for meaning in the randomness around us, to try to find organic ways to influence our fates and fortunes, and perhaps, in this way, we're all really witches at heart. And that feels like something. 

Happy Halloween!


Strange stories from previous years:

Halloween I

Halloween II

Halloween III

Halloween IV

Halloween V

Halloween VI

Halloween VII

Woman on the Edge

 

Icy fingers of fear run up my back despite the sweltering heat inside Grand/State station. The woman is on edge, and so am I — literally, at least. I always stand on the edge of the platform so I can be first on the train. One hard push is all it would take for me to fall onto the tracks. As bleak as the last eighteen months have been, no matter how ostracized I’ve become after Ryan’s suicide, I’ve made a new life for myself. I don’t want it to end here.

Woman on the Edge is another one of those “girl in danger” thrillers, a debut for author Samantha M. Bailey, and despite this apparently taking her six years to write, and despite the dozens of people she thanks for improving and ushering this novel into print, the whole thing comes off as hackneyed, amateurish, and unexciting. The only two redeeming qualities I can record: The premise is so ludicrous that I was compelled to keep reading to learn what Bailey thought would be a satisfying conclusion; and this is a mercifully short read. (Spoilerish — but not much beyond the book’s description — from here.)

I know what you want.
Don’t let anyone hurt her.
Love her for me, Morgan.

So, the premise: Morgan is waiting at the edge of a subway platform for her train to come when a strange woman — dishevelled and wild-eyed — approaches with a baby in her arms and thrusts it towards Morgan, calling her by name and begging her to protect her daughter, before jumping onto the tracks to her death. When the police arrive and take Morgan to the station for a witness statement, the detective who comes to interview her is the same one who investigated her husband’s recent suicide — a man who had bilked his clients (including all of Morgan’s family and friends) out of their life savings; a crime that everyone (the detective and all of Morgan’s family and friends) can’t quite believe Morgan didn’t know about and participate in. Realising that the detective now suspects that she snatched this baby before pushing the woman to her death, Morgan believes that only she can find out the truth about this woman and her motivations (despite her lawyer warning her to lay low and allow her private detective to investigate), and because Morgan is now alone in the world (all of her family, friends, and the charity she founded having cut her off) it’s really, really important for her to clear her name, and get custody of that baby.

The book is then divided into two alternating points-of-view: The timeline moves forward with Morgan as she carries out her harebrained investigation, and in alternate chapters, we meet the woman with the baby, Nicole, in the past before she became pregnant and watch as her story unspools to the point where she meets Morgan on the subway platform. If this is meant to be a mystery, the “who” and “what” are easy to anticipate, but if one is reading to learn the “why” behind any character’s behaviour, one will be sorely disappointed.

The plot is ridiculous and the line-by-line writing is worse. Someone must have told Bailey that details add authenticity, but the details she chose were a constant distraction to me. Every character’s height was recorded precisely, as in Tessa “was only five foot two but had so much inner strength” or Ben “must be around six foot three because he looms over my five foot seven frame.” Nicole was the founder and CEO of a luxury athleisurewear company, so I suppose it makes sense to telegraph her wealth by constantly name-dropping the luxury brands she surrounds herself with (Tiffany lamps, Prada luggage, a Viking range and Sub-Zero fridge), but even if she sells yoga pants and uses breathing techniques to control her anxiety, it never felt authentic for Nicole to abruptly think about her chakras:

• She could clear her heart chakra and be the mother her daughter deserved.

• Nicole had never fully balanced her third-eye chakra, the center of her deepest awareness.

• The sun rose high in the blue sky, a brilliant yellow orb, the colors of the destiny chakra. This was where she was supposed to be.

I found it distracting for Bailey to note every road and Chicago neighbourhood that people drive through, but my least favourite details were about the cars those people were driving — if it’s not important to the plot, why does this person drive a Nissan Altima and that one a Honda Civic? I get the lawyer having a "white Mercedes", I suppose, but was annoyed by Nicole getting into her “Lexus GS 350”. I don’t know what that is and cannot be arsed to Google it. And the absolute worst detail was Morgan being menaced on the road by someone in “a dark blue Prius”:

• I hear the roar of an engine revving, and the Prius speeds past me.

• She revs the engine, and the tires squeal as she jams on the gas and peels away.

• The Prius roared past her before she could get a second look.

Now, I’ve never actually been in a Prius, and I haven’t succeeded in learning if this famously silent electric vehicle actually “revs” or “roars”, but if a detail like that takes me out of the story, why couldn’t Bailey have chosen literally any other non-electric car to follow Morgan around? Couldn’t someone in the three pages of Acknowledgements have given her that feedback?

I don’t even want to get into how antifeminist this story is (Morgan and Nicole are supposedly both intelligent and driven, each founded an organisation out of passion and grit, and both are brought to their knees by their shady husbands and a sudden mania for motherhood as the only path to fulfillment), but hey, at least Morgan got butterflies when she met Nicole’s brother and decided to trust him based on that gut feeling, even if each of them suspect the other had something to do with the unhinging of Nicole; let’s squeeze in some romance, too, and try to milk a happy ending from one woman’s tragic death! I did not like this, and only because it’s not the worst book I’ve ever read, I’m rounding up to two stars.

Reality and Other Stories

 

All philosophers are trolls. No offense, Jefferson. But that’s really the whole project, isn’t it? Trolling common sense, trolling reality. What if you aren’t real, what if we don’t know what we actually know, what if all this stuff we take for granted can’t be taken for granted, and what if we ignore all the realities we act on in everyday life and instead push our thinking way past all norms and givens of observed behaviour, into this inhuman domain of pure logic, and see what messed-up and counterintuitive conclusions we can draw? I mean, that’s basically an entire discipline based on a fancy form of intellectual trolling. It’s right there at the dawn of the subject. Socrates was the first and worst. Massive, obscene troll. What if good isn’t good, what if justice isn’t justice, what if the virtues are really vices, what if nothing is real? Apart from everything else, he’s constantly contradicting himself. The dialogues are really just him trolling his mates and them being polite about it. Socrates, the original and greatest troll. He would have loved the comments section.

I read Reality and Other Stories thinking that this collection of eight short tales of “horror” would be appropriate leading up to Halloween; recognising John Lanchester as a Man Booker-nominated author further upped my interest and expectations. In the end, however, this collection is pretty weak tea: Each story focuses on some element of modern life — as the blurb promises, you can expect haunted cell phones and a demonic selfie stick — and although I did like Lanchester’s character work while setting up each unique situation, every story builds to an expectedly twisty conclusion that would make second-grade Twilight Zone or Black Mirror episodes. This passes the time, but not delightfully. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

I’m not interested in dissecting each of the eight stories but will quote chunks — and it would seem that in “chunks” is how Lanchester writes; I appreciate how long these passages are — to give a sense of the themes in Reality. There’s quite a bit of ironic humour throughout:

He hugged like a natural non-hugger who had taken professional instruction in how to overcome his instincts and hug, and then found, greatly to his own surprise, that he liked it. Which, in fact, was what he was, and the reason I know is that I gave him the course, “I Hate Hugging: Overcoming Your Fear of Intimacy Through Touch”, as a fortieth-birthday present.

And there are several stories that are from the perspective of professors (and a retired schoolteacher) that seem intended to lampoon their aura of intellectual superiority:

The first chair is an Italian macroeconomist of about my age. He spoke some sense about econometrics but then veered off into some whiffle about dialogue and conversation and paradigms. Overall, poor. He was succeeded by a female Eastern European literature professor in early middle age who had hair with a blue streak in it and purple glasses. Also bangles. There ensued a series of platitudes, falsehoods, mischaracterisations, illiteracies — an entire thesaurus of modern nonsense. The ostensible subject of her speech was the continuing contemporary importance of myth, but from the point of view of a properly trained mind — i.e. mine — there was no content at all.

And nearly every story builds to a mildly creepy scene as in the following:

I may have fallen asleep. I’m not sure. What happened next was in the margin between dreams and full consciousness. I knew where I was and what I was doing, but my volition seemed to have been dialled down so that I could not move or speak. I saw the handle of the door, directly across from where I was sitting, start to move. It was easy to tell, because it was an irregular wooden handle and the pattern of light shifted on it as it turned. The door began, very gradually, to open. The figure in the doorway was backlit from the light in the hall, and I couldn’t see its face, but I could see that it was a man. A tall man. Slowly and in complete silence, he came into the middle of the room. He was holding a phone in his right hand, and when he got to the middle of the room he lifted it up to his face. For the first time, I could see his eyes. In the reflected light of the phone, they were completely white. There was no pupil and no iris. I ordered myself to stand, but couldn’t. I felt as if there were nothing left of me but a compound of fear and helplessness.

And then come the twists — none of which jolted me from my seat. What a TV show like Black Mirror does really well is to draw a line between today’s technology and some horrifyingly plausible future use, but that’s not Lanchester’s method: half of these stories give today’s tech (cellphones, audiobooks, that stupid selfie stick) supernatural agency and the other half — more like the Twilight Zone — are set in a slightly different world (with commonplace androids, a Kafkaesque prison cell, a reality show that literally spells out its twist ending) and none of them have enough creep factor, social commentary, or genuine surprise ending to make a satisfying tale of “horror”. Again, this was a fine read, but I'd give it two and a half stars and am rounding down to two. (I wish I had remembered beforehand that I hadn't really liked Lanchester's Booker nod — The Wall — either.)

Burnt Sugar

 

I feed Ma sugar daily, and she consumes it like an addict. She becomes more like another sofa every day. No one notices this is the reason — no one makes the connection. They don’t believe in science unless it comes from the mouth of a doctor and in the form of a tablet. They don’t go to the studies, the source. Rats. Rats and mice are the key to understanding who we are as humans. What happens to a rat in ten days may happen to us in ten months or ten years, but it will happen.

At first blush, Burnt Sugar looked like an ideal fit with my interests: An examination of a difficult family dynamic, set in a culture and country foreign to me, referencing dementia, art, and the demands of motherhood. And as I read, I was always interested in (and sometimes mildly shocked by) the details that author Avni Doshi included; I was certainly never bored. But ultimately, there’s nothing very weighty or artful here — passages that appeared interesting in the moment don’t stand up on a second read through — and when I eventually learned that Doshi isn’t actually from India (she was born and raised in New Jersey, currently lives in Dubai) that seemed to explain a lot: this isn’t really an insider’s story, and even the parts that are apparently based on Doshi’s actual experiences felt written at a remove. I simply didn’t connect to this novel as much as I had hoped to. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

I suffered at her hands as a child, and any pain she subsequently endured appeared to me to be a kind of redemption — a rebalancing of the universe, where the rational order of cause and effect aligned. But now, I can't even the tally between us. The reason is simple — my mother is forgetting and there is nothing I can do about it. There is no way to make her remember the things she has done in the past, no way to baste her in guilt.

Burnt Sugar opens with a promising premise: After a lifetime of feeling neglected and abused by her mother, Antara is forced into the role of caretaker as her mother begins to suffer from early onset Alzheimer’s. The reader is asked from the beginning to consider what a young mother’s duty is to her daughter in light of her own desires, and as the roles become reversed, what are a daughter’s duties to a mother who was always prickly and whose mental deterioration is making her even more so. As the timeline shifts between the present and the past, interesting details specific to the India setting are related (baby Antara is taken from her father’s home as her mother flees to an ashram and becomes the guru’s lover; older Antara spends an abusive year at a Catholic boarding school; adult Antara spends time with her husband and friends at the Pune Club, an exclusive oasis of green in the city, built by the departed colonial-era Brits, used currently by the entitled) — and as interesting as I found these details in the moment, I have to note that reviews of Burnt Sugar by Indian readers describe these details as cliched and out-of-touch. I did like the timeshifting format here, however, as later scenes highlight the unreliability of memory (and, ultimately, the unreliability of our narrator, and perhaps, her mother, too).

But again, small passages that I found interesting in the moment didn’t add up to greater profundity, and I’m adding more than the usual number of excerpts to preserve for myself what I mean by that. On this difficult mother-daughter relationship:

Ma doesn’t know. I never told her that for a portion of my childhood I was always hungry and have been searching for some fullness ever since. Talking has never been easy. Neither has listening. There was a breakdown somewhere about what we were to one another, as though one of us were not holding up her part of the bargain, her side of the bridge. Maybe the problem is that we are standing on the same side, looking out into the emptiness. Maybe we were hungry for the same things, the sum of us only doubled that feeling. And maybe this is it, the hole in the heart of it, a deformity from which we can never recover.

On the setting of Pune:

The morning traffic collects at every corner, and Pune feels like one long bottleneck. Each eruption of horns is a torrent of bullets, and before long I am riddled. It will be winter soon and the temperature drops suddenly. Human beings need to be eased in slowly. Sudden movements lead to schizophrenia and sore throats.

On Alzheimer’s (from which, apparently, Doshi’s grandmother suffered):

The mother I remember appears and vanishes in front of me, a battery-operated doll whose mechanism is failing. The doll turns inanimate. The spell is broken. The child does not know what is real or what can be counted on. Maybe she never knew. The child cries.

On the strain her relationship with her mother puts on Antara’s marriage to a mild-mannered Indian-American:

Tonight, the silence feels alive. I am not sure if I started it, but it seems like something I would do. Doubts tumble in quickly to bury me; maybe he and I, we were never quite what I thought. I believe that if we don’t resume our conversation, if we never refer to it again, it will go away. If we never speak about Ma, she will cease to exist.

On Antara’s art (she’s a pencil drawer and her main project is a multiyear effort to copy a facial portrait every day from the portrait the day before and see how it changes from the original over time — what her mother dismisses as a game of “Chinese Whispers” and also as a “lie”; whenever an author uses an artist as the main character, I assume the “art” being described is a metaphor for the writer’s own goals and processes):

Painting was just an impression. Drawing, I saw, was the grid. Ground, walls, sky. All the things that were real yet incomprehensible. The city was changing every day, bridges, skyscrapers, new hotels. Small Portugese bungalows were being levelled to make way for malls. Everyone wanted to build up. Only I had the urge to strip down. That analysis seems laughable now. The truth is drawing was all I knew. It was automatic, something I did in my sleep. Even now my perception cannot completely fathom the wet complexity of colour. Wherever I look, I see lines.

On Antara’s own experience as a new mother (apparently based on Doshi’s experience with postpartum depression):

The street is raucous. I look around and I don’t know where I am. Has the city transformed so much since my internment? Was this the plan all along, to come together and watch me dissolve into nothing? Maybe this is the point of pregnancy, of motherhood itself. A child to undo the woman who bears it, to pull her safely apart.

I like all of those passages — and I had highlighted several more along the way — but ultimately, this novel felt inauthentic and overworked; a collection of nice passages that don’t add up to something more (and maybe that's because, like Antara, Doshi is interested in "stripping down" and "seeing the lines" or "grid"; maybe what I like is the colour and cohesiveness that paints adds?). I liked the details about life in India, but give a lot of weight to those Indian reviewers who found them cliched. I liked how the format led to thought-provoking revelations; I liked the sentence-by-sentence writing (even if some details seemed thrown in for shock value). I liked this — but a Booker finalist? That, I don’t get.

The Man Booker 2020 Shortlist

Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart

This Mournable Body by Tsitsi Dangarembga

The Shadow King by Maaza Mengiste

Real Life by Brandon Taylor

Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi

The New Wilderness by Diane Cook

I've listed the titles in the order of my own enjoyment, and although my favourite from the longlist (Apeirogon by Colum McCann) didn't make the cut, I am not unhappy that Shuggie Bain won. This is the first time in years that I didn't try to read the longlist and I'm glad I didn't bother; what an uninspiring collection overall.

The Rain Heron

 

The teenagers brought their boat to a stop. This water-risen heron was unlike any other they’d seen before — any other heron, any other living creature. Its blue-grey feathers were so pale, they claimed later, that they could see straight through the bird. Its body was pierced by strands of dusky light, and the tree was clearly visible directly behind its sharp, moist beak. A ghost, one claimed. A mirage, said another. But before they could get closer the heron hunched its neck, flapped its wings and leapt into the sky. A thick spray of water fell from its wings, far more water than could have been resting on its feathers. Then it disappeared into the remnants of the storm.

The Rain Heron begins with a fable: Heralded by the arrival of flood and black storms, sometimes this mythical bird made of cloud and rain will choose a person to attach to, granting their land the perfect conditions for a harvest of abundance. But like many fables, that of the Rain Heron contains a dark lesson: woe betide he who might seek to harm or exploit this mythical creature out of greed or spite. After this intriguing opener, author Robbie Arnott introduces us to a world gone sideways: Post ecological disaster, post resulting military coup, the residents of this unnamed country (most likely Arnott’s native Australia) are forced to make hard choices about survival (whether becoming involuntary conscripts in the military or finding ways to feed oneself while hiding from patrolling soldiers). The people on both sides are hard and impassive, but we eventually learn that everyone has a backstory, no one is the worst thing they have ever done, and while history might explain individual actions, it doesn’t excuse them: we always have a choice, and attempting to control the Rain Heron — to exploit and deplete the Earth for selfish gain — comes at a high price. Arnott’s landscape writing is lush and lyrical, even the “reality” of his post-disaster world has a hint of the fabulous to it, and as ecolit, the lesson of the Rain Heron is one we should all keep close to heart. I enjoyed the writing — from the sentences to the overall effect — very much and think this should be widely read. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

She shrugged. Men want things. They hear about something and pretty soon they’re convinced it belongs to them.

After recounting the legend of the Rain Heron, the story introduces us to Ren: a grey-haired, cave-dwelling survivalist who finds everything she needs on her patch of mountainside. But eventually, like the Nazis and their storied search for magical artefacts, whatever remote military structure is (chaotically) governing this country sends soldiers into the mountains to see if they can actually capture a Rain Heron. It’s unclear whether the Generals believe that possessing and somehow controlling the mythical bird will reverse years of countrywide drought — or whether they aim to have one simply because “men want things” — but soldiers follow orders and those that go into the mountains sow fear and wreckage and pain.

This ends when you let it.

And as I wrote above, we eventually learn the backstories for some of the characters, but ultimately, what we learn is that they ought to know better: cycles of exploitation of nature and wildlife lead to collapse; lead to putting pressures on individuals to make questionable choices (accidents are no accident) that initiate further cycles of pain and loss. If the fable of the Rain Heron is an analogy for how humanity exploits and depletes the Earth, and how the planet might fight back, the lesson truly is: we ought to know better. The temporary, immediate gain isn’t worth the longterm ecological effects. That’s the big picture stuff — which all worked for me — and I also really appreciated Arnott’s small-scale word choices:

With no river to follow the road blanded out into a long, turnless ribbon. The lack of water changed the landscape; as the hours stacked up, the pastures lost their greenness, fading into beige and hazel. They flattened, losing the humps and rocks of the foothills, and their fences straightened and strengthened, gridding the land into stiff fields. There was still no sign of people. The fields poured on, yellow and dry, and their blondness began to feel eternal. No mountains rose in the distance now, no hills, just a weak tide of golden crests undulating towards the fuzz of the horizon.

(Google Docs does not like the word “blanded” and I can’t completely picture what is meant by “fading into beige and hazel” [like the colour of hazel eyes?], but quirky/invented vocabulary always works for me.) For the most part, The Rain Heron centres on the experiences of individuals — we don’t see the workings of the military government or learn how (or exactly why) the coup played out, we only see the effects of this system on the people; we don’t see how the climate has changed, we only see the pressures this puts on individual survival — but near the end, we are shown how things are getting worse (in ways that are sadly familiar to us):

That summer millions of fish rose to the surface of the country’s largest river, bloating the banks with rot. Dry lightning licked once-wet forests into infernos. Peat fires burned underground in the marshes of the highlands, fires that might not go out for centuries. A few months later, frost entombed the roots of palm trees on the coasts. So much was ruined, either slowly or in red instants, and nothing was getting better, and nobody was doing enough about it. And through the quiet carnage of the world, I kept moving.

So, do we just keep moving through the quiet carnage of our world, business as usual, even as a pandemic tries to thin our number? I believe the lesson is: we ought to know better.

Fundamentals: Ten Keys to Reality

 

This is a book about fundamental lessons we can learn from a study of the physical world...To me, those fundamental lessons include much more than bare facts about how the physical world works. Those facts are both powerful and strangely beautiful, to be sure. But the style of thought that allowed us to discover them is a great achievement, too. And it’s important to consider what those fundamentals suggest about how we humans fit into the big picture.

In his preface to Fundamentals: Ten Keys to Reality, theoretical physicist, mathematician and Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek explains that his aim with this book is to “convey the central messages of modern physics as simply as possible” — and as valiant as his efforts seem to be, and as essentially interesting as I find the material, I’m afraid that these “central messages” conveyed “simply” did strain the limits of my comprehension. This might not be exactly the layman’s general interest science book that I hoped it would be, but Wilczek’s writing is straightforward, often engagingly personal, and he is obviously (and contagiously) filled with awe for what he does more perfectly understand about the underpinnings of reality. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

The complementarity between humility and self-respect is, I believe, the central message of our fundamentals. It recurs as a theme in many variations. The vastness of space dwarfs us, but we contain multitudes of neurons, and, of course, vastly more of the atoms that make up neurons. The span of cosmic history far exceeds a human lifetime, but we have time for immense numbers of thoughts. Cosmic energies transcend what a human commands, but we have ample power to sculpt our local environment and to participate actively in life among other humans. The world is complex beyond our ability to grasp, and rich in mysteries, but we know a lot, and are learning more. Humility is in order, but so is self-respect.

Also in the preface, Wilczek explains that as he “reflected on the material, two overarching themes occurred.” The first theme was abundance (as in the above passage) and the other was the need for humans to be “born again” in order to properly appreciate the universe (meaning to unlearn the separation between the self and the nonself that we all construct as babies). When I first studied Physics in high school, I could picture and work with the planetary model of the atom because it chimes with what is observable out in the universe; likewise, I could comprehend Newton’s explanation for gravity because of course an object falls down to earth because the planet’s mass is greater than that of an apple and exerts a greater force; these early theories of reality make sense to a brain that was trained to deal with the observable universe as filtered through human senses. But Schrodinger eventually replaced Bohr’s planetary model with one based on quantum mechanics, Einstein upended Newton with General Relativity, and modern physicists want to describe reality with mathematical equations instead of something concrete that the human mind can visualise — and I can only follow the math so far (and not leastwise because I resist the idea that all of life and mind and consciousness is an illusion sprung from an accidental area of density in a quantum field).

As for the fundamentals: They include the concepts of abundance (of space and time, matter and energy) and the fact that the universe is made up of very few ingredients, the fact that there are very few fundamental laws that govern them, and that complexity is an emergent quality of the universe’s base reality. So what does this say about humanity’s place in the universe? Early on, Wilczek quotes the ancient Greek philosopher (and first proponent of atomic theory) Democritus as having written in about 400 BC that human sensations are merely conventions, and “in truth there are only atoms and the void.” Turns out, Democritus was only wrong in thinking of atoms as the smallest units of matter.

According to our present best understanding, the primary properties of matter, from which all other properties can be derived, are these three:

Mass Charge Spin

That’s it. From a philosophical perspective, the key takeaways are that there are very few primary properties, and that they are things you can define and measure precisely. And also this: As Democritus anticipated, the connection of the primary properties — the deep structure of reality — to the everyday appearance of things is quite remote. While it seems to me too strong to say that sweet, bitter, hot, cold, and color are “conventions”, it is surely true that it takes quite some doing to trace those things — and the world of everyday experience more generally — to their origins in mass, charge, and spin.

All of matter (including us) is made up of these three properties, but “matter” itself is not the permanent state that we might imagine:

From forces we are led to fields, and from (quantum) fields, we are led to particles. From particles we are led to (quantum) fields, and from fields, we are led to forces. Thus, we come to understand that substance and force are two aspects of a common underlying reality.

And again, what does that mean about us?

Many once mysterious aspects of living things, such as how they derive their energy (metabolism), how they reproduce (heredity), and how they sense their environment (perception), (can now be understood) from the bottom up. For now we understand in considerable detail, how molecules — and ultimately, quarks, gluons, electrons, and photons — manage to accomplish those feats. They are complicated things that matter can do, by following the laws of physics. No more, and no less. These understandings do not subtract from the glory of life. Rather, they magnify the glory of matter.

Ahh, the glory of matter.

Matter, deeply understood, has ample room for minds. And so, also, it can be home to the internal worlds that minds house. There is both majestic simplicity and strange beauty in this unified view of the world. Within it, we must consider ourselves not as unique objects (“souls”), outside of the physical world, but rather as coherent, dynamic patterns in matter. It is an unfamiliar perspective. Were it not so strongly supported by the fundamentals of science, it would seem far-fetched. But it has the virtue of truth. And once embraced, it can come to seem liberating.

So, is there anything special about humans?

A special quality of humans, not shared by evolution or, as yet, by machines, is our ability to recognize gaps in our understanding and to take joy in the process of filling them in. It is a beautiful thing to experience the mysterious, and powerful, too.

I guess that’s something. I did like that Wilczek references many literary works alongside the scientific ones he cites (in particular, he seems to have a love for sci-fi: as with Robert Forward’s Dragon’s Egg or Olaf Stapledon’s Odd John), but the following didn’t quite warm my human heart:

The misery or evil of immortality is a common theme in myth and literature. The intended lesson: When it comes to longevity, be careful what you wish for. Frankly, I think this is sour grapes. The destruction of memory and learning by death is horrifying and wasteful. Extending the healthful human lifespan should be one of the main goals of science.

And I include the following just because it piqued my interest:

There is a quantity, usually written as t, which appears in our fundamental description of how change takes place in the physical world. It is also what people are talking about when they ask, “What time is it?” That is what time is. Time is what clocks measure, and everything that changes is a clock.

Again, I believe that Wilczek achieved what he set out to with Fundamentals, but having not been “born again”, I couldn’t quite get my mind wrapped around everything he laid out here; I seem stubbornly attached to reality as my senses interpret it (I can't help but prefer concepts that are analogous to those things I can see and touch), and more than that, I am stubbornly attached to the idea that there is something special about human consciousness. I do, however, wholeheartedly recommend this book — the ideas are complex but worth trying to understand; this is actually our reality after all.

The Discomfort of Evening

 

According to the pastor, discomfort is good. In discomfort we are real.

 

The Discomfort of Evening — winner of the International Booker Prize for 2020 — is a tough book to read: told from the perspective of a young girl whose family is mired in grief and ongoing tragedy, the details are focussed on the visceral, the scatalogical; there is prepubescent sexual exploration that borders on abuse; parental control and neglect and threats of suicide; animal torture and culling; bullying, desperation, isolation; so much muck and pain and ugliness that I wanted to turn away from. But centered as it is on a time and place that I wasn’t familiar with (a dairy farm in the Dutch “Bible Belt” in the early 2000s), and based somewhat on actual events from author Marieke Lucas Rijneveld’s own life, there’s an authenticity of voice and situation that drew me on. Known foremost as a poet, Rijneveld writes evocative sentences, and there’s no denying that I found the plotline compelling, but I can’t help but feeling like the author gratuitously pushed the details to the limits of what a reader could stomach (like Ottessa Moshfegh verging into Chuck Palahniuk territory) and this certainly wouldn’t be for everyone; I can’t really say that it was for me but it does feel worthwhile in the end. (Spoilery from here, but not much beyond the book’s blurb.)

I was ten and stopped taking off my coat. That morning, Mum had covered us one by one in udder ointment to protect us from the cold.

As the book opens, the main character is forced to remain at home while her beloved older brother leaves for a skating contest on the local lake, and in a moment of spite, she asks God to spare her rabbit from the Christmas dinner table and take her brother instead. When Matthies falls through a hole in the ice that day and drowns, the entire family is thrown into a state of despair that they can't move beyond. As for our main character: I didn’t learn until after I was finished that the name “Jas” (that suddenly appears about halfway through the book) is actually Dutch for “coat or jacket” and is mockingly used for this little girl who refuses to take off the red winter coat that she had been wearing the last time she saw Matthies alive. For the next two years, Jas — suffering from burdensome magical thinking ever since the bargain with God that killed her brother — will fill her coat pockets with totems and artefacts meant to keep the rest of her family safe. As people at school and out in the community begin to remark on the stink of the coat (and the bizarreness of it being worn day after day), it was a wonder to me that Jas’ parents didn’t even seem to notice it — but then again, neither of them seem to notice much beyond their own pain:

Mum is growing limper, just like the frozen beans. Sometimes she lets things fall from her hands and blames us. I said the Lord’s Prayer five times today. The last two times I kept my eyes open to keep watch on everything around me. I hope Jesus understands — cows sleep with one eye open so they can’t suddenly be attacked. I can’t help being more and more afraid of everything that could take me by surprise in the night: from a mosquito to God.

As farming members of a rural Dutch Reformed Church, the family has always lived modestly and frugally (and attended church services regularly; three times on Sundays), but following Matthies’ death, even small treats are banished from the home. When the mother stops eating, Jas and her remaining brother and sister start performing bizarre “missions” meant to keep their parents alive (while Jas and Hanna secretly dream of a Rapunzel-style rescue to “the other side”). When foot-and-mouth disease then ravages Holland and the family’s dairy herd must be destroyed, even the stolid patriarch is finally brought low:

He asks me if I still remember the story of the man who got on his bike one day and rode to the edge of the world. As he was cycling he discovered that his brakes didn’t work, which was a relief to him because now he couldn’t stop for anything or anyone. The good man cycles off the edge of the world and tumbles and tumbles, the way he’s been tumbling all his life, but now there’s no end to it. That’s what death will feel like — like an endless fall without getting back up again, without plasters. I hold my breath. The story has frightened me a bit. Hanna and I folded bottle tops around the spokes of Dad’s bike so he couldn’t secretly go after the man. I didn’t realize until later that Dad was the man. Dad was the one tumbling.

The parental neglect that Jas suffers, compounded by her own grief and guilt and need to protect her remaining family members, results in chronic constipation, ritualistic self-abuse, and some obsessive sexual curiosity and experimentation (there is plenty of snot and poop and pus and [mostly bull] semen in these pages). Her older brother and younger sister are also flailing and acting strangely, but with childish naivete and magical thinking, Jas believes that the items in her pockets (and the infected pin in her belly button and the bucket of toads under her desk) will somehow keep the family intact:

We still have our missions which have been keeping us on our feet until now, even though Obbe’s half lying on the damp earth, looking back at me, unmoved. I shuffle my welly awkwardly back and forth over the ground and become aware of goose bumps on my arms. The elastic of my pyjama bottoms is baggy around my waist. Obbe jumps to his feet; there’s still a trace of tears on his face. He pats the mud from his striped pyjamas. The thing that moves us will finally cause us to fall apart like a chunk of crumbly cheese.

I learned after finishing The Discomfort of Evening that, like Jas, the author was raised on a dairy farm, was a member of the strict Dutch Reformed Church, and lost an older brother as a child. I have no idea if Rijneveld’s family suffered to the degree described in the novel (I will note that foot-and-mouth disease did strike the Netherlands in early 2001 and must have added stress on their farm), but as off-putting as the details are, the overall story is affecting and relatable; Jas’ voice is credibly childlike and evoked a maternal protectiveness in me — even if the story also evoked disgust and, yes, discomfort. Perhaps, in the end, even if I didn’t much like this book, I wasn’t meant to; perhaps being made to feel anything in this cynical world is a success.

Every loss contains all previous attempts to hang on to something you didn’t want to lose but had to let go of anyway, from a marble bag filled with the most beautiful marbles and rare shooters, to my brother. We find ourselves in loss and we are who we are — vulnerable beings, like stripped starling chicks that fall naked from their nests and hope they’ll be picked up again.

 

Shuggie Bain

 

“Whit’s yer name, wee man?”
“Hugh Bain,” he said in a shy voice. “Shuggie.”
“Is that a dolly ye’ve got, Shuggie?” The boy was using his name like he had known him a long while. Without waiting for an answer he added, “Are ye a wee girl?” He stepped into the long grass, flattening it as he came.
Shuggie shook his head again.
“If ye’re no’ a wee girl then ye must be a wee poof.” He tightened his smile. His voice was low and sweet like he was talking to a puppy. “Ye’re no a wee poof, are ye?”
Shuggie didn’t know what a poof was, but he knew it was bad. Catherine called Leek it when she wanted to hurt his feelings.

Set in and around Glasgow from 1981 to 1992, Shuggie Bain is the coming-of-age story of a sweet little boy with everything stacked against him: An abusive, womanising, mostly absent father; a proud but hopeless mother who finds relief in pull-ring cans of foamy lager; older siblings who are intent on escape; and with no food in the larder, a burdensome sense of responsibility for his Mammy’s welfare, and surrounded by the tough and wild children of unemployed coal miners, Hugh “Shuggie” Bain doesn’t understand why he is always centered out as “different” — but his tidy clothes, correct grammar, and swishy walk might have something to do with it. This could have been a terribly miserable read — beyond the hungry and neglected Bain children, there are many scenes of abuse and pain and despair — but little Shuggie never gives up on his mother, Agnes, and whether or not he can eventually save her from her demons and herself, the reader is constantly rooting for Shuggie; he is a pure ray of sunshine breaking through the gloomy Glaswegian smirr. Like Trainspotting, Shuggie Bain explores the devastating economic and social consequences of Margaret Thatcher’s domestic policies on the Scottish working class, and it is this social commentary, coupled with the intensely real relationship between wee Shuggie and his poor Mammy, that makes this a compelling and emotional read.

The pair drank in silence and watched the others go about their normal routines. Mr Darling kept his thick tweed coat on. The weight of him on the bed rolled Shuggie into his broad side. From the corner of his eye Shuggie watched the yellow tips of his thick fingers stab nervously at themselves. Shuggie had only taken a mouthful of the lager to be gracious, and as the man spoke to him, he could think only about the tinned ale, how sour and sad it tasted. It reminded him of things he would rather forget.

Shuggie Bain opens in the year 1992: When we first meet him, Shuggie is 17, living alone in a squalid bedsit, working at a supermarket, and dreaming of attending hairstyling college. After a very short introduction, the story rewinds to 1981, and seven-year-old Shuggie and his family are living in a highrise tenement with his mother’s parents. Things seem crowded and chaotic, but recognisable as a form of “normal family life”. The disjointedness between the timelines begs the question: how did wee Shuggie go from here to there? (It was to answer that question and to ensure that Shuggie never loses his shine that kept me glued to these pages with my heart in my throat.) The next chapter is set in 1982 and sees the Bain family relocated to Pithead — a cheap housing scheme in Glasgow’s suburbs, built for miners and their families, now filled with unemployed men and their disappointed wives; all drinking away their weekly welfare benefits as their children run wild:

The Glasgow to Edinburgh train seemed like a toy in the distance as it charged through the wasteland that separated the miners from the world. It created an unseen boundary, and it never ever stopped. Years ago the council had ripped out the only station, for big savings in stationmaster wages. They laid on a single bus that came three times a day and took an hour to get anywhere. Now, in the evenings, the eldest of the miners’ sons stood at the train tracks with beers and bags of glue and watched with sadness and spite the happy faces roar by every thirty minutes. They fondled their cousins’ tits under baggy Aran jumpers and ran across the tracks in front of the speeding train, their soft hair whipped by the near miss. They threw bottles of piss at the windows, and when the driver let fly his angry horn, they felt seen by the world, they felt alive.

It is in Pithead that Agnes’ flirtation with alcoholism becomes a full-on love affair, and it is her youngest child, Shuggie, who takes off her black, strappy heels and tummy-binding tights when she passes out at night; Shuggie who wipes the sick from his Mammy’s mouth in the morning and brings her cups of tea and water and the warm dregs of last night’s beer; Shuggie who skips school on welfare day to make sure Agnes has money enough to still the pain in her shaking bones. And you could almost despise Agnes for what she puts her children (and especially Shuggie) through if there weren’t scenes of her being handled roughly by men (and especially by her second husband, Big Shug) — there are no excuses for her neglect, but there is something by way of explanation. Throughout everything, Shuggie adores his beautiful and elegant mother and vows to stay by her side “until she gets better”.

She was no use at maths homework, and some days you could starve rather than get a hot meal from her, but Shuggie looked at her now and understood this was where she excelled. Everyday with the make-up on and her hair done, she climbed out of her grave and held her head high. When she had disgraced herself with drink, she got up the next day, put on her best coat, and faced the world. When her belly was empty and her weans were hungry, she did her hair and let the world think otherwise.

In the Acknowledgements, author Douglas Stuart indicates that this novel is autobiographical to some degree — and I think that that explains the things I liked best and least about Shuggie Bain. On the plus side, the storyline is completely believable and affecting and Stuart paints a perfect picture of 1980s Glasgow and its inhabitants; even the dialect seems genuine (to my ear anyway) without being a strain to decipher and the socioeconomic realities are shown, not told. On the other hand, there were quite a few scenes that made for interesting/disturbing vignettes but which didn’t add to the larger story — Lizzie’s confession in the hospital ward or Shuggie making a lone friend in Annie, but she is never mentioned again — and they left me wondering if these were events in the author’s life that felt singular enough to include for authenticity’s sake, but which couldn’t then be woven into a bigger picture. I hope I included enough variety in the quotes to give a sense of Stuart’s fine writing (for a debut novel by someone with a career in a different field, the writing is never amateurish), and while I was never distracted by clumsiness, I was never wowed by inventiveness either. I do want to stress once more: Shuggie and Agnes and their relationship was absolutely compelling and believable and I read, breathless and glassy-eyed, with a burning need to learn how it all would end. That journey was more than worth any of my small complaints.

The Man Booker 2020 Shortlist

Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart

This Mournable Body by Tsitsi Dangarembga

The Shadow King by Maaza Mengiste

Real Life by Brandon Taylor

Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi

The New Wilderness by Diane Cook

I've listed the titles in the order of my own enjoyment, and although my favourite from the longlist (Apeirogon by Colum McCann) didn't make the cut, I am not unhappy that Shuggie Bain won. This is the first time in years that I didn't try to read the longlist and I'm glad I didn't bother; what an uninspiring collection overall.