Through the Glass

 

My mind flashed back to the previous winter, when a stone had flown up and hit my windshield as I was driving along the highway. I had had just a split second to think, “Maybe the whole windshield won’t crack,” then watched helplessly as a deep fracture snaked its way across the entire glass. I had been as powerless then to stop the damage as I was now.

 

In February of 2003, Shannon Moroney met her future husband Jason Staples, and after an instant attraction, on their first coffee date, Jason told Shannon (as he was legally obliged to do) that he was a parolee, having spent ten years in prison for a murder he committed when he was eighteen. As Shannon got to know Jason better, she could not reconcile this “gentle giant” with the crime he confessed to, and after meeting with his parole officer and prison counsellor, she was assured that Jason’s crime was a one-off; an inexplicable and impulsive act of an immature adolescent; Jason had been a model, repentant prisoner and was well on his way to becoming an asset to the community. With the blessing of her family and friends — who were all apprised of Jason’s past and believed him to now be a safe and stable, loving and supportive man — the pair were married two years later. Within one month of the wedding, Shannon would be informed by a police officer that while she was away at a work conference, Jason had kidnapped and brutalised two women. Through the Glass is Shannon Moroney’s account of this experience: her efforts to understand what snapped in Jason; their frustrating experiences with the Canadian Justice, Mental Health, and Prison systems — and through her own experience of feeling further victimised by these systems, which offer no support for the families of offenders, how she furthered her education and became a world-travelling public speaker and an advocate for restorative justice. This account is heartfelt and well-written — Moroney continually and empathetically prioritises the experience of the women who were the victims of her husband’s violence while trying to explain all that he caused her to lose as well — and her story brings forward many interesting and debatable questions; as a book club pick, I’m looking forward to our discussion.

It was becoming clear what many people now wanted from me. It was a pattern I’d see over and over in the months and years to come. They wanted — sometimes even demanded — for me to walk away from Jason and never look back. To them it was simple and clear-cut: Jason was evil. Therefore, I should shun him, ostracize him, eliminate him from my life, mind and heart to prove I wasn’t like him and to prove that I was on their side — the side of “good”. Any other action from me — any attempt to understand the nuances of his mind, the motives behind his actions and the deeper reasons that led him to commit such heinous crimes — was to these people a betrayal and made me guilty by association.

I see a lot of reviewers saying that they know that Jason Staples was a smooth-talking psychopath who fooled this woman and her family into thinking he was a reformed man; that they all should have known better than to invite him into their lives; that he was obviously, after ten violence-free years on the outside, just waiting to pounce. But Shannon Moroney tells a different story: the story of a kind and gentle man who could not explain what snapped in him when he took a woman’s life at eighteen; could not explain what “darkness” swept over him when he abducted first one woman, and then a second while Shannon was out of town. She knew that Jason had been adopted as a baby (so they had no family medical history to go by), and although she knew her husband had been devastated by his adoptive father’s death when Jason was six, and that he found it challenging to be raised by a mother with bipolar disorder, it wasn’t until he was back in prison that Jason revealed the sexual abuse he had experienced while growing up. Shannon had relied on the expert opinions of Jason’s parole officer and prison counsellor when they assured her that he suffered no mental illness, but she would eventually learn that over his ten years in the Kingston Penitentiary, Jason had received no detailed assessments or therapy, and by keeping his head down and avoiding trouble, was successful at concealing the demons that tormented him. While waiting long months for Jason to appear in court, Shannon even discovered that the same mix of caffeine pills and ephedrine that Jason had been self-medicating with while she was away at that conference had been linked to psychosis. There’s no reason to believe that Shannon could have predicted her husband’s violent behaviour, and as he appeared to be just as confused and devastated (Jason called the police the night of his crimes, told them where to find the women, and made a full confession), Shannon decided to advocate for Jason; to see him through the criminal proceedings and attempt to understand what happened.

In no way could you compare Shannon’s experience with that of Jason’s victims, but this is her story and she suffered losses as well: She lost her job as a school guidance counsellor (one of the students at the school was the stepson of one of the victims and Shannon’s principal didn’t think he should have to see her there); she lost friends; she lost financial security and a feeling of belonging to the community; and she lost her husband and the future they had planned together — none of these losses were due to any of Shannon’s actions, but despite being diagnosed with PTSD and suffering in countless ways, her position as the spouse of a violent offender made her eligible for none of the programs and supports offered to victims of crime. (And while I see a lot of one star reviews calling this “poor me” whinging that minimises the experiences of Jason’s actual victims, I thought that Moroney successfully balanced being sensitive to these women’s pain while trying to highlight the areas where systems failed her.)

I was realizing that forgiveness was a decision I would have to revisit over and over. It was turning out to be a process, not a single act. Forgiveness neither erased nor diminished the magnitude of Jason's violence and its continuing ripple-effect. It didn't take away the anger, frustration or loss I felt about what he'd done, and it couldn't bring back the life I'd had with him. What forgiveness did do was remind me that there was a human being behind the violence, and that his heinous acts did not represent the sum of who he was. Forgiveness gave me the permission to see and know both aspects of Jason, to be enormously angry and pained by his violent acts, but also to let go of that anguish before it took complete control over my mind and heart. Forgiveness stopped rage from becoming resentment, and it released me from having every aspect of my character and the life I still had ahead from being bound to Jason's violence. Forgiveness put my life back into my own hands.

Who knows what led to Jason’s violent relapse — I’ll certainly never know — but I think that Through the Glass adds valuable insider evidence to the conversation around prison reform (and especially the need for better therapy for those offenders who will be on the streets again one day; that’s in everyone’s best interest). But more than that, it highlights where systems failed Shannon Moroney: as the wife of a violent offender, everyone from Police Victims Services and the Crown Attorney to her school board and insurance company treated her like an accomplice; and with Canada having one of the highest incarceration rates in the “developed” world, that implies the existence of thousands upon thousands of prisoners’ family members similarly left without needed resources and supports. Moroney’s story sounds like it could happen to anyone and I wish her experience on no one. This was a good read that gave me plenty to think about.

Similar reads:

This Is Not My Life: A Memoir of Love, Prison, and Other Complications
(Diane Schoemperlen writes about her relationship with a parolee)

A Mother's Reckoning: Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy
(Sue Klebold writes about her son Dylan; one of the Columbine High School shooters)

The Light of the Midnight Stars

 

I want to bar myself,
from the light
of the midnight stars.
I have no one else to turn to.
Perhaps if I step out
onto the balcony
and fall,
a star will catch me.

 

I don’t know if I gave The Light of the Midnight Stars a completely fair shake: I started it just before my life got busy again, and when I realised that it was kind of a YA Fantasy Romance, I wasn’t eager to keep picking it up again; I spent way too long with this and it wasn’t entirely the book’s fault. I didn’t love specific aspects of the formatting (and especially the repetition of plotpoints, and of motifs from folklore), and being told from the rotating POVs of three very different sisters, I unevenly connected with them and their stories. But when I sat down to finally finish the last two hours of this book, things started coming together, and in the end, I found myself touched by this family and their fates. I can see how this novel would provide amazing representation for the right reader (especially at the intersection of Jewish, queer, and female), and I may well have enjoyed it more if I had had the time to read it more quickly, but for me it’s a three and a half star read, rounded down. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

I have begun to write my own story in these pages. The story I will tell my children.
About a girl who fell in love with a star.
About a girl whose heart was made of fire.
About a girl who found a way to plant herself in the earth and grow.

Set in the Kingdom of Hungary in the fourteenth century, we first meet the three adolescent sisters — Hannah, Sarah, and Levana — as they negotiate fairly ordinary lives as the daughters of a respected Rabbi in their multiethnic town of Trnava. Each of the daughters enjoys a special, magical gift (based on the kabbalah and Jewish folklore), and while Hannah is a healer, Sarah can control fire, and Levana can read the stars, they are careful to hide these powers from their gentile neighbours and avoid accusations of witchcraft. When a killing Black Mist descends on first the surrounding forest and then the town itself, Trnava’s Jewish population finds itself scapegoated and persecuted, and the sisters flee with their parents to nearby Wallachia; a region famous for its freedom of religion, but where the Rabbi decides to keep his family safe by posing as Christians. Hidden gifts, hidden desires, hidden identities: the second half of this book is about three scared and broken young women (and to a lesser extent, their peripheral parents) and their efforts to learn to live and love again.

Some evil is so unspeakable that the only way we can fight it is by telling a story. Over and over again, until history stops repeating itself.

As for the formatting: Author Rena Rossner explains in an afterword that while researching her own grandmother’s ancestry, she came across numerous legends, fairy tales, and authentic historical records from the medieval Kingdom of Hungary and she pretty much used all of it in this novel, as stories she’s telling us and as stories that characters tell each other. Events will occur in one of the sister’s lives, and then at some later point, that sister will recount the events to someone else with a “Once upon a time” telling, and the details repeat over and over. And as for the repeating motifs: There are so many twins and dragons and foxes eating grapes, sentient stars falling from the sky and pregnant women walled up in monasteries, and I truly didn’t understand why everything repeats in this way (unless it’s commentary on the repetition of violent antisemitism throughout history? The creeping Black Mist from Part One can be read as a magical dragon attack from local folklore, the Black Death, or antisemitism; in any case, the Jews are certain to be blamed and purged; be forewarned about some shocking violence in this tale.)

There is no good and evil, no light and dark, no man or woman. Every one of us contains multitudes. Every one of us contains a spark of God.

But this isn’t a totally bleak novel, and as I said, I ultimately found the story touching. I feel like maybe Rossner tried to put too much of her research into her final effort — it felt, for sure, like far too much was going on in Sarah’s story (some from folklore, some from the historical record; a weird, unconvincing mashup) — but again, maybe I just didn’t give this book the chance to carry me away. Definitely, I can see how this would appeal to the right readers.

Agnes Grey

 

How delightful it would be to be a governess! To go out into the world; to enter upon a new life; to act for myself; to exercise my unused faculties; to try my unknown powers; to earn my own maintenance, and something to comfort and help my father, mother, and sister, besides exonerating them from the provision of my food and clothing; to show papa what his little Agnes could do; to convince mamma and Mary that I was not quite the helpless, thoughtless being they supposed. And then, how charming to be entrusted with the care and education of children! Whatever others said, I felt I was fully competent to the task: the clear remembrance of my own thoughts in early childhood would be a surer guide than the instructions of the most mature adviser. I had but to turn from my little pupils to myself at their age, and I should know, at once, how to win their confidence and affections: how to waken the contrition of the erring; how to embolden the timid and console the afflicted; how to make Virtue practicable, Instruction desirable, and Religion lovely and comprehensible.

I picked the long-overlooked Agnes Grey from my bookshelf as an impulsive, short Valentine’s Day read; and while I can see that the pious writings of Anne Brontë — the youngest and least celebrated of the Brontë sisters — might be regarded as old-fashioned and moralising to a twenty-first century audience, I also believe that this is an important early work of feminism, classism, and animal rights. Based on her own experiences as an ill-used governess, Anne exposed in Agnes Grey how shabbily those with money (whether nouveau-riche or titled gentry) treated those educated young women whose circumstances and narrow options drove them to seek such “situations”; and her barbs must have hit their mark in the day if this was both a popular work and dismissed by the upper class as “coarse” and “vulgar”. Like Anne, the character of Agnes Grey is presented as the daughter of a poor clergyman (which explains her frequent sermonising), but unlike Anne — who would die, unmarried, at the age of twenty-nine — Agnes’ selfless work and devout religiosity leads to love and rescue; Agnes at long last gets the happily ever after that Anne could only dream of; Valentine’s Day read redeemed. I would give this a 3.5 and am rounding down against Anne’s only other novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.

When Agnes’ father makes some poor investments and then suffers ill health to the further impoverishment of his family, the eighteen year old excitedly, and naïvely, offers to hire herself out as a governess. The first family Agnes is engaged by, the Bloomfields, want her to instruct their three eldest children: seven year old Tom, six year old Mary Ann, and four year old Fanny. These children are hellions: sadistic and wild, kicking, spitting, screeching brats, and Agnes is expected to teach them Latin, art, and music while never raising voice or hand to them; never rebuking, restraining, or daring to break their fine spirits. Tom is particularly brutish and Agnes has no power to correct his more amoral actions when they are approved of by his parents:

“Papa knows how I treat them, and he never blames me for it: he says it is just what he used to do when he was a boy. Last summer, he gave me a nest full of young sparrows, and he saw me pulling off their legs and wings, and heads, and never said anything; except that they were nasty things, and I must not let them soil my trousers: and Uncle Robson was there too, and he laughed, and said I was a fine boy.”

After failing to impart much of her own education to these imps, Agnes is let go after a year but implores her mother to find her another such post. Next, Agnes is hired as governess by the Squire Murray; and while at first she is tasked with educating their four teenaged children, the two sons are eventually sent off to boarding school and Agnes is left in charge of the budding coquette Rosalie and the cussing tomboy Matilda; neither of whom being the least interested in Agnes’ lessons. This position is further from Agnes’ family, and while she is able to go home for the summer and Christmas breaks, she is so very lonely: disregarded by everyone at the Murray estate and the nearby town; being more than an “upper servant”, yet less than a peer, the only connection she has with people of her own station is when she receives a letter from home.

Though I had many spare minutes during the day, I seldom could look upon an hour as entirely my own; since, when everything was left to the caprices of Miss Matilda and her sister, there could be no order or regularity. Whatever occupation I chose, when not actually busied about them or their concerns, I had, as it were, to keep my loins girded, my shoes on my feet, and my staff in my hand; for not to be immediately forthcoming when called for, was regarded as a grave and inexcusable offence: not only by my pupils and their mother, but by the very servant, who came in breathless haste to call me, exclaiming “You're to go to the school-room directly, mum — the young ladies is WAITING!!” Climax of horror! actually waiting for their governess!!!

I like that sass. Agnes eventually makes her first friend with the new curate at the village church — the kind if plain-looking Edward Weston being her social, spiritual, and educational equal — and although it seems obvious that Agnes and Edward would make a perfect romantic/practical match, between Agnes being unable to declare her interest and availability, the curate’s responsibilities which keep him mostly occupied, and the mischievous Misses Murrays who conspire to make sport of him, it is not obvious if Agnes’ blossoming affections will be returned.

Here I pause. My Diary, from which I have compiled these pages, goes but little further. I could go on for years, but I will content myself with adding, that I shall never forget that glorious summer evening, and always remember with delight that steep hill, and the edge of the precipice where we stood together, watching the splendid sunset mirrored in the restless world of waters at our feet — with hearts filled with gratitude to heaven, and happiness, and love — almost too full for speech.

I liked what the gentle Anne had to say about the treatment of animals: whether referencing birds, cats, dogs, or horses, you could always judge a character by the way they treated living things, and I appreciated that Agnes was never quiet when she witnessed abuse. I liked what Agnes’ story reveals about the shoddy treatment of governesses in the nineteenth century, as well as the circumstances that might force a young woman to have considered such an unappreciated career. (Further to that, Anne exposes the treatment of women in the upper classes and their choices and circumstances were likewise constrained by the men around them.) This wasn’t a complicated or twisty plot, but as an effort at social realism, I imagine it must have landed like a bombshell in its day. And in the end, I was delighted that Agnes got her happily ever after, even if that wasn’t to be the fate of her creator.

The Echo Wife

 

This, tonight, this would be what I was remembered for. This would be the focus of my eulogy. Not the other thing, not the shameful disaster that my life had briefly become thanks to Nathan. No one would be talking about that — about Nathan and his weakness. It would be this, just this, my work and my research and my success. I lifted a hand to tuck a strand of hair behind my ear, then arrested my arm in the middle of the movement, Nathan’s voice ringing through my memory. Don’t fidget. You look exactly like your mother when you fidget.

 

First of all: Don’t read the blurb for The Echo Wife if you decide to pick this up; it gives away far too much of the initiating premise that author Sarah Gailey spends several chapters building up to slowly. This is not exactly the “non-stop thrill ride” that that blurb promises, but the plot does have a lot of twists that I didn’t see coming and I was often delighted to be surprised. And while it is about a scientist, I really wouldn’t consider this sci-fi (and for the most part, the sciencey bits don’t really hold up and you have to just go with it). Ultimately, The Echo Wife uses a scientific “what if?” to examine questions of agency, identity, gender roles, and what makes us human; what makes us us. This was a quick and interesting read, and while the plot might not bear much scrutiny, I appreciate what Gailey was going for here. Spoilers (but not beyond those found in the blurb) beyond this point. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

She was made for this, and looking at her now was a stark reminder of how different she was from me, and the awful truth that every difference was on purpose. There were no coincidental differences between us. Anything I admired about her was, by necessity, something I found lacking in myself. I had to hate her just a little if I was going to survive any of this, because if I truly believed she was better than me, it meant that Nathan had been right to make her. If Martine was better than me, Nathan had been right to stop loving me.

Evelyn Caldwell is an award-winning scientist, a pioneer in the field of human cloning. She also became divorced recently when she discovered that her husband (and one time research partner) had stolen her own methods in order to start a relationship with a clone of herself; one with all of her own sharp edges smoothed over. At first I found that concept sort of sweet — conceivably, Nathan could have created any fantasy sexbot but what he wanted was the woman he married, but more available — but as the story goes along the concept becomes more and more horrifying: Nathan wanted a clone of Evelyn in order to control and debase the woman who had turned out to be more brilliant and successful than he; by using Evelyn’s patented “Caldwell Method”, Nathan was able to create a version of her that was programmed to please, to never fight back, to want the children that Evelyn disdained.

As the plot progresses, there are flashbacks to Evelyn’s childhood and we meet her brilliant but violent and controlling father, and the mother who taught her how to tiptoe and cringe around him. We can recognise that these two influences are at war within Evelyn — she wants to be strong and respected like her father, but without the hornet’s barb, and she’s constantly telling herself not to fidget or apologise like her mother would — and when she meets her clone, Martine, Evelyn realises that this kind and patient version of herself could have been her own fate with different childhood influences. I found all of these bits interesting.

I told myself that it was a question of choice, of agency. A clone getting pregnant wasn’t just wrong because it felt strange. It was wrong because, no matter how much Martine developed her own personality and desires, she didn’t have a right to them. She was a made thing. She was a tool, and tools don’t have the right to decide how they’re used.

Evelyn is used to thinking of the clones she creates as being disposable tools — used as body doubles, organ farms, or research subjects before dispassionately euthanising and cremating them — and she is offended by Martine’s attachment to the baby she’s carrying; even if Martine thinks and acts like a person, is genetically identical to a person, Evelyn refuses to grant her personhood. Ultimately, this gets tied back to Evelyn’s parents and how her father had effaced her mother’s personhood, and I found all of this interesting, too. Once again it's like reliving the war between Evelyn's parents, and thanks to Nathan's efforts, there's a version of her out there where the mother's personality has taken control; it's to Evelyn's shame that dealing with Martine sees her father's personality taking control of herself. 

Again: the details of the plot and the science behind the making and programming of these clones don’t hold up to scrutiny, but I was open to being entertained and this unpredictable, and somewhat thought-provoking, story fit the bill.

Wild Swims

 

On my way out I read the sign with the commandant’s regulations. It didn’t say anything about not swimming in the moat. Once in a while somebody must jump in, I thought. Wild swims are becoming increasingly popular across Europe. I’ve heard of a British woman, for instance, who managed to swim her way up through a large lake system somewhere in the middle of England. Every midsummer night she was out swimming, and I imagine her fighting her way up salmon ladders and into still waters. ~ Wild Swims

I hadn’t heard of the current Instagrammable phenomenon of “Wild Swimming” (apparently, simply the act of swimming in any natural body of water) before I read this book, but having googled the title and reading the extra information that incidentally came up, I can see that this makes for a brilliant (English) title for this collection of short stories. The main pushback against the trend of Wild Swimming is that it’s mostly indulged in by wealthy, white urbanites — people so removed from the natural world that they fetishise and valorise acts that their poorer, rural neighbours enjoy as routine and accessible — and throughout the fourteen (very) short stories in Wild Swims, we meet a variety of characters (who might well all be privileged, white urbanites) who all seem to be suffering from modern forms of disconnection: from themselves, from their partners, from decency. Author Dorthe Nors frequently shocks her characters with memories bubbling up coldly, as from an underground spring, to add discomfort to their current placidity; the past and present shift seamlessly over the course of brief paragraphs and sentences, and the writing is not so much stream-of-consciousness as swirl-of-ponderence. Characters are fully fleshed with precisely captured moments, the narratives are unpredictable but credible, and the situations made me wince and snort and sigh as people attempted to, as in the title story, fight their way up salmon ladders in search of still waters. (I will note that in the original Danish, this collection was titled “Kort over Canada” — which I translated as “A Map of Canada” — and as the character from Pershing Square has a fantasy of pretending to be Canadian based on stereotypes about the country as dull and decent, I’d say, as a Canadian myself, that’s a type of disconnect from reality, too.) I don’t believe I’ve read a Danish author before, but as these stories are set all over the world, I don’t know if there’s anything pointedly Danish about them (note: the story Hygge made me quite uncomfortable, so that’s a disconnect from the stereotype that felt nicely ironic), and I would love to read more from Nors. This collection provided an enriching, if too brief, reading experience.

From here, I’ll just give a flavour of the writing with unfairly out-of-context quotes. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

First she won all the battles, then he positioned himself squarely on her side. In that way, he stopped losing, and she tired of scrutinizing him. ~ In a Deer Stand

She stood there and the light went right through her, that’s the way I remember it. How the sun caused her physical form to cease. On the broad white expanse she cast a sharp shadow and I stood opposite her, not alone. ~ Sun Dogs

It was as we were sitting on the couch, me with her free hand on my trouser knee and her with her eye on the Baileys, that she said, “We’re good friends , aren’t we? I know I’m stupid,” she said, “and it can’t be easy for you with all your brains to go around with someone like me,” she said. “So can’t we just be cozy ?” ~ Hygge

She’s thinking about him and what he said — that it wasn’t love. It couldn’t be, he’d said, and here she’d gone and felt precisely as if it were. ~ By Sydvest Station

When I turned off the light, it began to come over me. I lay on my back, arms a bit out to the sides, legs heavy, relaxed. My body felt good, I sank down into the soft mattress, and a short while later the bed was no longer a bed but bare earth. Thin vegetation grew up around and through me. That’s what it felt like. It was a chilly day, far from Boston, there was water nearby, and then the bird came. It perched on one of my ribs. Then it started to peck the flesh from my breastbone. It was a quiet act of devotion, and the sky above me was no longer local but some vast firmament, and I disappeared into it. ~ Between Offices

It’s dawned on her that while it lasted, she was really two people at the same time. One who was as if possessed by love, and one who walked alongside, silent and observing, and sometimes the two would have arguments that the observer always lost, because love bears all things, endures all things, but if I have not love, the lover screamed, I am clanging brass, a sounding cymbal, and the observer made a mental note that horror vacui might be what gets the country’s church bells to ring. ~ The Fairground

There was some lighthearted confusion a little while later when Anja kissed me back by the outdoor shower. It wasn’t a good kiss. The yellow flowers on the sleeves of her dress seemed to be elsewhere beneath my hands. ~ Compaction Birds

The entire drive home she thought about an episode of Dr. Phil she’d once seen. It featured a woman not unlike herself. She sat on stage and lamented the fact that men rejected her because she was intelligent. Dr. Phil affirmed this without hesitation. Then the woman said it was wrong and unfair . Then Dr. Phil asked, “But do you want to be right, or do you want to be happy?” Whereupon the audience applauded wildly. ~ Pershing Square

Nobody else was home, but she wanted the lights off, so it was lucky it was summer. He was able to push her far enough to the left on the pillow that the light from the window struck her. There she lay like a pale blotch in the midsummer night, and he removed her glasses. The stripped, absent face excited him, and while her gaze fluttered about trying to locate him, she told him she’d never done this before. Then he stroked her hair, until a faint expression of gratitude appeared on the face below. A small picture of the effect of his caress, and it made his erection so hard, he was forced to raise himself on one elbow. ~ Honeysuckle

The doctor said there was nothing they could do, that Einar should go home and make the most of his remaining time. Those were his words, according to the sister’s summary, and in the evening Alice called around the circle and said, “Now we have to hope he manages to get a hospice place.” Afterward, when she’d hung up the phone, she sat for a while staring out into the midsummer darkness, and without realizing it she hummed, “I get so happy when the sun is shining.” ~ On Narrow Paved Paths

It’d be nice if she were standing next to him now. There was a time when they always visited churches together. Ten years ago, she would have been standing at his side. In her bag she’d have juice cartons, disinfected hankies, chapstick. There was a time when she never left home without fruit in her purse. He’s given her children, and they’ve never wanted for anything. The last thing he saw outside was her biting into an almond croissant, washing it down with scalding coffee, and reaching for her phone. Who can drink coffee in this heat? he wonders, closing his eyes for a moment. ~ Inside St. Paul’s

It was as if a heavy lid had slammed shut within me. That’s how I recall it, a great lid, and beneath it a frozen darkness that was all my own. While Mark held forth on my naïveté for the others, I fell back into the dark and thought of things that were impervious — cement floors, plexiglass, ice packs — and that the safest way to avoid people like Mark was to seal yourself off, and then, when you were sealed off, it was about your face and getting it back in position, getting it to close over the darkness and everything you have stored inside. ~ The Freezer Chest

He can see her, a girl scout in the summer darkness with fever-white hair. He’s turned everything off in the living room, and she probably can’t see him. Her face takes on an odd luminosity from her phone. He can see her chewing her lip in concentration. Now she raises her eyes. It’s the girl from the driveway. She peers at the window, eyes wide. Quickly he shoves his face against the pane, pressing, opening his mouth. His teeth touch glass and her throat muscles tense, then she bolts like an animal down the bank, across the road, in her nightshirt. ~ Manitoba

 

Migrations

 

Once, when the animals were going, really and truly and not just in warnings of dark futures but now, right now, in mass extinctions we could see and feel, I decided to follow a bird over an ocean. Maybe I was hoping it would lead me to where they’d all fled, all those of its kind, all the creatures we thought we’d killed. Maybe I thought I’d discover whatever cruel thing drove me to leave people and places and everything, always. Or maybe I was just hoping the bird’s final migration would show me a place to belong.

I was hoping to like Migrations more than I did; it took me so long to get a copy, and I had read so many excellent reviews about it, that I went into this sure it would be a slamdunk for me. I care about the planet and the creatures we share it with; l acknowledge that we humans have, and continue to, force other species into extinction and that, at a minimum, we should be talking about that more. But, ultimately, I don’t think that author Charlotte McConaghy does the cause much good with this novel: By using an unreliable narrator as a main character, a woman who seems to suffer from mental illness and whose thoughts and actions are unrelatable (to me, anyway), and by putting her in not-quite-credible situations, I poured too much energy into decoding McConaghy’s plot, leaving little left over to feel much for the themes (important as they are). Migrations is a slippery fish, and for the most part, it wriggled from my grasp. (Beware a potential spoiler in the next quote.)

Mam used to tell me to look for clues.
“The clues to what?” I asked the first time.
“To life. They’re hidden everywhere.”
I’ve been looking for them ever since, and they have led me here, to the boat I will spend the rest of my life aboard. Because one way or another, when I reach Antarctica and my migration is finished, I have decided to die.

(The above quote is from the first chapter, and as many reviews speak of this intention, and as unravelling the reason for this intention is a major thrust of the narrative, I don’t quite consider it a spoiler.) The basic plot: In a near-future where most of the world’s wildlife has died off, Franny Lynch is an amateur ornithologist (trained by her husband, Niall; a renowned professor of Biology), and having been entranced by Niall’s description of Arctic terns as the furthest migrating animals on the planet (travelling from the Arctic to the Antarctic and back again annually), Franny decides to tag as many of the last known colony of terns in their Greenland nesting grounds as she can and then attempt to shadow them south. Franny talks her way onto a fishing boat (as the oceans are mostly depleted of fish, her assurance that the tagged birds will lead the boat to one last “Golden Catch” seems just bait enough to overcome the ship’s suspicious skipper and crew), and as Franny learns to make herself useful by tying sailor knots and swabbing decks, she must overcome her own disgust at associating with people who have made their living off of the industrial-scale taking of life. Interpersonal drama and other exciting events ensue.

Meanwhile, the timeline skitters around — we visit and revisit events from Franny’s childhood, how she met and fell in love with Niall, her more recent past — and it’s all mysterious, sad, and purposefully confusing. Franny is prone to nightmares, sleepwalking, and keeping secrets. The women in her family have a history of disappearing — some kind of genetic predisposition to migratory behaviour; just like the terns! — and as a lover of wild things, Niall is both attracted to the wildness in his wife and reluctant to cage her with his love. As the fishing boat heads ever southward, Franny’s entire life story is revealed and we, at long last, learn the true purpose of her project.

It seems to me, suddenly, that if it’s the end, really and truly, if you’re making the last migration not just of your life but of your entire species, you don’t stop sooner. Even when you’re tired and starved and hopeless. You go farther.

This seems like cautionary eco-lit, but despite mentioning that scientists are desperately trying to save the pollinators that sustain humanity’s food sources, there really isn’t much here about what would be negative (except for some people’s sadness) about a mass extinction event. Even a passing warning that people should book forest tours ASAP because the waiting list is about to outstrip the expected life of the last forests doesn’t have anything to say about how their impending loss might affect life on Earth. Really, this is Franny’s story — a woman so broken by family loss and abandonment that she can’t mentally endure the loss of one more animal species — and between choking up raven feathers in her dreams and slipping easily into frigid waters in every waking hour, I had a hard time understanding her; slowly unspooling her true history did add dramatic tension, but it did not help me connect with the character. And this is, at heart, a love story — but despite making clear that this was a biologist and an essentially wild thing being drawn to the only other person that each could ever hope to understand (or hope to be understood by), McConaghy didn’t convince me that this match could or would happen; why would the “migratory” Franny consent to an open-doored cage? Why would the Niall of the empty childhood and overtaxed present want someone who can’t promise to stay by his side? I wanted this to work for me, but it left me as empty as the lonely sea and sky.

This Mournable Body

 

Now you understand. You arrived on the back of a hyena. The treacherous creature dropped you from afar onto a desert floor. There is nothing here except, at the floor’s limits, infinite walls. You are an ill-made person. You are being unmade. The hyena laugh-howls at your destruction. It screams like a demented spirit and the floor dissolves beneath you.

This Mournable Body is, as I have learned, the third volume in a trilogy (following Nervous Conditions and The Book of Not) by Tsitsi Dangarembga, and I have come to it as a standalone after it was shortlisted for the 2020 Man Booker Prize. That has made for a challenging reading experience. All three volumes follow the life of Tambudzai (“Tambu”) as she comes of age against the backdrop of Zimbabwe’s War of Liberation. The first two volumes cover Tambu’s education and early working life, and as This Mournable Body begins, she is approaching middle age, unemployed, unmarried, living illegally in a youth hostel, and without knowing that in the previous novels Tambu was presented as clever, ambitious, and driven, she comes across now as listless, disengaged, and fairly unlikeable; she has nothing but she’s not working towards anything. As the novel progresses and Tambu acts like the world owes her more than she has, I couldn't tell if her memories of being an excellent (if unrecognised) student and an award-winning (if uncredited) copywriter were a matter of Tambu being an unreliable narrator or if she was dropping hints as to what made her the kind of hopeless woman we see today. The language is tricky (many passages needed more than one read, not to mention the second person POV), the plotting elliptical, Tambu’s mind unknowable, but by the time I got to the end of this, I felt some important truths had been slowly revealed to me; truths about what it was to be a woman in the 90’s in this post-colonial, patriarchal, unstable country. I would gladly go back and read the first two volumes in this trilogy, but I’m not unhappy about the added interest that the uncertainty around Tambu’s past provided here as a standalone, standout, read.

When you are several steps away they turn to each other. They suck air in through their teeth in harsh hisses. Five. This is your thought. Against a market. Five. Against a city, a nation. A planet. Women. Five. What do they think they can achieve? They can hiss as much as they wish.

Dangarembga took the title for this novel from the article Unmournable Bodies, written by Teju Cole in The New Yorker in the wake of the 2015 Charlie Hebdo massacre and concerning which victims of violence we in the West deem most “mournable”. (In reference to the connection, Dangarembga has said, “Basically I asked the question whether, if we could mourn the circumstance of certain living bodies we might not create a better world. At the same time those living bodies also need to mourn themselves in order to begin to heal and move forward.”) A series of big events happen in Tambu’s life in This Mournable Body, and while I didn’t always understand her actions (or inactions), I eventually realised that as a woman (and, oh, how the women are abused in this book) and as a Black Zimbabwean (living still in the shadow of her more powerful white neighbours), she was suffering a form of PTSD from living through the war; and while she may not have been a combatant (as many of the other women in the novel were), hers was a body deserving of mourning; from herself as much as from those around her. This was an incredibly interesting narrative, even if I had to sometimes work to find the meaning, and ultimately, I thought the whole story ended perfectly.

She says your education is not only in your heart anymore: like hers, now your knowledge is now also in your body, every bit of it, including your heart.

I hope I do remember to go back and read the rest of this trilogy (so many books, so little time); Tambudzai is an incredible character, and an incredible lens through which to study this time period in Zimbabwe’s history, and I would love to meet her back when things were looking so bright. I would not have been unhappy had this won the Booker.

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.

Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants

 

I could hand you a braid of sweetgrass, as thick and shining as the plait that hung down my grandmother’s back. But it is not mine to give, nor yours to take. Wiingaashk belongs to herself. So I offer, in its place, a braid of stories meant to heal our relationship with the world. This braid is woven from three strands: indigenous ways of knowing, scientific knowledge, and the story of an Anishinaabekwe scientist trying to bring them together in service to what matters most. It is an intertwining of science, spirit, and story — old stories and new ones that can be medicine for our broken relationship with the earth, a pharmacopoeia of healing stories that allow us to imagine a different relationship, in which people and land are good medicine for each other.

Braiding Sweetgrass is exactly what Robin Wall Kimmerer promises in the Preface — a weaving of scientific fact, indigenous ways of knowing, and stories from her own life — but unlike three equal-sized hanks making one even plait, this book reads like a collection of loosely connected essays with each of them weighting her three strands differently. This led to an unevenness in my reading experience (I enjoyed some bits quite a bit more than others; was intellectually engaged with some bits more than others), but despite this being a more challenging read than I had been anticipating, I think that Kimmerer’s message is vital and ultimately well-presented: We owe a debt of gratitude to the earth and its gifts and it’s time that we forge a relationship to our planet that’s based on reciprocity and not exploitation; just imagine if we gave back nourishingly to the land, didn’t take more than we needed, and shared what we harvested. If that sounds like a utopia, it’s only because we of the dominant North American settler culture don’t recognise that people lived like that on these lands for millennia before Christopher Columbus showed up; why wouldn’t we want that for ourselves? Kimmerer (as a Professor of Environmental and Forest Biology, an ecologist, a mother, and a member of the Potawatomi Nation) understands that our exploitation of the earth is both ecologically unsustainable and unhealthy for the human soul, and in Braiding Sweetgrass, she shows us another way. Well worth any quibbles I might have with the formatting.

Knowing that you love the earth changes you, activates you to defend and protect and celebrate. But when you feel that the earth loves you in return, that feeling transforms the relationship from a one-way street into a sacred bond.

Kimmerer at one point references “species loneliness” — a feeling of sadness and isolation stemming from a disconnection to the rest of Creation — and through sharing stories of a different way of engaging with the natural world from her indigenous heritage, she starts us on a path that could heal the planet and ourselves. If we begin to recognise non-human entities — from birds and animals to trees, rocks, and water — as our relations, we will begin to pour love into them, and feel love pouring back to us. As a biologist, Kimmerer is able to demonstrate that this kind of thoughtful interaction is vital for the healing for the environment, and as an Anishinaabe woman, she offers it as a defence against “windigo” thinking; the kind of monstrous greed and hunger that leads to emptiness and soul-sickness. The stories that Kimmerer tells — of mindfully picking sweetgrass, rehabilitating her pond over the course of decades, helping migrating salamanders to cross a highway in the middle of a rainy night — show that she has spent her life putting her philosophy into action; for the betterment of her surroundings and to the benefit of her own soul. Would that we all lived like this.

Being naturalized to place means to live as if this is the land that feeds you, as if these are the streams from which you drink, that build your body and fill your spirit. To become naturalized is to know that your ancestors lie in this ground. Here you will give your gifts and meet your responsibilities. To become naturalized is to live as if your children’s future matters, to take care of the land as if our lives and the lives of all our relatives depend on it. Because they do.

Again, I didn’t love every bit of the writing here (some bits felt a bit too long, too repetitive, too indulgent), but the overall message was essential and encouraging; healing the earth begins with healing my personal relationship to my surroundings, and that’s definitely something I (and every other individual) can work on.