The Fortune Men

Your brothers send their greetings and wish me to tell you that they have put in a bid to win the first cinema concession in Hargeisa. I do not know if it will be granted to them, or to one of those cut-throats on the other side of the ditch, but if you have anything to contribute, manshallah, otherwise I will tell them it is impossible. Some of these sailors return with such good fortune, son, and I hope that one day it will be you stepping out of a car with your suitcases and children and happy wife.

 

The Fortune Men is based on a true story: In 1952, a Somali transplant to Cardiff — married to a local white woman and father to her three sons — was wrongfully charged with murdering a shopkeeper. Known to area police as a shiftless gambler and a thief, this one-time merchant seaman, Mahmood Mattan, was an easy target for the cops in this rowdy port town to frame; and with an all-white jury and witness testimony swayed by significant reward money, it’s easy to make the connection between systemic racism and the little value given to this Black man’s life. Author Nadifa Mohamed, herself a transplant from Somalia who grew up in Britain (and whose father apparently knew Mahmood Mattan), stuffs this novel with period detail in an effort to bring this historical footnote to life, but I found it all a little clunky; there’s too much detail about too many peripheral characters and I never found myself quite connecting with Mattan. I am glad to have learned the history but this wasn’t a terribly successful novel for me (but as it has been shortlisted for the 2021 Man Booker Prize, who am I to judge?) Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.

Adjusting his homburg hat — the hat his mother-in-law says reminds her of funerals — low over his eyebrows, Mahmood realizes that there are too many people he doesn’t want to see on the street: the Nigerian watchmaker chasing after a watch he’d snuck out of his pocket, the lanky Jewish pawnbroker who had taken in his bedclothes when he’d had nothing else to pawn, that Russian woman from one of the cafés who he both wants to see and dreads seeing. He takes a deep breath and steps out.

From the beginning, we’re not really meant to like Mahmood: we learn immediately that he’s delinquent in support payments to the wife who has kicked him out, he’s a thief, a gambler, a layabout, a womaniser. But even so, when the police finger him for a murder — based mostly on vague reports of a Somali being seen in the area that night — the reader does hope that the wheels of justice will eventually turn in Mahmood’s favour. The story carries Mahmood from boarding house to police station, jail, and then to trial — and for the most part, this is interesting. But along the way, Mohamed distracts the reader from Mahmood’s fate by inserting too many of the “colourful” facts she must have learned in her research of the times: Mahmood meets a Jamaican pimp in prison who talks about being picked up by upperclass white couples who wanted him to have sex with the wife while the husband watched; he talks with his Somali friend “Berlin” and learns that he got that nickname after being tricked by some Germans into becoming a specimen in a type of travelling anthropological zoo; Mahmood remembers the bacchanalian ritual at sea that saw someone dressed as King Neptune initiating the “Pollywogs” upon crossing the equator; there are many scenes from Mahmood’s childhood in Somalia and we learn the history of control of that country switching back and forth between the British and the Italians; we even spend quite a lot of time from the perspective of the (soon to be murdered) Jewish shopkeeper and her family, telling of how the deceased’s sister joined the WAAF after Kristallnacht and her experiences manning barrage balloons. All interesting enough, I suppose, but these details didn’t add much to Mahmood’s story for me.

His life was, is, one long film with mobs of extras and exotic, expensive sets. Long reams of film and miles of dialogue extending back as he struts from one scene to another. He can imagine how his movie looks even now: the camera zooming in from above on to the cobblestone prison yard and then merging into a close-up of his thoughtful, upturned face, smoke billowing out from the corner of his dark lips. A colour film, it must be that. It has everything: comedy, music, dance, travel, murder, the wrong man caught, a crooked trial, a race against time and then the happy ending, the wife swept up in the hero’s arms as he walks out, one sun-filled day, to freedom. The image stretches Mahmood’s mouth into a smile.

I didn’t know how Mahmood’s story ended before I read this book, so this did have some narrative tension for me; I just got a bit impatient with the extraneous bits. This may have worked better for me as nonfiction.

2021 Man Booker Prize Nominees

The Shortlist (In my order of preference):

A Passage North, Anuk Arudpragasam

The Promise, Damon Galgut * The Winner

No One is Talking About This, Patricia Lockwood

The Fortune Men, Nadifa Mohamed

Bewilderment, Richard Powers

Great Circle, Maggie Shipstead

 

And the rest:

Second Place, Rachel Cusk

China Room, Sunjeev Sahota

An Island, Karen Jennings

The Sweetness of Water, Nathan Harris

Klara and the Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro

A Town Called Solace, Mary Lawson

Light Perpetual, Francis Spufford

Aesop’s Animals: The Science Behind the Fables

 

 

It’s good to manage expectations early, so I want to be clear that this isn’t a book about Aesop. If you’re hoping to learn more about the man behind the fables, this probably isn’t the book for you. If, on the other hand, you have idly wondered whether foxes or crows are cleverer, if wolves really are deceptive or a tortoise could ever actually beat a hare in a race, then read on!

 

One of my favourite courses in my first year of university back in the 80’s was Ethology — as I remember it, it was a broad look at animal behaviours and how they mirrored or illuminated human behaviour — and to my delight, Aesop’s Animals: The Science Behind the Fables reads very much like an introductory textbook to that course. Zoologist Jo Wimpenny, prompted by the anthropomorphised characteristics attributed to the animals in eight of Aesop’s fables, examines, through the recounting of years of animal behaviour experiments, whether or not these are true characteristics (Is a fox a sly manipulator? Is a donkey stupid? Can a dog be fooled by its own reflection?). Filled with fascinating quotes, experiment results, and animal facts, I found myself an eager student once more; a thoroughly satisfying experience. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

How we represent animals in fictional stories reveals our attitudes towards them and our treatment of them.

And this is pretty much the point of this book: So many of the traits that Aesop attributed to his animal characters have endured, unexamined, through the millennia, and these traits influence how we value the animals around us. The idea that wolves are bloodthirsty deceivers (further maligned in the Middle Ages in the tale of Little Red Riding Hood) led to their extermination in most of Europe. The picture of donkeys as slow-witted plodders has seen their decline from a time when they were given royal burials alongside Egyptian pharaohs to their current status as overworked beasts of burden in (primarily) developing countries (and Wimpenny shares a saddening tale of donkey hides’ current use in a high-priced Chinese medicine, ejiao, that has prompted the opening of donkey abattoirs across Africa and the resultant thefts of these essential animals from families who can’t afford to replace them). On the flipside, the more positive idea that male lions are noble and majestic (and Wimpenny explains the huge metabolic cost a lion pays for a full, dark mane — the more impressive, the less he is able to move around in the hot sun, forcing the females to feed and care for him, which they are programmed to do for the promise of genetically superior cubs) has made such lions the ultimate test of human prowess, from gladiators to big game hunters. In order to confront the stereotypes, Wimpenny relates one of Aesop’s fables at the beginning of each chapter, explores how the featured animals display the traits attributed to them (often surprisingly accurate on the surface), tells the story of other animals that might better fit the stereotypes, and finishes each section with a “Fact or Fiction?” summary.

At its heart, this is the story of the history of animal behaviour study and in this regard Wimpenny states, “It’s only in the past 30 or so years that a concerted effort has gone into studying the cognitive abilities of animals other than primates.” It was only after the time that I was in university that the scientific community began to accept that there was anything deeper to learn from studying the behaviour of birds, insects, and non-primate mammals (in particular, there was a big pushback against studying domesticated animals like dogs and horses because they weren’t “natural”) because if they don’t look like us, they can’t tell us anything about us. Wimpenny stresses that every species is inherently valuable and worthy of study for its own sake, and although she shares many intriguing studies that demonstrate what looks like “intelligence” in various animals (novel tool use, future planning, self-consciousness), she also warns that behaviours that look like they demonstrate human intelligence need to be interpreted through each animal’s own “toolkit” of behaviours and the evolutionary pressures that created them. And on the flipside of that, it’s unfair to say an animal is not intelligent when they can’t perform particular tasks as well as humans do: In order to test whether animals have a “Theory of Mind”, the classic test involves a mirror and most primates can connect their reflection with their own bodies. Dogs, however, don’t pass this test and Wimpenny explains that that’s probably because dogs aren’t primarily visual animals; the results are more impressive when experimenters have developed tests that involve the dogs’ superior sense of smell. The results of all of these experiments seem to impact how we regard and treat the animals around us and the history of animal behaviour testing seems to have also been an ongoing, unwitting, test on humanity all along. A sampling of interesting animal facts:

• One in 10 of us can’t detect the almond-like smell of the highly poisonous gas, hydrogen cyanide; and it’s thought that as many as 60 percent of us are unable to detect the pungent, sweet, sulphur odour of metabolised asparagus in urine. *

• The Argentine ant is a species with the largest recorded societies of any multicellular organisms. The imaginatively named “large supercolony” (which may number over a trillion individuals in California alone!) covers 1,000km of the western United States, from San Francisco to the Mexican border, as well as 6,000km in Europe, 2,800km in Australia, 900km on New Zealand’s North Island and growing areas on Hawaii and Japan. Remarkably, even though it stretches over multiple continents, it is a single society. The evidence is in the chemical make-up of the hydrocarbons on their cuticle and the way in which ants from different sites behave towards other ants. Take an ant from the colony in California and drop it into the heart of the same colony in Japan, and the Japanese ants will rub antennae with it and treat it as if it is one of their own. But take an ant from a different colony in California and drop it into the large supercolony (in California, Japan, or anywhere else) and the unfortunate creature will be ripped apart in minutes.

• Larvae of the green lacewing show a “wolf in sheep’s clothing” strategy to live among their prey, the woolly alder aphid. Woolly aphids, as their name suggests, look like tiny sheep because they are covered in white “wool” (in reality, waxy strands produced by the aphids for protection) and they are usually fiercely guarded by ants.The lacewing larvae have taken the role of the wolf quite literally: they disguise themselves by stealing some of the woolly wax and covering their own bodies with it — and as a result they can walk straight past the ants and feast on the aphids. The lacewing larvae are manipulating the ants’ visual and olfactory systems in order to misrepresent the world to them, an incredible evolved strategy for sneaking an easy meal.

(*I often eat asparagus and just smile weakly when people joke about it making their pee smell funny. After reading this and polling my family, I can report that most of us can’t smell the “sweet, sulphur odour” but one daughter apparently developed the ability as an adult. Interesting to me anyway.)

I find myself wondering again what Aesop would think about all this — would he be surprised to learn the truth about his animals? Would he have chosen different characters if the science existed then? And how would more scientifically accurate portrayals have altered our world view? Stories are essential, powerful tools to entertain, inspire and teach, but to improve our understanding of our world, perhaps it’s time that we melded the facts with the fables.

Wimpenny shares a story from British news reports about patrons at a pub who were too terrorised by the presence of a fox in the parking lot to exit the premises, and while she suggests that this represents a kind of unfair conditioning from tales like Aesop’s (which I’m not sure about; unless it looked rabid, I don’t think I’d be scared of a fox), she also adds that this seems to be a symptom of people not having enough contact with nature and wildlife. Whether we are misinformed by popular culture or simple ignorance, if learning facts about animal life causes us to treat them better, books like this one go a long way toward improving the world. Just my kind of thing.

Mind Picker: A Marriage Made in Sauble

 

I find it hard to decide what to write about my daughter's wedding: this was such a happy event for our family, but how much of this is my story to tell and how much would be an invasion of the newly married's privacy? Kennedy hasn't posted any photos online yet (I guess she's waiting for the professional pictures to get edited?), so I'm hesitant to even show her face here (as if I haven't elsewhere over the years). Ultimately, I can't possibly let this pass without comment, so here's my story of the happy day...

Two years ago, Kennedy and Zach became engaged at Sauble Beach; Dave and I were thrilled to have been up there with them for that joyous day and it was meaningful for all of us that Zach decided to "pop the question" at everybody's happy place. They immediately started making plans and reserving vendors and the perfect venue was chosen, with a wedding date set for October 1, 2021. Of course, like all engaged couples over the past year and a half of COVID-related shutdowns, Kennedy and Zach watched as wave after wave of lockdown delayed or cancelled other's wedding plans; and although they are both more concerned about community health than their own personal desires, it must have been hard for them to know what to hope for as 2021 dawned. In March of this year they were contacted by the venue and given a one time chance to make a change: They could commit to paying for 160 people for a wedding on October 1st, no matter how many were actually in attendance (with no way of knowing what the actual provincial-mandated limits would be at that time) or they could let another couple have their date and push their wedding back two more years. They made the hard decision to push it back two years (which seems to have been the right decision as current mandates only allow for fifty guests at an indoor event), but they also had alternate plans: a "minimony" at Sauble Beach.

As I wrote last year, we were fortunate enough to have bought the property at Sauble Beach that had once been in Dave's family, and with both her Granny and Grandpa not doing so well, Kennedy asked if we could host a small wedding for immediate family at Sauble in September (with the bigger event still scheduled for 2023) to make sure that her grandparents would be able to attend. Of course we agreed - delighted by the prospect, in fact - and new plans were begun for catering, tent rental, etc. Unfortunately, as I have had the sad duty to report, first Kennedy's Granny and then her Grandpa passed away this year, and although my mother did make the effort to fly up from Nova Scotia to attend, my father did not (and with not even a phone call to explain or apologise - he mentioned to Ken that he wouldn't be coming and that was the only word I received on the matter - this is definitely a step too far even for this cold and selfish man; it is unforgivable to me that his absence made Kennedy cry, so soon after the loss of the grandparents who were always present and loving. Her Grandpa begged his doctors to help him live long enough to see his granddaughter get married; her Pop just didn't show up.) But still, the show went on.

Who knows what details to include? Dave and I went up two weeks early to paint all the rooms on the main level, generally spruce everything up, and fill the gardens with fresh mums. My mother arrived the week beforehand and was eager to see the place we bought and participate in the excitement, but was mostly underfoot. My brothers rented a cottage for the week for their families across the street but only Ken could come up more than a couple of days early; Zach's family rented a cottage a block away for the Thursday to Sunday, and their wedding party had all arrived by Friday. We watched the big tent go up (gratefully as it was supposed to rain for most of the day of the wedding), the deluxe toilet trailer (with his and hers sides, flush toilets, running taps, and lights, so much more impressive than a regular portapotty) was delivered to the rear driveway, we painted the arch that the kids were repurposing from their new house, Kennedy and Ella started making bouquets, and everyone started helping with the fine details. We had a lovely dinner at Heydays on the Friday night (they don't take reservations but Dave talked the manager into making an exception for the twelve in our wedding party), followed by a fire back at our place that saw me and Dave stay up way too late with Zach's parents. Saturday morning Kennedy had arranged for her wedding party (plus me and my Mum) to have our nails done, and when we returned, Dave had made a big breakfast for "the ladies" (including Zach's Mom and sister and Kennedy's friends). With the day breaking clear and warm with a cloudless cobalt sky, we set up the thirty-some chairs for the ceremony, set the tables with cutlery and placecards, Kennedy finished the flowers on the arch and the centerpieces, and then everyone scattered to start getting ready.

I have to pause to talk about my own outfit. When the latest lockdown was lifted last spring, Kennedy immediately made an appointment for us to find something for me to wear at David's Bridal. Everything the consultant brought for me seemed way too formal for an intimate backyard-at-the-beach wedding (although any of them would have been fine for the "big wedding" in 2023), and we would have left the store empty-handed if we hadn't noticed a clearance rack that had a Vera Wang dress, in Kennedy's size, for a hundred dollars. When she tried it on, at my urging, I suggested that she could keep her expensive, more formal gown for the big event and not care if this one was dragged through the grass and sand (and as it turned out, through the water at sunset as well). That felt like such a lucky find, but still, it took me months to find just the right thing for myself - but when I did, I knew it was the right thing: a jumpsuit, blue and sleeveless on the top, with wide, chiffon, floral palazzo pants on the bottom. I felt like me in this outfit - whereas so many of the mother-of-the-bride dresses I tried felt like I was playing dressup in my mother's closet - and I couldn't have been more pleased and comfortable all day. On the other hand, I do regret not getting my hair done professionally; I haven't even had my hair cut in two years because I let Mallory get in my head when she told me I shouldn't get highlights again to hide my grey; that letting it go natural is a more powerful statement than trying to look younger than I am when I'm ten years older than the mother of the groom...yeah, she got in my head and I could have looked more polished, but I did look like myself, so there's that...

Anyway. Kennedy was absolutely right for us to have rehearsed several times the night before and the processional up the aisle was seamless; I was delighted that she wanted both me and her Dad to walk her to the front. The officiant they chose (recommended by their venue) was (as everyone keeps mentioning) the most handsome man anyone had ever seen in real life (like a taller, better looking Ryan Reynolds). He had had a few video calls with Zach and Kennedy over the months, and based on those and some questionnaires they filled out, his service was like a stand-up comedy act of the funniest moments from their nine years together. But after all the laughs - which even had Kennedy and Zach gasping for breath; they had no idea what this Jeff was actually going to do with all the info - the officiant brought it all back to a sincere message of, "And when times get tough during your marriage, and they will get tough, I want you to remember these moments and the joy you've brought to each other and the love that brought you here today." Zach and then Kennedy read the vows that they wrote - each of whom made me laugh and cry - they said their I Dos, signed the documents, kissed and were married!

The ceremony was followed by photos on the beach and with the ATV (as above) as the caterers passed hot hors d'oeuvres. There was dinner (with a self-serve slider bar), followed by a few speeches and formal dances. Kennedy and Zach left for sunset photos with their photographer while the rest of us started dancing; Dave put on a spectacular fireworks display on the beach, and I may not have stopped dancing until one in the morning, wondering at that point where everyone had gone.

There was plenty of cleanup the next morning but nary a complaint about it; a little work nothing compared to the big fun that was had. Zach asked me later what my favourite bits were and all I could do was list everything: the job Kennedy had done with the flowers was absolutely stunning, and the details she added with gold spray-painted dinosaurs (for her) and D&D dice (for him) were like lovely Easter eggs; the tent with the strings of low-watt Edison bulbs, candles and mirrors on the tables, made for a magical setting; I loved the music they chose and the vows they wrote (I told Zach he made me cry and he said, "I know. I saw."); I loved the officiant and his style; the photographer was everywhere, captured everything, but was never in the way; the food was delicious and the caterers were efficient and respectful in our kitchen; I loved the black and white dinosaur tableclothes that Kennedy and I sewed up, the dinosaur coluring sheets and crayons at every seat, and the lawn games that Zach's parents brought up (and that were a huge hit all evening long); I loved that Kennedy made jars of her Grandpa's secret relish recipe as party favours; that she bottled wine and personalised them with her "wedding logo"; that she provided blankets by the fire for the cooling evening; I told Zach that I loved the red plaid jacket he wore (why shouldn't he also stand out on his wedding day?) and that I was still delighted by Kennedy's discount dress; I loved that Kennedy had a custom wedding band made out of her Granny's wedding set, with other added family diamonds, and that she wore her Nan's pearls; I loved that Kennedy put a gold calligraphied "Bride" on the back of the white helmet I bought for the ATV pics (because for some reason the idea of these pictures delighted me and I liked that they played along); I loved that my outfit and Zach's Mom's accidentally coordinated and that, although the bridesmaids were told to just buy something "green and not too formal", they coordinated beautifully, as well. I loved that the wedding took place at Sauble Beach and that Kennedy's recently passed grandparents were mentioned and referred to throughout the day. I loved that their presence was both felt and acknowledged.

There's a famous story in the family that when my inlaws got married, the day was wild with wind and rain. Even so, Bev insisted that on the way to their Niagara Falls honeymoon, she wanted to stop at her father's grave to place her bouquet on it. As they drove to Dorchester, Jim stopped at a gas station to buy his new wife a plastic rain bonnet to protect her hair at the cemetery, but as she opened the car door graveside, the rain suddenly stopped. Bev placed her bouquet, paid her respects, and when she got back into the car, the rain started up once more. Bev always believed that her father was watching over her that day. Can we thank Kennedy's grandparents for the gorgeous weather on her wedding day, despite dire forecasts all week? I don't know about that but I do know this: Their unquestioned love and unflagging support were meaningful enough to Kennedy that she and Zach added hours to their drive home from the wedding to swing by Dorchester and leave her bouquet on her grandparents' grave.

And I love that.

The Seed Keeper

 

Thakóža, you’ve had no one to teach you, not even how to be part of a family or a community. You know what the grandmothers went through to save the seeds. That’s how tough you have to be as an Indian woman. And as a seed keeper.

 

With The Seed Keeper, author Diane Wilson uses “seeds”, both literally and metaphorically, to make social commentary and to trace the hard history of the Dakhóta people of Minnesota. In brief: The U.S. government signed a treaty granting the Dakhóta a portion of their traditional lands in perpetuity, but then broke the treaty to settle the West with white folk. The starving Dakhóta rose up when promised food wasn’t delivered to them, were massacred and hanged in the country’s largest mass execution, and the rest were imprisoned or marched to reservations in South Dakota and Nebraska (the women, the seed keepers, sewing precious heirloom seeds into the hems of their clothing). Eventually, Dakhóta were allowed to return to their homelands, only to have their children taken away to abusive boarding schools. And when those students grew up and had families of their own, they were often so broken — suffering depression, addictions, health issues — that lurking social services swooped in and put their children in foster care with white families. The effects of this history is related through the present day experiences of Rosalie Iron Wing — having no mother and losing her father when she was twelve, Rosalie was alienated from her people, their traditions, and barely survived foster care — but like a seed awaiting the right conditions for germination, Rosalie’s potential was curled up safely within herself the whole time, just waiting for the chance to grow. In a broad sense, this reminded me of Braiding Sweetgrass meets Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee meets Indian Horse, but it’s in the particular — the history of these Dakhóta people and not the lumping of all Indigenous people as some tragic monolith — that The Seed Keeper feels most important; when an Indigenous author such as Diane Wilson asks me to listen to the story of her people, I strive to do so respectfully and with an open mind and heart (and not dwell too long on plot details that may not have worked for me).

Once in a while I rocked a bit, but mostly I just sat, my thoughts far away. I was not interested in what would come next. I still had business with the past. I could feel the way it tugged at me, growing stronger as John’s light dimmed. No matter what people said, when he finally left his body, this life of ours would go with him. There was so little left as it was. I was a burnt field, waiting for a new season to begin.

As I opened with, Wilson treats “seeds” both metaphorically (as they are containers of the past and the future for Rosalie and the Dakhóta) and also literally: In order to escape her foster mother, Rosalie agrees to marry a local white farmer she barely knows when she turns eighteen. Rosalie begins to reconnect with nature as she plants the seeds for her first kitchen garden, and as the plot develops and her husband eventually embraces GMO agriculture, a philosophical divide is explored between traditional and modern methods. As The Seed Keeper opens, this husband, John, has just died and forty-year-old Rosalie returns for the first time to her father’s cabin in the woods. Through her POV and those of some of the seed keepers who came before her, the story of the Dakhóta, Rosalie, and her own family are all eventually revealed; and as might be expected, it is here, back on her traditional lands, that Rosalie finally blossoms.

Sometimes, when I was working in the garden, a wordless prayer opened between me and the earth, as if we shared a common language that I understood best when I was silent. Only when paying attention with all of my senses could I appreciate the cry of the hawk circling overhead, or see sunflowers turning toward the sun, or hear the hum of carpenter bees burrowing into rotted logs. Just as birds made their nests in a circle, this clearing encircled us, creating a safe place to grow and to live. History might have cost me my family and my language, but I was reclaiming a relationship with the earth, water, stars, and seeds that was thousands of years old.

In a number of memoirs I’ve read by Indigenous authors (Up Ghost River, One Native Life, The Reason You Walk), the return to traditional lands does have a powerful healing effect over body and soul for First Nations peoples, and as Canada nears our first National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, we should all be open-hearted to the stories these first peoples need us to hear; it is the first and smallest step towards true reconciliation and I am grateful to Diane Wilson for sharing her story with me.

Priestdaddy

 

“The working title is Priestdaddy,” I say, determined to make a totally clean breast of it. Not that my father believes a breast can ever be clean. “Wait till The New York Times gets a load of that,” he says evilly. Then, turning his attention back to the football game, he bellows, “C’MON ANDY!” and kicks a meaty leg in the air. He refers to all athletes by their first names, as if they are his sons.

 

Fast on the heels of reading No One Is Talking About This, the Man Booker-shortlisted novel based on some of Patricia Lockwood’s own experiences, I picked up her well-regarded memoir Priestdaddy, and it was incredibly illuminating to read these in tandem: as different as these two works are (Priestdaddy is much funnier and observant), it seems obvious now how the person with this background wrote that novel. To briefly summarise: Lockwood’s father received a rare dispensation to become a Catholic priest after already being married and having started a family, so she and her four siblings lived in a series of rectories as her father moved from parish to parish, her devoted mother doing her best to turn these dreary boxes into family homes. Lockwood’s father was a boorish, chauvinistic, guitar-wailing, gun-toting iron fist in a lace-trimmed cassock, her mother a submissive worrywart, and as soon as she could, Lockwood ran away with a like-minded sensitive soul whom she met on the internet. After a decade away, however, an expensive health crisis forced Lockwood and her husband to return to the family home for eight months, and during that time, she recorded her parents’ words in the present, interspersed with her own memories from the past. Primarily known as a poet, Lockwood’s writing is flush with amusing metaphors and acerbic asides (which I see some reviewers found overwhelming) and I found this whole memoir to be interesting, compelling, and well-written.

I sometimes wish my childhood had been less obsessed with the question of why we are here. But that must be the question of any childhood. To write about your mother and father is to tell the story of your own close call, to count all the ways you never should have existed. To write about home is to write about how you dropped from space, dragging ellipses behind you like a comet, and how you entered your country and state and city, and finally your four-cornered house, and finally your mother's body and finally your own. From the galaxy to the grain and back again. From the fingerprint to the grand design. Despite all the conspiracies of the universe, we are here; every moment we are here we arrive.

Lockwood’s mother — devout Catholic, supportive matriarch, constantly searching the internet for new dangers to worry over — sounds like an interesting character, but it’s her father — sprawled on the couch in see-through boxers as he yells at the macho movies on the television — who steals every scene in which he appears. And he’s a priest? (I have no idea how this book makes no commentary, or includes no reactions from new parishioners, on just how weird and unusual this situation is; it just is what it is.) A typical observation:

My father despises cats. He believes them to be Democrats. He considers them to be little mean hillary clintons covered all over with feminist legfur. Cats would have abortions, if given half a chance. Cats would have abortions for fun. Consequently our own soft sinner, a soulful snowshoe named Alice, will stay shut in the bedroom upstairs, padding back and forth on cashmere paws, campaigning for equal pay, educating me about my reproductive system, and generally plotting the downfall of all men.

Lockwood writes more about how this man affected her as a father than his role as a practising priest (although stories about his pastoral duties are also included) and that made the material more relatable to me:

I know all women are supposed to be strong enough now to strangle presidents and patriarchies between their powerful thighs, but it doesn't work that way. Many of us were actually affected, by male systems and male anger, in ways we cannot always articulate or overcome. Sometimes, when the ceiling seems especially low and the past especially close, I think to myself, I did not make it out. I am still there in that place of diminishment, where that voice an octave deeper than mine is telling me what I am.

And again, Priestdaddy goes some way to explaining the content of No One Is Talking About This. Lockwood must have been pretty popular on social media in her days of poverty and writing lewd poems in a garret if she could mention on twitter that her husband needed surgery and her fanbase funded it within days. She references the poem “Rape Joke” (which can be read here) and how it led to her eventual successes in publishing:

Usually publishing a poem is like puking in space, or growing an adolescent mustache — no one really notices, and it might be better that way. Something about this one catches, though, and in the space of a day it is everywhere. Thousands of replies, messages, and emails pour into my various inboxes. A dozen girls send me their own versions of the poem, filled in with their own details.

The content and online popularity of that poem further illuminate both Lockwood’s novel and this memoir, and taken all together, it feels audacious and authentic. With amusing lines and fine observations throughout all that I’ve read from Lockwood, I don’t know what more can be asked of her. I'm looking forward to what she comes out with next.

The Body: A Guide for Occupants

 

The body is often likened to a machine, but it is so much more than that. It works 24 hours a day for decades without (for the most part) needing regular servicing or the installation of spare parts, runs on water and a few organic compounds, is soft and rather lovely, is accommodatingly mobile and pliant, reproduces itself with enthusiasm, makes jokes, feels affection, appreciates a red sunset and a cooling breeze. How many machines do you know that can do any of that? There is no question about it. You are truly a wonder.

Bill Bryson is another one of those authors that I find myself returning to time and again — because I’m interested in his topics — without actually loving his writing style. Needing an audiobook to occupy me as I tackled a large painting project, I selected The Body: A Guide for Occupants (primarily based on its fourteen hour length) and it fit the bill; filling the time and the empty air around me. In this book, Bryson gives a comprehensive overview of the human body — organ by organ, system by system — describing the contributions made by the long line of scientists who have devoted themselves to human anatomy and adding in the diseases specific to the various body parts and how we have learned to combat them. I probably would have liked this better as a physical book — Bryson narrates this himself and I found his performance a little ponderous and self-satisfied as he repeatedly slowed when approaching the punchlines of the ironic humour that rarely made me smile — but I have to admit that repeatedly Bryson shared facts that made me go, “Wow”. Plenty more wow moments than not — just a few of which I’ve shared below — I’m rounding up to four stars.

• In breathing, as in everything in life, the numbers are staggering — indeed fantastical. Every time you breathe, you exhale some 25 sextillion (that’s 2.5 × 1022) molecules of oxygen — so many that with a day’s breathing you will in all likelihood inhale at least one molecule from the breaths of every person who has ever lived. And every person who lives from now until the sun burns out will from time to time breathe in a bit of you. At the atomic level, we are in a sense eternal.

• Make no mistake. This is a planet of microbes. We are here at their pleasure. They don’t need us at all. We’d be dead in a day without them.

• The great paradox of the brain is that everything you know about the world is provided to you by an organ that has itself never seen that world. The brain exists in silence and darkness, like a dungeoned prisoner. It has no pain receptors, literally no feelings. It has never felt warm sunshine or a soft breeze. To your brain, the world is just a stream of electrical pulses, like taps of Morse code. And out of this bare and neutral information it creates for you — quite literally creates — a vibrant, three-dimensional, sensually engaging universe. Your brain is you. Everything else is just plumbing and scaffolding.

• In the 2017–18 flu season, to take one recent example, people who had been vaccinated were only 36 percent less likely to get flu than those who hadn’t been vaccinated. In consequence, it was a bad year for flu in America, with a death toll estimated at eighty thousand. In the event of a really catastrophic epidemic — one that killed children or young adults in large numbers, say — Kinch believes we wouldn’t be able to produce vaccine fast enough to treat everyone, even if the vaccine was effective. “The fact is,” he says, “we are really no better prepared for a bad outbreak today than we were when Spanish flu killed tens of millions of people a hundred years ago. The reason we haven’t had another experience like that isn’t because we have been especially vigilant. It’s because we have been lucky.”

(I was, in particular, awaiting a passage like that last one; wondering if Bryson would have anticipated our Covid world and he does write prophetically about zoonotic diseases and the likelihood of species-jumping pandemic-causing viruses.) Bryson clears up a bunch of myths — the idea that we use only 10 percent of our brains, that we require 10000 steps or eight glasses of water/day, that MSG causes Chinese Food Syndrome, that all the chemicals that make up our bodies could be bought for pocket change, antioxidants are “a giant racket” that do not combat aging, a daily aspirin is as likely to cause gastrointestinal problems as prevent heart or stroke disease — but the most frustrating aspect of this book (which is not Bryson’s fault) is how very often he describes some aspect of the human body and is forced to add, “and no one knows why”. That we have learned so much about how our bodies work is a marvel; that so much remains mysterious is more marvelous still.

Worlds in Shadow: Submerged Lands in Science, Memory and Myth

 

Just because much human history is invisible does not mean it was never there or that its existence was unimportant. In order to properly understand ourselves and our journey as a species, our challenge is to acknowledge the existence of this hidden history and try, iteratively and painstakingly, to piece it together from the fragments we can see.

 

I thought from its description that Worlds in Shadow: Submerged Lands in Science, Memory and Myth would be primarily about those eerily lost places that seem to persist only in a nearby people’s folklore — and to a degree, those stories are here: from a Polynesian tale of a guardian shark who thrashed its tail against an island’s underwater support pillar, causing it to topple over, to the Breton conteurs of North-West France who still travel village to village telling of the fabulous lost city of Ys, long submerged in the ocean — but as much as researcher and author Patrick Nunn refers to such tales as jumping off points, this is really about the science of how islands do, sometimes, suddenly appear and disappear, and moreso, how humans throughout history have dealt with ever-changing coastlines; an issue pressing for our times as a warming Earth threatens coastal dwellers all over our “drowning world”. I am personally more interested in people's stories than the geological science that could get a little dry here (even if so much of the cataclysmic processes were shockingly new to me; I did naively think that the ground beneath my feet was more solid and enduring than it is), but I can’t fault a book for not being what I expected. Thorough, ultimately interesting and credible, Worlds in Shadow taught me much. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

In a world where we are confronted by global change that is as contemptuous of human endeavour and individual aspiration as it is dismissive of political borders and agendas, understanding how our ancestors were affected by comparable changes and how they overcame these is at once a lesson in coping as well as a beacon of hope.

Wherever Nunn cites traditional peoples’ legends — the Tlingit of British Columbia tell of a monster who lives in the bay and periodically shakes the surface of the water like a sheet, Narungga (Aboriginal) stories describe a giant kangaroo that once dragged a bone through the Spencer Gulf, carving a channel that let the ocean in — he then describes the evidence in the geological record that proves these stories are actually describing known events. Nunn encourages us to regard these legends as science from the past and to marvel at the endurance of tales that were passed down orally for countless generations. And I learned some things about famous lost worlds that I didn’t know: Nunn flatly insists that Atlantis didn’t exist, “There are numerous clues in the writings of Plato, who manufactured the story of Atlantis in about 350 BC, that it is allegorical not factual...a fiction created to illustrate the principles explained in The Republic.” (I always assumed that because it was first described by Plato that that was pretty firm evidence that Atlantis did exist, even if I didn’t think that it was populated by some super-advanced technological society.) And I guess I never critically examined the difference between the supercontinents that are said to have once existed (Pangea and Gondwana were real, Lemuria is a fiction; I always thought they were pretty much different names for the same thing.) And I was challenged by Nunn’s dismissal of the deep ocean as our final unexplored frontier:

While scientists may not have explored every square metre of the ocean floor, there is little mystery about what is there. Imagine you have a back garden of 30m2. You may dig a few holes here and there to plant fruit trees, but would you really expect to find anything wildly different by digging elsewhere?

(Is that analogy actually self-evident?) I did appreciate the thorough descriptions of the science behind submergence (whether from sea-level changes, tectonic changes, gravity collapse, giant waves, or volcanoes), and especially as it relates to the threatened places where people live today. (Bottom line: there’s nothing we can do to prevent island and coastline submergence — processes are happening beneath our feet that we can’t control and melting glaciers are only adding to these natural phenomena — and our focus should be on relocation.) Yet, if I had a complaint about this book it would be the condescending tone that Nunn uses when arguing against the beliefs of pseudoscientists; they who would use the universally compelling idea of lost lands to advance their own (nefarious?) agendas:

Consider the end of the supposed lost continent of Mu, claimed to have once stretched across most of the Pacific Ocean (it didn’t), described in a 1931 book by James Churchward.

Cataclysmic earthquakes rent Mu asunder…she became a fiery vortex, and the waters of the Pacific rushed in making a watery grave for a vast civilisation and sixty million people.

Pure flapdoodle, of course. But we can trace self- styled ‘Colonel’ Churchward’s description back to a time a few years after the 1883 Krakatau eruption when Helena Blavatsky, founder of Theosophy, was composing her magnum opus, The Secret Doctrine. In it she described a ‘huge land’ named Rutas allegedly described in (conveniently unspecified) ‘Brahminical traditions’. One day, Rutas was abruptly destroyed in a volcanic cataclysm and ‘sent to the ocean depths’ leaving behind only the islands of Indonesia to mark the place where it once stood. No one has uncovered Brahminical or any other traditions to support Blavatsky’s ludicrous claims about Rutas, but it is almost certain that reports about the Krakatau eruption greatly influenced her thinking at this point in her life as she scratched out her specious legacy in a cramped South London tenement.

There is a preponderance of really interesting information in Worlds in Shadow — if sometimes a little dry, if sometimes a little patronising — and even if the takeaway message is that the habitable Earth has always been dropping away beneath humanity’s feet and we’ve managed to survive as a species to tell the tale, I ultimately found that more frightening than hopeful. Rounding up to four stars.

No One Is Talking About This

 

It was a marvel how cleanly and completely this lifted her out of the stream of regular life. She was a gleaming sterilized instrument, flashing out at the precise moment of emergency. She chugged hot coffee and then went, “AHHHHH,” like George Clooney on ER, like she was off to go slice out the tumor that had lately been pressing on the world’s optic nerve. She wanted to stop people on the street and say, “Do you know about this? You should know about this. No one is talking about this!”

 

No One Is Talking About This begins so achingly hip and of the moment — written like and about a string of (sometimes familiar) memes and tweets that attempt to capture the experience of they who mindlessly consta-scroll through their various feeds — and as shallow and as meaningless as a life described thusly may seem, the novel takes a swerve in its second part: with a family crisis (apparently one based on author Patricia Lockwood’s own experience) serving to remind the unnamed narrator of what is really important, her life pivots from one of inanity to one of deep meaning. In its overall construction, I found this to be a bit like Brave New World come to pass, but in its details, the midnovel swerve was incredibly radical in a way that no one is talking about. I have to say that the first part — in which, for example, the narrator becomes internet famous for tweeting, “Can a dog be twins?” and then proceeds to tour the world to speak on panels about internet culture — did not really engage me; nothing about “Can a dog be twins” is amusing or provocative to me; I would not stop to read that sentence twice, let alone tweet cry emojis at it in appreciation. So while the first part had me imagining that this novel might be more meaningful to my daughters — on the cusp between Millenials and Gen Z, they are infinitely more immersed in the tiktok-insta-twitterverse than I am — the second part seemed designed to provoke them at the level of their most deeply held personal beliefs and I could not imagine them following where the narrative leads (even if it represents the author’s own lived experience). I understand that’s kind of vague, and I’ll be more specific behind spoiler tags, but I’ll say again that this didn’t really feel aimed at me — there were some nice sentences, but it felt mostly like in-jokes that failed to intrigue me — and the novel’s most radical aspect is the one that no one is talking about. I have no idea if this book will one day be regarded as a perfect time capsule of our moment or if its content was passé the moment it was sent to print.

“You could write it,” she had said to the man in Toronto, “someone could write it,” but all writing about the portal so far had a strong whiff of old white intellectuals being weird about the blues, with possible boner involvement.

I did not find it particularly charming that the narrator only refers to the internet (or is it specifically Twitter?) as “the portal”, or that she only refers to the otherwise unnamed president of the United States as “the dictator”, but I can recognise that Lockwood engagingly uses her short passages format to experientially capture the feeling of a social media feed while writing about such feeds. The narrator finds herself a slave to the portal — wanting to be aware of all the latest content while trying to create her own next viral post — and the memes and tweets she reads/creates/reacts to are generally vulgar and shallow and heavily ironic, all serving to create a group of people who think exactly the same way: she learns a “funnier” way to laugh, who to cancel (war criminals but also people who make guacamole wrong), and she happily locksteps along with all the latest groupthink:

The words Merry Christmas were now hurled like a challenge. They no longer meant newborn kings, or the dangling silver notes of a sleigh ride, or high childish hopes for snow. They meant “Do you accept Herr Santa as the all-powerful leader of the new white ethnostate?”

As she travels to the various panels on internet culture around the world, she meets a fellow influencer who admits that his own balls are always somewhere in the pictures he posts online and she laments the fact that she had been banned from the portal for two days after posting a picture of herself crouched over and dripping period blood onto a sculpture of pipe cleaners (labelled THE TREE OF LIBERTY) after the election of “the dictator”, and this type of content is treated as normal and expected. But then the family crisis begins and this novel becomes something else entirely. (*Spoilers from here*) The narrator’s sister is happily pregnant with her first child but it is discovered that the fetus has Proteus syndrome, a condition that causes an overgrowth of skin and bone, and although a team of doctors determines that it is unlikely the baby will be born alive (and if she is alive, it won’t be for long or with any kind of awareness), the greater danger is to the mother’s life: with a rapidly overgrowing skull, giving a natural birth to this baby could rip the mother apart. Unfortunately, emboldened by the election of the dictator, the governor of Ohio has passed a draconian pro-life bill that not only criminalises abortion but also prevents early labour inducement. And although the narrator is outraged and offers to drive her sister to Las Vegas or whatever it takes to do the medically necessary interventions, the sister decides to resign herself to her fate and gives birth to a live baby who immediately captures the hearts and minds of her family. The narrator is enchanted by the baby’s middle distance stare, her giggles at being kissed on the tummy, her engagement with the world on her own terms:

“She only knows what it is to be herself,” they kept repeating to each other. The rest was about them and what they thought a brain and body ought to be able to do. When the neurologist, in that first-ever meeting, had said gently that maybe the baby would one day be able to count to three, she almost turned the table over on her, because who needed to count to three? Look what counting to three had gotten us. I’m warning you.

The baby only lives for six months, but no one who knows her regrets that she was allowed those months of life and I submit that in our internet-dominated lives of shallow and banal content, where there is a generally progressive ethos that assures us there is only one correct way to look at complicated issues, there is no more radical course for a novel to take than a pro-life one. I described this novel to one of my daughters yesterday, and as soon as I got to the part where the baby was born alive and the narrator falls in love with her, my daughter — in the wake of the new Texas whistleblower site — had her back up and said that she would throw such a novel against the wall. I explained that this narrative is apparently based on the author’s own experience with her short-lived niece — she presumably did not set out to write a pro-life novel — but, as that is effectively what Lockwood did write, my daughter said it sounds like proselytising and ought to be shelved under Christianity instead of General Fiction. And when I further explained that my own biggest amazement is that I have read zero reviews that remark on the pro-life mid-novel swerve, my daughter agreed that that is strange: The first half of this book, in form and content, seems written for someone like this lovely, big-hearted, fiercely feminist daughter of mine, but nothing could have provoked her more than the direction the narrative eventually takes (even if it is based on lived experience) and no one is talking about that. 

“I can give them to her, I can give her my minutes.” Then, almost angrily, “What was I doing with them before?”

So, yes, this is, generally, about remembering that real, authentic life happens off of the internet, but in its specifics, No One Is Talking About This is even more radical than that anodyne summation suggests. Even so, it didn’t really engage me (beyond wondering what my daughters would make of it) but it wasn’t a waste of time.

2021 Man Booker Prize Nominees

The Shortlist (In my order of preference):

A Passage North, Anuk Arudpragasam

The Promise, Damon Galgut * The Winner

No One is Talking About This, Patricia Lockwood

The Fortune Men, Nadifa Mohamed

Bewilderment, Richard Powers

Great Circle, Maggie Shipstead

 

And the rest:

Second Place, Rachel Cusk

China Room, Sunjeev Sahota

An Island, Karen Jennings

The Sweetness of Water, Nathan Harris

Klara and the Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro

A Town Called Solace, Mary Lawson

Light Perpetual, Francis Spufford