River Mumma

 

The rushing of the water turned to whispers, hisses sounding one word over and over: Alicia, Alicia, Alicia. It became a song. Alicia could hear River Mumma’s voice in the current. Intoxicating and haunting. Waves splashed on the bank, breaking upon Alicia’s feet, encircling her ankles like hands gripping her joints. She felt an ever-so-delicate pull toward the river, and she complied. She should resist, but she couldn’t. She had to listen to what the voice said.

River Mumma was so much more fun than I had expected — it’s a quest story populated with strange and dangerous creatures from Jamaican mythology — and it was also surprisingly meaningful and observant; similar in voice and setting to author Zalika Reid-Benta’s last release, Frying Plantain (once again, this is from the POV of a first generation Jamaican-Canadian living with her protective and hard-working single mother), this has much to say about keeping faith with one’s ancestors and finding meaning in community. This was so cinematic — the “duppies” were terrifying and the Toronto setting was lovingly evoked — and while I tend to agree with the adage that “good books don’t make good movies”, this is the exception: I loved this read and I would love to see it on film. Perhaps this could have been longer and devoted more space to character development and deep analysis, but I love this for what it is and can’t give fewer than full marks. (Note: I read an ARC and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

In the time Alicia referred to as Before, things weren’t like this. She wasn’t like this. Four years of undergrad completed in three, another eighteen months in New York earning an MA and founding a graduate lit mag, and internships at two boutique literary agencies. She was on her way to becoming the next Toni Morrison of publishing, only to graduate and discover a wasteland in place of the opportunities she’d been promised. She’d returned to Toronto when her money ran out, applied everywhere, and got no interviews. Now everything seemed pointless, including and especially this party.

At twenty-six, Alicia didn’t think she’d be back living with her mom in Toronto, working a low-paid retail job, suffering a quarter-life crisis of no friends but coworkers, no plans but survival, no growth in sight. She also didn’t think that she would suddenly be once again experiencing the “sight” that gave her such awful nightmares as a child; but this time, in addition to ghostly visions and “journeying” through time and space, Alicia comes face-to-face with one of the most powerful deities of Jamaican folklore: the River Mumma — a mermaid-like guardian of the waters, none too happy about the pollution of the waterways, exploitative extraction, and the diaspora who seem to have forgotten the importance of honouring her — and although Alicia doesn’t think that she has the skills or knowledge base to become the “chosen one”, River Mumma sets her on a quest that will have dire consequences if she should fail. Joined in her quest by two coworkers — Mars and Heaven, who Alicia never really even thought of as friends, but who are also members of the Jamaican-Canadian community — the plot is propulsive with a tight timeline (Alicia must recover River Mumma's stolen golden comb before sunset the next day; around four o’clock on this winter’s day), constant setbacks (including attacks by the duppies who don’t want her to succeed), and Alicia keeps losing time to visions and journeying: but just what is it her ancestors need for her to learn?

She wanted to get up and rally — she’d spent much longer at UC than she’d intended, it was already eleven o’clock and she still had no way of finding the comb — but her body hadn’t finished processing the knowledge her ancestors had decided she should experience first-hand in order to acquire. It was a peculiar thing; to feel such a profound sense of pride in the resistance, in the will to live of the people who came before her, and feel personally lacking in the face of that ability at the same time. She had done nothing with her life. When tasked with a duty, the same kind of duty they’d carried out, she resented the responsibility. Heaven was right. She wasn’t the right person for this job.

Layered on to the quest plot is a nicely nuanced exploration of the malaise of disconnection felt by young people today — and specifically the disconnection felt by Toronto’s Afro-Caribbean community. From learning about the resilience of one’s ancestors to remembering to honour the sacred in one’s daily life, it’s suggested that the cure to existential crisis can be found in strengthening the ties with one’s community; it sure can’t hurt. On top of this, I loved the setting: I don’t live in Toronto but I enjoyed all of the local references — from Timbits and the Cashman (I did laugh when Mars suggested visiting “Oliver’s” to pawn some gold) to aggressive Toronto drivers and taking forever to merge onto the Gardiner — I’ve lived this (even if I wasn’t being chased by a fire-breathing cow) and it brought the story to life for me. There’s much more to this than a fantastical vengeful mermaid, but River Mumma is definitely the star and I am so glad to have learned about her. Reid-Benta knocked this outta the park (which I will always mentally refer to as the SkyDome) and I hope this finds a wide audience.

The House of Doors

 

My body felt very light, almost weightless, as I turned towards him. In the silence we looked at each other, each waiting for the other to speak, to move.

“The House of Doors,” I said softly.

I haven’t read Tan Twan Eng before, so I can’t really say if The House of Doors is typical of his work, but honestly, I just found it dull. Combining a few real life historical events — an in-its-day shocking murder trial, the in-exile revolutionary efforts of China’s Sun Yat Sen, Somerset Maugham’s world travels in search of subject matter for his next bestseller — and overlaying each strand with melodramatic love stories, I wasn’t moved or entertained by any of it. I can see that others really loved this, and it has caught the attention of literary juries, so I have no problem admitting that my experience was not typical. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

Below my wedding portrait hangs a photograph of two women, their blouses and frocks and hats quaintly old-fashioned, from another age: Ethel and me, each with a rifle in our hands, the mock-Tudor façade of the Spotted Dog in Kuala Lumpur looming behind us.The photograph had been taken after a shooting competition on the padang. Poor, poor Ethel. My eyes glide to the photograph next to it. I unhook it and study it in the light of the windows. Looking at the four of us – Willie Maugham and Gerald and Robert and myself – lounging in our rattan chairs under the casuarina tree in the garden, my mind loops back to the two weeks in 1921 when the writer and his secretary had stayed with us at Cassowary House. I put down the photograph. The morning is decanting its light down the slopes of the far mountains. It is the autumn equinox today; here, in the southern bowl of the earth, the portions of day and night are exactly equal. The world is at an equilibrium, but I myself feel unsteady, off-balance.

As the novel opens with a prologue set in 1947, one of our two narrators, Lesley Doornfontein, is living in South Africa and has received a first edition copy of W. Somerset Maugham’s The Casuarina Tree. This mysteriously inscribed collection of stories sends her mind back to 1921, when she and her husband were living in the Malaysian state of Penang and had played host to “Willie” Maugham and his secretary/companion Gerald Haxton. Maugham himself is the second narrator, and between what he shares about the economic and domestic pressures he was under at the time, and the story that Lesley tells him about her role in the infamous Ethel Proudlock Case, we get to watch as the desperate author mines the lives of others for his fiction (in this case, turning the story his hostess tells him into the short story The Letter). While Lesley willingly unburdens herself of the secrets she had been keeping for her one-time friend, Maugham also probes her for details of the affair Lesley herself had been having at the time; and when it comes out that just about everyone has affairs and secret lovers, it is concluded more than once that “Every marriage has its own rules.”

From the beginning, I found the writing a little overblown, and I wondered if Tan was trying to emulate Maugham’s own old-fashioned vernacular. When Maugham first meets with his old friend Robert (Lesley’s husband), he notes to himself, “The thick head of hair Robert once possessed was gone, the dome of his head now a depilated basilica, with just a narrow fringe of sparse grey hair above his ears. He hadn’t recognised his old friend’s voice either — the resplendent baritone he used to envy had shrivelled to a querulous, fissured tone.” And when Maugham meets Lesley herself, he thinks, “The corners of her mouth were slightly curled, pulled downwards by another tangle of lines, giving them an anatine look.” And I did not believe that these were in-the-moment impressions, even from a last century author. Or that non-author Lesley would have the following thoughts while skinny-dipping with Maugham in a sea of efflorescent plankton:

Like an anchor sliding from a ship, I sank beneath the surface of the sea and cleaved my way down, descending in a cocoon of light. Shadowy fishes darted around me. The water grew colder, but still I kept falling, intoxicated by the sensation that I was travelling back in time. Was it because the sea was so unmeasurably old, existing even before the firmaments had been formed to divide the waters from the waters? I was gripped by an atavistic urge to keep sinking, down and ever down into the impenetrable darkness, boring a narrow tunnel of light into the fathomless sea, nebulae burning from my fingertips, comet-fire trailing in my wake. What would happen if kept falling, all the way to the beginning of time?

Nothing about the various love stories engaged me, Lesley educating herself on Chinese history after meeting the revolutionary Sun Yat Sen felt like info-dumping, and even her story of the notorious murder trial of her “friend” Ethel Proudlock was doled out so slowly and matter-of-factly that it lacked the expected narrative tension of a courtroom drama (reading The Letter was a much more satisfying experience and there is something interesting in seeing how Tan imagined Maugham turned the one into the other).

We sat there in the silence, our true thoughts camouflaged from each other. What sustained a marriage, kept it going year upon year, I realised, were the things we left unmentioned, the truths that we longed to speak forced back down our throats, back into the deepest, darkest chambers of our hearts.

From Lesley and Robert’s marriage to Maugham’s relationship with Gerald to Sun Yat Sen’s polygamous partners and Ethel Proudlock’s scandal, this idea of lies and secrets sustaining every marriage seems to be the main point of The House of Doors, and that wasn’t an engaging enough thesis to keep my interest. This just wasn’t for me.

Booker Prize Longlist 2023

A Spell of Good Things by Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀’

Old God's Time by Sebastian Barry

Study for Obedience by Sarah Bernstein * My favourite of the list

The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng

If I Survive You by Jonathan Escofferey

How to Build a Boat by Elaine Feeney

This Other Eden by Paul Harding

Pearl by Siân Hughes

All the Little Bird-Hearts by Viktoria Lloyd-Barlow

Prophet Song by Paul Lynch

Western Lane by Chetna Maroo

In Ascension by Martin MacInnes

The Bee Sting by Paul Murray

Western Lane

 

I don’t know if you have ever stood in the middle of a squash court — on the T — and listened to what is going on next door. What I’m thinking of is the sound from the next court of a ball hit clean and hard. It’s a quick, low pistol-shot of a sound, with a close echo. The echo, which is the ball striking the wall of the court, is louder than the shot itself. This is what I hear when I remember the year after our mother died, and our father had us practising at Western Lane two, three, four hours a day.

Western Lane is a short domestic drama, a coming-of-age story, about surviving grief and making connections through one’s actions when words are no longer up to the task. Author Chetna Maroo writes in short, unadorned sentences that nonetheless capture something true about the experience of loss, and despite its brevity, I felt a real emotional punch with this. I liked the details from the family’s Indian-British (Jain) culture, I liked the particular POV of our eleven-year-old protagonist — who is feeling uniquely responsible for getting her father through his own grief at the same time she’s experiencing her first crush — and I even liked the bits on the squash courts that lead to an exciting tournament sequence. There is a lot packed in here, and while I would give it 3.5 stars if I could, I’ll round up to four (mostly to rank this higher than some of the other titles on the Booker longlist. Do I expect it to be shortlisted? Maybe not?)

Much later, Khush would say that that night was really the start of it, of Pa’s thinking about what he would do with us. It wasn’t Aunt Ranjan. It was Uncle Pavan talking about the past. But I think Pa told us himself what moved him. He sat beside us one morning on the bench outside the squash court and said, “I want you to become interested in something you can do your whole life.”

After a warning from his sister-in-law that his three daughters are at risk of “going wild” after the loss of their mother, “Pa” decides to focus on the girls’ squash skills at the local rec centre, Western Lane. As they run drills and “ghost” skills, Gopi (the youngest sister at eleven) emerges as the greatest talent; and when she starts training with thirteen-year-old Ged — the son of a white woman who works at the facility and whose attention from the girls’ father becomes concerning to their community — their friendship will start to fill in some of Gopi’s empty spaces. The relationship between the sisters is lovely — they are all good kids working to get their family through their tragedy — but even as Gopi continues to improve and attracts the attention of someone who thinks she should enter a local tournament, their father seems to be slipping further away from them:

After one of these silences, we heard Pa asking Ged’s mother if she didn’t feel, sometimes, that there was too much time. He asked her if things terrorised her, like hours, or the expressions on a child’s face, or the clattering of lids on pans. Maybe she moved in some way that told Pa she understood. He was quiet, and then he said: “The children. The girls. Sometimes I look at them and think they will eat me.”

Perhaps predictably so, Gopi puts a lot of pressure on herself to save her father through her performance at the tournament — this, after sacrificing herself in other ways — but there is something interesting about the way that Maroo uses sport as a metaphor for the disassociation of grief (Gopi sees herself moving through grief while still inside the grief; sees herself moving through game play while still in the game; marvels at seeing the Milky Way on the horizon while acknowledging her place in it), and it all worked for me. In different circumstances I might round this down to three stars, but there’s something to this and I’m glad I read it.

Booker Prize Longlist 2023

A Spell of Good Things by Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀’

Old God's Time by Sebastian Barry

Study for Obedience by Sarah Bernstein * My favourite of the list

The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng

If I Survive You by Jonathan Escofferey

How to Build a Boat by Elaine Feeney

This Other Eden by Paul Harding

Pearl by Siân Hughes

All the Little Bird-Hearts by Viktoria Lloyd-Barlow

Prophet Song by Paul Lynch

Western Lane by Chetna Maroo

In Ascension by Martin MacInnes

The Bee Sting by Paul Murray

Study for Obedience

 

I wanted to be good in the terrible world. I thought of the birds. I accumulated fidelities in this space of diminishing returns. On the one hand, I felt that my obedience had been rewarded at last. On the other, in this cold and beautiful countryside, I feared I was living a life which I had done nothing to earn and I felt sure of some swift and terrible retribution. As I bit into the last strawberry, I began to weep because language, I felt, was no longer at our disposal, because there was nothing in the word that we could use. Nothing settled in place.

The title of Study for Obedience hearkens to the world of painting, and as it has been widely noted that author Sarah Bernstein had been inspired by a retrospective of feminist painter Paula Rego’s work (even using Rego’s words as an epigraph: I can turn the tables and do as I want. I can make women stronger. I can make them obedient and murderous at the same time.), it should come as no surprise that Bernstein’s novel comes across as painterly. Impressionistic and pointillist, showcasing tone and technique over overt subject matter, Bernstein nonetheless masterfully explores notions of guilt and innocence, language and belonging, history and destiny, and the complicity of those who claim to have been simply following orders. A Gothic rural horror that reads like a mashup of Max Porter and Shirley Jackson, I experienced this viscerally — not really knowing if Bernstein was giving us a modern fairytale until late references to reality recall horror beyond anything the Brothers Grimm imagined. I loved every bit of this experience — even if, perhaps especially if, I had to work to make meaning — and I will absolutely read the author again. (And speaking of paintings: Why does this cover look like someone killed Donna Tartt’s Goldfinch?) Slightly spoilery from here (I knew nothing going in and would recommend the same to other readers). The novel opens:

It was the year the sow eradicated her piglets. It was a swift and menacing time. One of the local dogs was having a phantom pregnancy. Things were leaving one place and showing up in another. It was springtime when I arrived in the country, an east wind blowing, an uncanny wind as it turned out. Certain things began to arise. The pigs came later though not much, and even if I had only recently arrived, had no livestock-caretaking responsibilities, had only been in to look, safely on one side of the electric fence, I knew they were right to hold me responsible. But all that as I said came later.

An unnamed woman relocates to an unnamed “northern country” — the place from whence her ancestors hailed — in order to act as housekeeper for her eldest brother: a very wealthy businessman, recently divorced, who has bought and renovated an impressive manor house on the edge of a small village. The entire novel is an interior monologue from this woman’s POV, and while it might not be quite correct to call her an unreliable narrator, it’s clear that we are getting only her version of events. She tells us early that she is the youngest child in her family, that she has more siblings than she would care to count, and while they had all trained her in servitude and obedience, this eldest brother, in particular, has made it his mission throughout her life to stamp out the woman’s personal thoughts and desires.

As she cheerfully does chores for her brother — chopping wood (for ambience in the centrally-heated home), the daily shopping, the cooking and cleaning — she realises that she’s being shunned by the locals (whose language, not incidentally, she’s unable to pick up): as she walks through town, parents shield their children; diners at the local cafe hook their fingers in the sign of the cross at the sight of her; and when she volunteers at the local farm, she is sent a message to muck out the stalls and avoid all contact with people and animals. Strange events begin to occur — and the woman finds herself under suspicion — and it’s hard to tell if they distrust her because she’s woman, or if they suspect that she’s a witch, or if there is some other, more insidious, prejudice at play (it doesn’t help things that the woman likes to twist reeds into human shapes and leave them on folks’ doorsteps in the middle of the night).

This is a short book with long paragraphs (running into pages), and while I savoured the language, it’s hard to excerpt passages that give the full flavour. I was often amused, as when we learn the the woman bathes and dresses her brother in the course of her duties — soaping his back and “executing Indian head massages” — and when he becomes listless, and after watching a documentary on horses, the woman decides to purchase some appropriate curry combs in order to restore her brother:

I walked around the shop perusing the impressively thorough selection of brushes on offer, ranging in size from the infinitesimal — designed, I reasoned, to brush the teeth of a cat — this perhaps to smooth the skating rink erected on the town's lake each winter. Somewhere in the middle of these two (for the tools were arranged by size) I found three brushes roughly adequate to the dimensions of my brother, that could provide coverage and relief to his longest flank as well to his littlest fingers.

(I hope that comes across as absurdly funny as I found it to be.) This next point is the slight spoiler of which I warned: There is also a real sense of dread and horror in the storyline. I would not have been surprised if it turned out that the woman was a ghost or a vampire (because of the way the townsfolk reacted and because she mentions that she’s always been repulsed by the idea of entering a church), but through hints and feints, we eventually learn that she is Jewish and that her family had escaped the area in the last century. Which, to the townspeople, makes her a kind of zombie: They thought she and her people were dead and gone, and here she is, risen from the ashes of history to confront them with their past:

He could easily understand the people of the town, he told me one golden summer evening, as we sat looking out on to the garden, their attitudes then, their attitudes now, how they felt they had got a raw deal, had been cut off from fortune by some accident of fate, merely because what at a certain point they and their forebears had called efficiency the rest of the world had, in stages, and one by one, rather like dominoes falling against one another in a tidy sequence until they found themselves all together in a heap, until everything came to an end, determined to be acts of barbarism. And how many of those claiming to be upright had agreed that none was too many? And how many of them in truth, in their heart of hearts, could say they were not guilty? What after all was the difference between thought and deed? Was it a question of scale, or systemisation? What about the pit parties? What about the dogs?

So, back to the title: There’s the idea of obedient soldiers simply “following orders” as they committed atrocities, but there’s also the idea of women like our main character subdued into obedience, made monstrous in response. What was the purpose of the reed figures that scared everyone so? Why did the brother’s health start to decline under her care? The unnamed country could easily have contained a dense forest with a witch living in a candy house at its heart, and who could blame folks for shunning her? This was unsettling, and this was art; just to my tastes.

Booker Prize Longlist 2023

A Spell of Good Things by Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀’

Old God's Time by Sebastian Barry

Study for Obedience by Sarah Bernstein * My favourite of the list

The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng

If I Survive You by Jonathan Escofferey

How to Build a Boat by Elaine Feeney

This Other Eden by Paul Harding

Pearl by Siân Hughes

All the Little Bird-Hearts by Viktoria Lloyd-Barlow

Prophet Song by Paul Lynch

Western Lane by Chetna Maroo

In Ascension by Martin MacInnes

The Bee Sting by Paul Murray

A Spell of Good Things

 

She had always marvelled at his calm reassurance that everything good in his life would either remain the same or get better. He took good fortune for granted. As though it were impossible that it would abide only for a spell. She had never been able to shake the sense that life was war, a series of battles with the occasional spell of good things.

I’ve read quite a few books set in modern-day Nigeria (enough to acknowledge that as colonists drew the country’s borders, this enforced association of unaffiliated tribes is no cultural monolith), and while I am open to learning more about the pressures that any group of people live under, I really didn’t learn anything new in A Spell of Good Things. Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀ (whose previous novel Stay with Me did expand my heart and mind) is going for an intergenerational epic here: Rotating between the POVs of many members of an upper class and a lower class family, she demonstrates the ways in which every Nigerian is negatively affected by political corruption, lack of investment in social programs and infrastructure, and entrenched social customs. But there really wasn’t anything new or surprising in the details. Adébáyọ̀’s characters are well-drawn and sympathetic — it’s hard not to wince as various people are controlled or beaten by those who have power over them — but overall, the writing is straightforward, often dull, and builds to a dramatic conclusion devoid of any literary or philosophical payoff. This was fine, but I wouldn’t give it the Booker Prize.

God forbid she ever say it out loud, but Kúnlé was a much better catch than she expected for Wúràọlá. The longer Wúràọlá had remained single, flitting from one unserious boyfriend to another, the more Yèyé had worried that, when she did decide to commit to one of them, closer to thirty than twenty, she would be left with a pool of expiring men who were unmarried because no one wanted them. On her worst days, she had imagined Wúràọlá ending up with some barely educated drunkard whose parents lived in a house with no indoor plumbing. And how would that have improved on her daughter’s fortunes in this life?

Although the novel rotates between nine POVs, the two main characters are: Ẹniọlá — a poor boy in his last year of secondary school, whose father had been laid off from his teaching job years before, and as the dad now spends his days in bed staring at the wall, Ẹniọlá’s mom is forced to beg and scavenge to afford her children’s school fees and rent on their squalid flat, and: Wúràọlá — a brilliant doctor rotating through her hospital residencies, from a rich and influential family, whose mother is pressuring her to get married. Although these two characters couldn’t be more different, the failings of their government affect them in the same ways: lack of investment in education and healthcare sees not enough teachers and books for Ẹniọlá, not enough fellow doctors or medicine for Wúràọlá; without enough food, Ẹniọlá is lucky to get one meal a day, whereas Wúràọlá is too busy to stop and eat more than once a day; with an upcoming election, venal politicians will put pressure on Wúràọlá’s father to support this one or that if he wants to continue getting government contracts, while those same politicians won’t be above hiring a poor boy like Ẹniọlá to enforce a different kind of pressure:

Ẹniọlá pressed his forehead against the window. So what if he was carrying a machete? Holy Michael had not asked him to hurt anyone with it, he was just going to scare people a little. If he could help his mother and sister, could whatever made it possible be as wrong as his father claimed?

While not very much happens for most of the novel, Ẹniọlá on a bus with a machete does initiate dramatic events, and while I see that many reviewers think the ending justifies the journey, I’m going to shield myself behind the Kirkus review that refers to this “trajectory” as “predictable and moralizing”; hey, their words, not mine.

I found it interesting that Adébáyọ̀ presents the female characters as smarter and more capable than their male partners — although Ẹniọlá is shown as desperate to complete his education, it’s his younger sister who gets perfect grades; Wúràọlá is a respected doctor while her fiancé couldn’t pass the entrance exam to med school; Ẹniọlá’s mom will do anything to support her family while his dad is too depressed to even apply for work; Wúràọlá’s mother, Yèyé, has secret investments in case their “spell of good things” runs dry (advice she received from her very capable older sisters); even the tailor shop (a storyline that I think could have been cut without losing anything) is owned by a woman. It was interesting that women can succeed in this society — there doesn’t seem to be any barrier to girls receiving the same educational opportunities as boys — even though they still suffer under sexist customs (the women aren’t complete until they’re married; the poor family’s landlord will only deal with the dad, even though it’s the mom who scrapes together the rent; there are countless rules for prostrating themselves before, addressing, and serving the men.) Even so, I was intrigued that Adébáyọ̀ would present someone as independent and intelligent as Dr Wúràọlá getting giddily caught up in the admiration of others once she does get engaged and I was a bit disgusted by Wúràọlá enumerating the reasons why she doesn’t want to leave Kúnlé once he starts abusing her, ending her list with “he’s hot and I love that he’s mine”. Just, no.  I get that Adébáyọ̀ is addressing both sexism and classism — and the extra pressures put on people by a corrupt government — but I honestly don’t think she’s saying anything new here: yeah, these things are bad; no, this didn’t do much for me.

Booker Prize Longlist 2023

A Spell of Good Things by Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀’

Old God's Time by Sebastian Barry

Study for Obedience by Sarah Bernstein * My favourite of the list

The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng

If I Survive You by Jonathan Escofferey

How to Build a Boat by Elaine Feeney

This Other Eden by Paul Harding

Pearl by Siân Hughes

All the Little Bird-Hearts by Viktoria Lloyd-Barlow

Prophet Song by Paul Lynch

Western Lane by Chetna Maroo

In Ascension by Martin MacInnes

The Bee Sting by Paul Murray

This Other Eden

 

It’s Apple Island! It is Apple Island!

Benjamin Honey looked at his wife crying to him — fierce and true. But she was wrong. His orchard, so fair in appearance, was a folly; his half-remembered Eden no sooner restored than carried off by a little wind and rain.

This Other Eden opens with an epigraph that states: Malaga Island was home to a mixed-race fishing community from the mid 1800s to 1912, when the state of Maine evicted 47 residents from their homes and exhumed and relocated their buried dead. Inspired by this historic tragedy, author Paul Harding imagines his own such mixed-race community — the first settlers, a runaway enslaved man and his Irish wife, having arrived on the fictional “Apple Island” in 1792 — and although, by design, the reader knows where the plot must lead, Harding seems to be using the storyline merely as a scaffolding from which to hang his incredibly pretty words. On the one hand: I am a sucker for just this kind of rhythmic and lyrical wordcraft; and on the other: knowing that this was based on true events, I don’t know if Harding did right by the memories of those whose lives he mined for inspiration. I savoured the reading experience, but it left a sour taste in my mouth; my heart wanted to round up to four stars, but my brain says three.

Terrible, she thought, making her way home as Charlotte and Tabitha and the Sockalexis children criss-crossed in front of and between the line of adults walking away from the schoolhouse along the path. Terrible how terribly good intentions turn out almost every time.

As the novel opens in the early twentieth century, there’s something like sixteen residents living on Apple Island: all of mixed race and a range of colours; many the result of inbreeding, consensual and otherwise. In the first scene, we see the Honey family (the direct descendents of the island’s first settlers) as they tell stories and try to keep warm in their crude cabin; cold, hungry, threadbare, but loving. We eventually meet Matthew Diamond: a retired minister who comes to the island every summer in order to teach its children, and although he appears to be a charitable and Christ-like man, he will eventually reveal a hidden ugliness. If Apple Island is Eden, Diamond is the serpent; his proffered fruit of the knowledge of good and evil necessarily leads to the Fall. Yet: if Diamond is the villain for eventually bringing government inspectors (and their new excitement for eugenics) to the island, Harding doesn’t exactly portray the pre-contact society as a paradise. The inbreeding has had an effect on some of the residents (one little girl seems little more than animal), they are living hand to mouth in unhygienic conditions, and summer school doesn’t seem sufficient for the handful of students that, somehow, include a maths genius, a Latin scholar, and an artistic savant. The fact that intervention (as per other information in the epigraph) leads to bad outcomes for some residents doesn’t actually seem to argue against the need for some kind of intervention. This would have been more tragic if Harding had made the islanders seem more like ordinary people who simply chose to live apart from society — if their mistreatment had been more clearly linked to racism or paternalism or eugenics — instead of peopling this outpost with the old man with a religious mania for carving Biblical scenes on the inner walls of the tree he lives inside, or the man who wears his dead mother’s dress and dead father’s clerk apron and obsessively acts out what he remembers of their roles in life, or the little girl who won’t eat people food but bites the heads off snakes and vermin. I guess what I’m saying is that there’s nothing philosophically interesting about the plot — because of the way that Harding used his source material — and ultimately, that didn’t feel respectful to those who actually lived this.

As for the wordcrafting, many, many scenes play out like the following; odd phrasing and syncopation that worked for me (but could wear on another reader, for sure):

Put the haystacks in the sky, bristling and sharp, rasping across the lowering blue. Stack the clouds in piled rows across the meadow, simmering, hovering, combed fog stitched by the bottom to the short shorn grass, vegetal, green, drying in the day, dehydrating in the sun, sweet and wet then dry and sweet and perfuming the meadow, the deep gray purple morning clouds with the shorn dark green morning grass waving like tide grass in salt creeks then leaching white and straw as light sheers to high white noon and hangs from the pinnacle of the day, suspended in the heat and high white and white hay, suffocating, asphyxiating in breathless angelic light. How to get dawn, noon, and dusk all at once. How to get the heat. The forms and light and colors describe themselves to Ethan with perfect clarity and harmony, without explanation or reason, and he copies them down onto the canvas with the paints.

There is a nice bit in the middle that sees this self-taught painter — Ethan, who can pass for white — sent away for instruction by the meddlesome Matthew Diamond. But as much as I was enjoying the change of scenery, we are eventually brought back to Apple Island and the eviction of its residents, and I don’t know if at all hangs together. But again: This really isn’t about the plot; it’s about words and rhythm and mood and I felt like Harding succeeded in what he was aiming for. But again: Knowing that this was based on the lives of real people, it leaves a sour aftertaste. Art, but problematic.

Booker Prize Longlist 2023

A Spell of Good Things by Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀’

Old God's Time by Sebastian Barry

Study for Obedience by Sarah Bernstein * My favourite of the list

The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng

If I Survive You by Jonathan Escofferey

How to Build a Boat by Elaine Feeney

This Other Eden by Paul Harding

Pearl by Siân Hughes

All the Little Bird-Hearts by Viktoria Lloyd-Barlow

Prophet Song by Paul Lynch

Western Lane by Chetna Maroo

In Ascension by Martin MacInnes

The Bee Sting by Paul Murray

If I Survive You

 

You assume that, should you survive long enough to become a grandfather or great-grandfather, you will outlive winter; you will outlive glaciers and polar bears and snow. And it occurs to you now that, should you survive to see your progeny reproduce, you will outlive and thus need to explain Miami to these descendants — who in your mind’s eye split your features and Jelly’s — as the city, by then, like much of Port Royal and Atlantis before it, will have returned to the sea. It occurs to you that people like you — people who burn themselves up in pursuit of survival — rarely survive anyone or anything.

I like reading fiction because I am very interested in learning how other people live. And with If I Survive You, author Jonathan Escoffery writes about a community — Jamaican-Americans in Miami — that I’ve never seen explored in this way. In a series of short stories (that definitely reads like a novel), we meet Trelawny (born in America to Jamaican immigrants) and his older brother Delano (their father’s favourite), and the pressures that this family — and especially Trelawny — endures was definitely eye-opening to me. The writing is polished (this does not feel like a debut), the small moments are touching, but although several stories end on big shocking scenes that made me gasp in the moment, I was left with the feeling afterward that these scenes were unwarranted and gratuitous. The bottom line: The small moments engaged me and truly gave me a sense of how a family like this might live, but the big moments, and the overall storyline, didn’t feel authentic. This felt like a 3.5 star read to me and I’m rounding down.

“Are we Black?” you ask your mother.

Agitation grips her. A shudder takes her bright, freckled flesh and wiggles it over her bones as she quickly finishes the family genealogy, down to the last shaky details. “Your father’s father’s mother was Jewish. Your grandmother’s mother was Irish,” she says. “Your grandmother’s father,” and she lowers her voice to a whisper when she says this part, “may have been an Arab.”

You stare at her blankly, noting, “You haven’t answered the question.”

Her agitation inflates to ire. “Chuh. I was never asked such stupidness before coming to this country. If someone asks you,” she says, “tell them you’re a little of this and a little of that.”

The first story, In Flux, introduces Trelawny as a young boy in search of an answer to a question he hears frequently at school: What are you? He’s too white to fit in with the Black kids, too brown to hang with the whites, and as he doesn’t speak Spanish, he’s not welcome around the Cubans and Dominicans either. Trelawny’s parents and older brother speak in a Jamaican patois (which most people don’t recognise as English), and the boy’s naive insistence that he should just be thought of as “American” means that he doesn’t fit in very well with his family either. Trelawny is a very likeable and sympathetic character, and as events like Hurricane Andrew and the 2008 Recession play out in the background, the unique pressures that Trelawny and his family experience as outsiders are well explored.

These are also the stories of absent fathers and microaggressions and economic failure. I don’t know if I understood why, after graduating college, Trelawny was too overqualified to get any job and needed to live in his car (or why, years later, he and a girlfriend — who each had a fulltime job by then — couldn’t have qualified for an $11 000 mortgage to buy his father’s house?) I’ve never tried to make a quick buck by answering CraigsList ads, but I didn’t understand what the white people were willing to pay for over the years. I really liked the story of cousin Cukie reconnecting with his own absentee dad in Splashdown, but as dramatic as that ending was, I saw it coming (and I thought that it detracted from the integrity of the book overall). On the other hand, I didn’t see the ending coming in Under the Ackee Tree, and I thought it was perfection. Again: I was moved by small moments but put off by several of the big plot points.

My parents came to the U.S. not for economic advancement but to escape the violence the U. S. government funded in Jamaica throughout the 1970s as part of its war on socialism. But when I say Jamaica to non-Jamaicans, no one thinks of CIA operatives, or puppet prime ministers, or historical continuity. Instead, they break into free association, as if they’d been tossed into a rap cypher: Bob Marley, irie, ganja, poor people, Sandals, ‘ey mon! At best, they believe our history began the moment they purchased their all-inclusive vacation package. Of course, the difference between exiles and my parents — in fact, the difference between me and my parents — is that my parents have a homeland to which they can return.

This disconnection — Trelawny’s feeling that he’s truly neither American or Jamaican; that he doesn’t fit in with his family or community (he’s never even had a girlfriend who wasn’t fetishising him or rebelling against their parents by being with him) — is the crux of If I Survive You, and Escoffery does a wonderful job of exploring the experience. I certainly did learn something of how someone in this position lives, I just wanted to believe in everything that happens.

Booker Prize Longlist 2023

A Spell of Good Things by Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀’

Old God's Time by Sebastian Barry

Study for Obedience by Sarah Bernstein * My favourite of the list

The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng

If I Survive You by Jonathan Escofferey

How to Build a Boat by Elaine Feeney

This Other Eden by Paul Harding

Pearl by Siân Hughes

All the Little Bird-Hearts by Viktoria Lloyd-Barlow

Prophet Song by Paul Lynch

Western Lane by Chetna Maroo

In Ascension by Martin MacInnes

The Bee Sting by Paul Murray