Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer's Reviews > This Other Eden

Now shortlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize and 2023 US National Book Award for Fiction

#2 in my Booker Prize longlist rankings after reading all the longlist books twice.
My Instagram post on what worked for me, what did not, my favourite quote and of course a book-themed Golden Retriever photo here:

https://www.instagram.com/p/CxVpkzQoL...

Longlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize. I first read this book in July - of the 80 or so eligible books I read it was the only one of my top 13 to make what was a rather underwhelming longlist (6 other books I had read made the list) - and perhaps not surprisingly was at the top of my provisional rankings after reading the full list.

So, here is another arrival on our little island, Esther thought. Our little island on this little earth. This little earth, hung somewhere deep in the fathomless heavens. Here is another arrival this girl, this child-ripening within her own body the seed of another arrival, another child, each and every life comprehensive, each peculiar, each priceless, and each less than the shadow of a shadow, all cherished or despised, celebrated or aggrieved, memorialized or entirely forgotten.

I re- read the book in late August and enjoyed it as much second time around particularly due to the many biblical references (Eden, Noah’s Ark, Pharoah, crossing of the Red Sea, the wilderness tears, Ruth, Babylonian exile, Jesus and so on).

ORIGINAL JULY REVIEW

Eha’s life and the lives of everyone on the island and everything they’ve done and enjoyed and suffered and nearly starved from and all the full moons and bright suns and green grass and blue skies and rain and snow and wind and clouds, tin cups, lead sinkers, cod and lobsters and clams and whelks and driftwood all begin to erupt in slow motion from the infinitely dense black point in Eha’s thought that is the meaning of this eviction, which at first his brain could not divulge to his understanding but is splitting open and disgorging as he sits looking at his house remembering so many things. Now he looks at his house and can feel Zachary’s sorrow, as if from inside, instead of just knowing that he’s a sad man from the outside, and can feel the comfort of his tree and as he understands that, looking at the house he and Zachary built together, that Zachary taught him how to make, he realizes not the fact but the meaning of the fact that this house before him, from which he and his mother and daughters are to be evicted and which once empty will be set afire and burn from home to square of ash, is made of the tree that he and Zachary felled on the main, deep in a part of the woods Zachary knew about from the old uncles and grandpas and Penobscots who lived by themselves away from any town or settlement. He realizes, too, that he was once a son missing a father but Zachary has been his real father all these years since, and he realizes that he now is a father missing a son.

Paul Harding’s debut novel “Tinkers” about a dying New England clockmaker was published by a small independent press and something of a word-of-mouth hit before its surprise Pulitzer Prize win in 2010. His second novel “Enon” featured the grandson of that clockmaker, mourning the death of his pre-teenage daughter.

This is his third novel and while character/location wise tangentially related to his first two (a “grand dame” - Ms Hale from ‘Enon’ is a side character in this as an absent ten year old who later acts as a donator of drawings to retrospective art exhibitions, and a pivotal part of the novel occurs on the ‘Enon” estate) takes the themes of death and mourning and extends them from individuals to a small and distinctive community.

It is also I think the novel that may bring him to greater UK attention with a potential Booker longlisting given the book is blurbed by one of the judges (Esi Eduygan) but one which would I believe be entirely merited.

The book is inspired by the story of Malaga Island (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaga_...) – a very small Island in Maine which housed an eclectic interracial community and was subject to a forced deportation by the state authorities in 1911 on the grounds of “degeneracy” with some residents taken to institutions for the feeble-minded – an action for which the state issued a belated apology in 2011 – something bought to the attention of the public in Down East Magazine (https://downeast.com/history/malaga/) in an article which Harding later read while also noting that the first International Eugenics Congress (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interna...) was happening in London at almost the same time (1912).

The story of the Island and that link provides the framework for what is an otherwise entirely fictionalised novel – Harding has said “I’m not the person to write the history of Malaga Island; I have no organic connection to it; I didn’t grow up there. Those people’s personal lives are not mine to take up.” – instead he uses it as an imaginative launch pad for exploring what the community of the Island might be like and how they may have experienced the State’s actions – “I think of my writing as interrogative, you just go in there, and you just listen and look and describe. The mode can never be explanatory. There’s no thesis. There’s no argument. It’s purely descriptive, just always asking, ‘What is it like, what is it like, what is it like?’”

Harding’s Malaga equivalent is “Apple Island” – lying some 300 feet only from the mainland and named after the trees planted by (and an obsession for) its first settler – Benjamin Honey a free or fleed Bantu/Igbo origin slave who first moved to the Island with his Galway born wife Patience in 1793.

And the book opens in 1911 with the Island matriarch – Esther Honey (Benjamin and Patience’s great-grandaughter) telling her own grandchildren (Ethan – 15, Charlotte – 10, Tabitha – 8: children of her – largely silent - son Eha, a talented carpenter) the Island’s own Noah/Flood based foundational story when the Island and the early Honey family was almost destroyed in a Hurricane enduced storm in 1815 (presumably the “Great September Gale” - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1815_Ne...) – surviving only just by clinging onto the top trees of a branch as a wall of water and debris flooded over the land.

Gradually we are introduced to the other members of the Island - a group with “blood from every continent but Antarctica” who live in a hand-to-mouth freedom, invested with lice but also free to roam their small Island at will.

Theophilus and Candace Lark (“cousins probably siblings”) from a series of inbred generations whose four children (other than the younger sister Millie) are sun-sensitive, part blind and part deaf – the oldest Rabbit living off bark and sea creatures: they survive (just) by fishing which is largely carried out by Candace now with Theophilus wearing his mother’s dress, his grandmother’s apron and his storekeeper grandfather’s affectations (particularly the phrase “What lack ye” – when people pass).

Violet and Iris McDermott – two elderly sisters who run a laundry for mainlanders clothes and who look after a group of three Penobscot tribe children abandoned into their care

Zachary Hand to God Proverbs – a civil war veteran who lives in a hollow tree at the end of the Island – a tree inside which he (a brilliant carpenter who helped Eha fell and then build the wooden and shingled Honey family home) carves a series of increasingly elaborate biblical scenes. Zachary together with Esther is the effective elder on the Island and he also shares the knowledge of her own very troubled past with her father, a past which Esther sees as having bought something of a curse to the Island whose consequences are bound up in what is now happening

Zachary is also something of an Old Testament prophet figure

Wicked shepherds! Burn me at the stake and hang me from a tree. Clap me in the stocks; send me down the mine; set me in the burning fields. But I am queer. And I say, Here is water, bread, a dull penny. Here’re my old shirt, my plane and hammer, a roof I’ll help you raise above your head. Here is my queer old body, in a barn, behind a hedge, beneath a shadow, on a bare pallet—quick—while the murderous king still sleeps. Here is a song, a painting, a jig and a reel. Here is an island for an apple, an orchard for an eye. Here is a single, perfect apple for an island.

The other permanent inhabitants are Annie Parker (who lives alone at Zachary’s end of the Island) and three dogs.

Each Summer, Matthew Diamond (a retired schoolteacher from a missionary and theological college in Enon) stays on his Summer home on the Maine Coast and visits the Island brining relief parcels as well as teaching the children in a schoolhouse he, Zachary and Eha built – three of the children proving skilled pupils, with Ethan in particular a promising artist.

Esther distrusts Matthew – partly as he reminds her of her father (as well as her own lightskinned sister who fled the Island) but also as she senses that his interest in the Island will bring it to wider attention and lead to its destruction.

Now, here the mainlanders were, on Apple Island, in the form of this courteous, plain white man who turned Esther’s guts because he reminded her of her father and whose coming surely forecasted disaster. Courteous, and innocent, really, Esther thought, but innocent as in, as in—she searched for the word and it came to her from Shakespeare, from Hamlet—innocent as in artless. He was not innocent in the sense of being blameless, but in the sense of being oblivious to the greater, probably utter, catastrophe into which the, yes, artless graciousness of bringing the school and lessons would draw them all.

And her fears come to pass as, inspired by eugenic theories and by a newspaper article and series of photos which talks about “the little rock’s queer brood of paupers and the squalor in which they live” decide to make the Islanders “all related by blood .. many or most clinically idiotic as well as lazy” wards of the state - first sending Doctors to measure and examine them, then taking the Larks to an institution (an act resulting in tragedy) and later forcibly expelling the Islanders.

Matthew knowing this is coming decides to rescue Ethan – relying on his white skin and artisitic talent to get a placement on the Enon estate to refine his painting skills – and a whole side story takes place there as Ethan falls in love with Bridget - a young serving girl herself from a remote Island community - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_B... note that if the reader has already not drawn very strong connections between this book and Audrey Magee’s “The Colony” then Bridget – if I may be permitted a Darwinian pun given the Eugenics underpinnings – provides the Missing Link).

The two start a sexual relationship and that story ends rather inevitably and leads to Ethan fleeing the estate (and the novel) ahead of expulsion and Bridget (and her unborn baby) becoming the last refugees to take shelter on the ark of the Island.

Matthew is a complex character with an aspect of his personality – his attempts to help the Islanders despite his secret aversion to those of non-white races – explicitly modelled by Harding on the theologian Karl Barth and his role in aiding Jews fleeing Germany despite his own deep feelings of antisemitism.

Harding was drawn to Barth and other theologians by Marilynne Robinson (and others) and their and her influence on her writing is clear in a novel infused with biblical imagery - particularly that of the Flood and then the Ark which effectively bookend the story – with the expelled Honey family feeling the destruction of their Island – the novel ends on that destruction – on a raft.

Esther saw them all on the raft as they might be seen from the shore, or higher, from over the water, from above the ocean, castaways, a bitter old harridan and her grown brother son and two granddaughters, a mutt, and a pregnant stranger, adrift together on a raft piled with their home in pieces, the house a gesture toward and persistence at the kind of home they’d all wanted for themselves since they’d come to the rock, the island, and clung to it, always knowing that sooner or later they’d be noticed, for the worse, and be expelled back out onto the waters. Esther lifted her face and looked back at her home. That poor island, she said. That poor little island of such poor dear souls. Driven from our home, our ark, our little basket in the bullrushes. All for some kind of hotel, they say.

The final aspect of the novel is that it is threaded through with the catalogue of a 21st century exhibit of some of Ethan’s paintings (as well as some letters and photos) commemorating the Islander’s lives some century after their (now seen as shameful) expulsion.

So a complex and multifacted novel which is in my view moved from excellent to outstanding by the power of Harding’s writing – long complex run-on sentences which build in power and impact but ones in which it feels, something like Zachary’s elaborate biblical scenes, in which each word has been carefully and patiently carved.

And mixed with this much literary imagery (the Bible and Shakespeare proving the main but far from exclusive sources) and shimmering descriptions of the natural world of the Island – which themselves draw on Ethan’s careful observations that inform his paintings.

Just as in “The Colony” Harding is also capable of taking the same scene and switching in it between points of view – a relatively trivial but beautifully captured incident in which the two Honey girls bathe in the sea, being a perfect example.

Overall – very highly recommended.

The sun rose and set every day. The moon, too. The tides went out and came in. The seasons turned in order. Some of the trees lost their leaves in the autumn and grew them back in the spring. People ate breakfast and supper when they had food and smoked and drank their tea. They had babies and raised them. They worked and slept. They sang and laughed and yelled and wept and fought and coupled. But from the first time she’d heard it, Esther Honey understood that if the man Jesus had died and been buried then really and truly rose, it was the only time such a thing had ever happened and that meant everything else in the world took its real meaning from that young man lying dead in his grave and awakening back to life and rolling the stone away from his tomb and saying goodbye to his friends and helpers not in spirit but actually in that body that had died and come back to life.