Paul Harding, This Other Eden (W. W. Norton, 2013, 212 pp)
How did this book end up on my shelf of assorted new books from Loutit Library? I had read no reviews, had not heard it mentioned, knew nothing about the author or the subject. And when I picked it up, after it sat on the borrowed-books shelf nearly until its due date, I was initially put off by the bleakness and despair of the penniless, disease-ridden, forgotten collection of mixed-race settlers on a tiny island on the coast of Maine, set at the beginning of the 20th century, a hundred years after a freed slave and his Irish wife had made their way to the then uninhabited rocky outcropping and created a small, isolated, eccentric community there, scraping a living from the sea and the woods, intermarrying, living in cabins they built or in dirt hovels or in the trunk of a tree. It seemed too bizarre and outlandish to read more than the fifty pages I usually allot to an unfamiliar book.
But the extraordinary lyricism of Harding's writing drew me in, and so, in the end, did the horrifying tale, based on historical events, of the brutal application of eugenicism and racism to this luckless band of outcasts and misfits.
Below is the review I have submitted to Christian Century, not yet edited or published.
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Violent storms often mark turning points in epic narratives,
as in the flood story of Genesis 6-9. King
Lear staggers across a wind-swept heath, bemoaning the loss of his kingdom and
his mind. Battered by a hurricane in the
Florida Everglades, Zora Neale Hurston’s characters shelter in their flimsy
shanties; “they seemed to be staring at the dark, but their eyes were watching
God.” Storms pummel the Yorkshire moors when
a spurned Heathcliff runs from the house of his beloved in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering
Heights. In Wesley Anderson’s film
“Moonrise Kingdom,” whose musical and dramatic structure derives in part from Benjamin
Britten’s church oratorio “Noye’s Fludde,” a great storm wreaks destruction on
a village.
A storm of Biblical proportions ravages the New England coast
in the opening pages of Paul Harding’s novel, This Other Eden. An immigrant from Ireland who had settled on an
uninhabited island two decades earlier with her African husband escapes from
her house just before the storm smashes it into splinters, thinking to herself,
“This was the Judgment and what was to be was to be; it was useless to try to
outrun the outstretched arm of the Lord.”
Benjamin and Patience Honey sweep up grandchildren in their arms and
climb the tallest tree on the island. As
the tree sways and nearly snaps in the gale, they watch the floodwaters destroy
homes and farms and orchards and then at last subside. Of the family members and neighbors who have climbed
up after them, some are spared, others swept away and drowned.
As the great flood causes both the near destruction and the
renewal of the human family in the Biblical story, so the hurricane of 1815 decimates
but does not destroy a mixed-race community on a Maine island. Apple Island is a “granite pebble in the
Atlantic,” (13) separated from the mainland by just 300 feet of tidal shallows
– and by an unbridgeable gulf of racial prejudice and social isolation.
The story of the great storm is recounted nearly a century
later by the first settlers’ great-granddaughter Esther, who presides from her
rocking chair over two more generations of the Honey family. She is the matriarch, too, of a ragged
community of outcasts and misfits, the “distillate of Angolan fathers and
Scottish grandpas, Irish mothers and Congolese grannies, Cape Verdean uncles
and Penobscot aunts, cousins from Dingle, Glasgow and Montserrat.” (23) Living in rough-hewn cabins, repurposed
fishing vessels, and a hollowed-out tree, a dozen island-dwellers eke out a
living from farming, fishing, gathering berries, and providing day labor and
laundry services for mainland families.
There is a foundation of history underlying Harding’s
fictional story. The Great September
Gale of 1815 destroyed 500 homes and took 38 lives in New England. (Hurston also described an actual storm, the
Okeechobee Hurricane of 1928, one of the most powerful ever recorded.) And a tiny coastal island, Malaga Island, was
uninhabited until a formerly enslaved man and his white wife settled there in
1794, raised a family, and were joined by a few others seeking refuge from
societal scorn. The isolated Eden of
their descendents ended in 1911 with forcible eviction, not by angels bearing
swords but by state authorities who determined by precise cranial measurements,
applying the fashionable science of eugenics, that generations of racial mixing
had produced a population of subhumans. Some
of the residents were committed to the Maine School for the Feeble-Minded. All this is documented in local sources and
state records.
The novel is a work of imagery and imagination, however, not
history. Harding invites us to inhabit
the lives and worlds of characters he has created. “I think of my writing as interrogative,” he
has told an interviewer: “You just go in
there, and you just listen and look and describe. The mode can never be
explanatory.” What Harding hears as he listens is a rich
tapestry of unexpected analogies, vivid images, and arresting descriptions of
hardscrabble lives.
When arrangements have been made for Ethan, one of the Honey
children who has shown a talent for drawing, to lodge with a wealthy friend on
the mainland – a possibility only because the boy can pass for white – the
islanders send him off with a great feast.
There are oysters and lobsters from the ocean, corn from the fields,
truffles from the forest, and beer from who knows where. The islanders sing hymns, sea shanties, and
“women’s desolate, joyous songs.” It is
an event never before experienced, never to be repeated.
The islanders were so used to diets
of wind and fog, to meals of slow-roasted sunshine and packed storm clouds, so
used to devouring sautéed shadows and broiled echoes; they found themselves
stupefied by such an abundance of food and drink. (97)
Everywhere on the island, and in each of the residents’
lives, there are layers of light and layers of darkness. Esther is tormented by memories of the
monster who was her father. The
missionary teacher who builds the first school on the island to broaden the
horizons of its children – one of whom quickly grasps advanced mathematics,
another the composition of Latin poetry – cannot shake his belief in a
hierarchy of higher and lower races. The
oldest island resident – by appearance, although no one knows his own or
anyone’s year of birth -- is a hermit who carves elaborate Biblical tableaux
into a hollow tree that is his principal home.
Later he decides it is a pointless exercise and sets fire to the tree.
On nearly every page a reader is caught up by vivid and
evocative phrases. “Evening came over
the meadows,” Harding writes, “and the haystacks lowered into deep blues and
purples as the sky flared and lowered, too.”
(125) The author relishes the
arcane vocabulary of fishers and farmers and foresters: we observe a tedder in the hayfields (118), a
drail on a fishing line (29), a thwart saw and a froe in the forest (175, 178),
and a young workman peening a scythe (149).
Biblical themes come to the surface, too, sometimes evoking
the great flood of the opening pages. Sketching
a dead bird, young Ethan ponders whether Noah’s family “found the bodies of the
drowned everywhere, jammed under boulders, slung in the tops of dead trees, splayed
on the plains”. (60) The schoolteacher,
having initiated Sunday services as well as weekday classes, explains in a
sermon that the Genesis version of the flood of Gilgamesh proclaims the unity
of the entire human family, a doctrine of which he has not entirely convinced
himself. When government representatives
are drawing up eviction orders, we are told:
Lawyers are filing documents. Judges are signing orders. Scientists and doctors are collecting
data. Pharoah’s heart is as hard as
ever. (94)
This is a novel of race, of poverty, of loyalty and betrayal,
of the horrors of eugenic science, of the cruelty of the powerful. All these themes are present. But beyond that it is a narrative whose
poetry and imagery shed light on the inner lives of men and women with whom we
have nearly nothing, and nearly everything, in common.
NOTE: This
Other Eden has been named a finalist in the fiction category for the
National Book Prize.
Both the film and the music are discussed in my essay, “Spiritual Realities
Made Audible and Visible: An
Appreciation of the Music of Benjamin Britten,” Christian Scholar’s Review
44:3 (Spring 2015), pp. 237-252.
