This Other Eden (2023)

Why this one?

This is another one on the 2023 Booker Longlist, from which I’m cherrypicking a few books that grab my attention. This seemed to be one of the selections that folks online were less surprised to see on the list, so I reasoned it was worth giving a go.

It's written by Paul Harding (1967- ; active 2009-) born Wenham, Massachusetts, USA. He studied English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he began playing drums in the band Cold Water Flat. He played with the alternative rock outfit, which toured regularly and had some degree of college radio driven success, until its split in 1996. Always a keen reader, he had already taken a summer writing class at Skidmore College, NY, during breaks in touring. His tutor on that course was Marilynne Robinson, through whom he learned about the Iowa Writers Workshop, where he later studied under the likes of Robinson, Elizabeth McCracken and Barry Unsworth. He became interested in theology during this period. He hit the ground running, to say the least, as an author, with his debut novel Tinkers (2009) winning the 2010 Pulitzer Prize - the first novel to come from a small publisher to do so since 1981's A Confederacy of Dunces. He followed this up with 2013's Enon, which has a small degree of crossover with This Other Eden (2023), his third and first to be longlisted for the Booker.

Thoughts, etc.
This Other Eden is a fictionalised version of the story of Malaga Island, off the coast near Portland, Maine. The small island was home to a mixed-racecommunity from the Civil War until 1911, when all of its residents were forcibly evicted by the state. Relatively little is conclusively known about the origins of the settlement on the island, with much of its history until recently only having been told by prejudiced accounts which treated the islanders as outcasts and 'degenerates'. Harding creates a version of the island's history, renaming it Apple Island after the dreams of his version of the first settlers, an escaped slave and his Irish wife.

The novel is primarily set in the latter days of the Island, its fate known and fixed from the outset. Harding brings to life an evocation of what life may have been like on the island, and is largely concerned with giving humanity to these anonymised and maltreated peripheral historical figures. In the space of only 200 pages, we are vividly introduced to a rich cast of characters we know to be doomed. While many of them are eccentric, and certainly viewed as such by the officals who visit the island, Harding is at pains to detail both their many talents and the bonds of their collective-style existence. We're introduced to the likes of Esther Honey, the matriarch of the island and teller of the history of its previous residents. Well-versed in a handful of biblical and literary texts, she's a kind of prophet in her own mind, blessed or cursed with the ability to see the doomed fate of those around her while they continue in ignorance. There's the Lark family, whose nature-attuned, almost feral children (especially the tragic Rabbit) are supremely memorable, and Zachary Hand to God Proverbs, who lives in a tree carving biblical images in its hollowed trunk. And there's Ethan Honey, Esther's grandson, who is helped off the island by a well-intentioned (albeit horribly racist) missionary, sent to Enon to study art under a friend of his. This, of course, is another doomed journey, there to represent the many other islanders who have left over the decades, to unknown but generally presumed to be disastrous fates. Even Ethan is only allowed his possibility of escape because he can pass as white - other talented children on the island have no such genetic luck.

The missionary, Matthew Diamond, acts as a conflicted representative of the outside world. Arriving with a (far from unique) repulsion for the island’s mixed-race residents, he is nonetheless spurred on by his faith and responsibilities as a teacher to try to do something to help the islanders, when visits from the state make it abundantly clear what's due to happen to them. Unfortunately his intent is hopeless in the face of the eugenicist policies of the state, who arrange to have some of the islanders transported to facilities for the 'feeble-minded' which seem little more than slow death camps. The views of the state officials are simply the orthodoxy of the time - no more acceptable for it, but presented as grimly inevitable.

It's a really finely crafted novel, and one in which almost every sentence is laden with a kind of fatalistic doom. Sparks of brightness emerge through the characters' gallows-humour-inflected interactions and memorable idiosyncracies, the attunement to the natural world that they possess, and the brief and beautifully rendered moment of artistic escapism offered to Ethan. But overall it's a sad novel, a kind of memorial to an ideal of a community (albeit one that was barely scraping by at its end) existing outside the bounds of convention, something that modern society could not allow to continue and therefore had to destroy.

Back in reality, the state of Maine quietly issued an apology for the treatment of the Malaga Islanders only in 2010.

Score

8.5

Another impeccably well-written entry in the Booker canon, and one that I could easily (and happily) see making the shortlist. It slightly lacked that extra ‘something’ that would elevate it to my top tier, but it’s certainly brimming with quality.

Next up

Onto a book that’s been on my TBR list for a little while now, The Bee Sting by the reliably excellent Paul Murray.