Harding, Paul. This Other Eden. Goose Lane Additions, Fredericton, 2023. F; 09/23.

This semi-historical tale is I think Paul Harding’s second novel, the first (Tinkers) won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. This one is short-listed for the Booker. I was reassured by the book’s confident engaging opening, and frankly dazzled by some of the literary pyrotechnics. Mr. Harding has a way with words and dramatic excitement. There were for me troubling quibbles about the genre (more later) and eventually some loose ends to the plot which could have been necessitated by historical fact. My experience of this one did decline somewhat past the halfway point. But overall I’m calling it a thumbs-up, maybe with just one hand.

A small island just off the coast of Maine was settled by a black man and his wife in the late 18^th century, and the offspring of this couple with a few additions and subtractions populated the island until 1912 when they were evicted, at least one killed, many institutionalized, and their settlement destroyed by the government. The story traces the growth and intermarriage of the inhabitants and though it’s hard to say where the line between history and fiction falls there is no doubt there is incest, murder, and an extremely savage primitive existence by any standard, among what ends up being a mixed-race group of three or four families.

(Scattered PLOT ALERTS in the following) A retired schoolteacher named Diamond arrives in the late 1800s and starts a school for the children, discovering that a few of them excel at language, math, and (for one in particular) drawing and painting. The family Honey are the main protagonists, the grandmother Esther, her son Esa, and his three kids Ethan, Charlotte, and Tabatha. Esther was impregnated with Ethan by her father, whom she pushed off a cliff to his death. Ethan is the artist, and the two girls appear reasonably capable. One family apparently consists of sadly obscurely abnormal pale children. One man is an eccentric hermit who lives in and decorates with carving the interior of a large tree. A pair of women subsist by taking in laundry from the mainland, living in an old sailboat.

When in the early 20^th century doctors, enforcers, and government officials arrive and eventually remove the family of abnormal children there is violence, one of them dies, and then the Honey family escapes to the mainland. Ethan is sent to a wealthy cultured friend of Mr. Diamond where he is set up to develop his painting but falls in love with Bridget, a teenage maid in the house, who gets pregnant. Ethan is then dismissed and disappears, and Bridget finds her way to the island and escapes with the Honeys. (No more PLOT ALERTS)

I’m going to post a couple of quotes here to show some of the flavour of author Harding’s writing:

(Zachary is the hermit who lives inside a tree)

Zachary didn’t know how many no-good full-grown sons he’d watched steal their old mothers’ money and food and blankets, and drink every jug, bottle, ladle, skinful of wine, whiskey, beer, moonshine, or worse they could snatch away in their shaking hands, until they lay in their mothers’ beds vomiting their pickled insides all over the counterpane and dying right there and their mothers having had to have lived seventy years in order to get their hearts broken like that. And he couldn’t count all the atrocious old men who’d mauled and molested and murdered their own sons and daughters with their bare hands and practically skewered their young dead bodies and roasted them on spits and eaten them headfirst, like backwoods Saturns, and tossed the bones into the dirt for the dogs to gnaw…

(A celebration occurs when it is announced that Ethan is going to be given an education on the mainland and the feast is in multiple and extreme contrast to the dreadful starvation fare of the Islanders)

The islanders feasted on lobsters, the tenderest they’d ever had, they all agreed, drenched in the melted fresh butter, bowls and bowls of the chowder, the creamiest and richest they’d ever had they all said, fresh bread, with the crustiest crust and softest insides anyone had ever eaten, broken in chunks from the loaves, slathered, too, in the fresh butter, oysters, the coldest and briniest and most succulent ever, everyone shouted in between sucking them from their shells, corn that everyone agreed was the sweetest they’d ever tasted as they munched their way along and around ear after buttered ear, the darkest, muskiest, most mysterious and beguiling truffles ever to have sprouted, and the sweetest, plumpest, freshest berries anyone had ever tasted, they said popping one after another down, or cramming handfuls at a time into their mouths, as the children and Annie Parker did. And the beer. Glorious, they all said. Rich, dark, creamy, fortifying. Everyone had a small glass, or two, including the children and Mr. Diamond.

I suspect few people will agree with my problems with this story which do NOT include so much the incest, murder, illiteracy, and disgusting malodorous lives of the Islanders. They have more to do with the author’s decision to celebrate what he believes is the first mixed-race settlement in the United States. I’m tempted to wonder So what? Black and white people in the US of course have their difficult and continuing problematic history very well documented and in my opinion at times mishandled by enthusiasts on the left, especially academics in elite universities. I don’t think the fact that an isolated population consists of both black and white people is necessary for a serious story, especially one this good that needs no such ideologic underpinning.

A related issue for me is the documentation and presumed condemnation of the eugenic, racist, and cleanliness-next-to-godliness obsessions of powerful white men around the time of the first world war. Yes, these things existed and are inexcusable. Anti-Semitism, contempt for the intelligence and abilities of women, and bating of Chinese people were acceptable and daily occurrences in my hometown and neighbourhood in the 1950s. These things have of course changed. But is it really necessary to either virtue-signal or try to scold a radically opposed fringe over to one’s majority view? I think Mr. Harding is far too good a writer to need to rely on issues that are politically polarized.

I found the Booker jury’s inclusion on its short list of a majority of male writers and few if any visible minorities an encouraging indication that they were actually basing their decisions on literary merit. I hope I don’t need to clarify that in my opinion literary merit exists throughout the genders, cultures and races more or less evenly. I hope this powerfully-written story doesn’t edge out a couple of others in the Booker shortlist that look and feel to me superior.

8.2/9.3