It is immediately obvious why the novel is so titled, because Apple Island (42 acres, barely 300 feet from the mainland of the USA), despite seeming so bare and deprived, is a sort of paradise. The novel is set in the early 1900s, and we find 5 families living on this small island, all
drinking mulchy black tea to nip morning, noon, and suppertime pangs if not real hunger. Hunger wore everyone to exhaustion, the family wrapped and huddled around the stove heads bowed, meagre dinner [a strip of salt cod, half a potato, and 2 roasted chestnuts] almost making things worse” (p24).
Although they are all lice-ridden, possess very little in material goods and no money at all, only a few are literate, and are on the edge of starvation quite often, nevertheless, they are peaceful, loving, industrious, concentrated, and some have real talent as master carpenters and one as an artist, one as an avid student of Latin, another of Mathematics.
Our protagonists are the Honeys – Esther Honey, the grandmother, Eha her son, and Eha’s 3 children, Ethan (15), Tabitha (10) and Charlotte (8). Like many of the other islanders, they are of extremely mixed race heritage, ranging from being able to pass as white to all shades of brown and black.
And so the last of the Honeys were – fourth, fifth, and sixth generations’ distillate of Angolanfathers and Scottish grandpas, Irish mothers and Congolese grannies, Cape Verdean uncles and Penobscot aunts, cousins from Dingle, Glasgow and Montserrat…(p23).
Many are in-bred, many have known tragedy, one lives in a tree, literally. But for all their oddities and frailties, they are fiercely independent, beholden to no one, generous and loving amongst themselves, not just feeble-minded and filthy as authorities regard them as being.
The depiction of these islanders is tender, luminous, touching, stirring. Harding does a marvellous job in making each and every one of them precious, worthwhile, unique individuals who have not deserved to be evited and their homes destroyed, simply because the powers that be have decreed it so without proper understanding or appreciation of this community. Harding makes us look at each and every character, all endearing in their different ways, all struggling and suffering but enduring and courageous in their own ways. There seems a wisdom to their way of life despite it being so straitened. They have the basics of understanding family bonds, sharing resources, allowing space for foibles and eccentricities, and apparently suspension of all judgement. It is therefore an outrage to the reader’s sensibilities when authorities arrive from the mainland, to check, and categorise, and judge the islanders, and find them wanting. The reader is given to understand that the authorities are simply blind to the beauty of this Eden, and the beauty of its islanders. Eviction notices are served wholesale, and the islanders will be ripped from their homes and sanctuaries.
Reading this book is like watching sunshine on water, the light bringing sudden colour and life, vitality and fascination into what seemed a mere muddy puddle. The depictions are so beautifully crafted that every sentence seems so perfectly placed, so vibrant with illustration of meaning. For example, in mentioning Esther makes simple medicinal cures for her family, Harding writes,
She concocted salves salutary to lean lives lived on shallow soil and bare rock (p63).
The imagery is so vivid, and the choice of words, like salutary, so perfectly in sync with the narrative frequency. In fact, the entire book reads like a piece played pitch perfect, not a single word or note even the tiniest bit off key.
In the second part, we see Ethan offered a place on the mainland in a rich man’s house to focus on his painting skills, with the idea of getting him into art school perhaps. The house has a teenaged housekeeper, much the same age as Ethan, and that immediate love story between the youngsters is so tender and perfect that poignancy is built into their romance. No young love could possibly be so perfect, without being damned, surely. In becoming paradise, surely the seeds of its own destruction are inbuilt? The two lovers are such novices in life as well as in love, that they are completely vulnerable and defenceless as they fall completely in love.
Timothy Whitcomb is the man who serves the eviction notices to the families on Apple Island. Lest the reader it tempted to regard him as a villain, Harding writes just a couple of pages about how Whitcomb returned home to his wife and baby daughter after that day, shaken to the core, famished and unable to eat, his body and head aching.
’It’s some kind of hell’, he said. ‘It’s some kind of trick. Like a devil making fun’. He almost sobbed from confusion and anger. ‘They had the whole island but there they were all huddled together like rats in a nest. Filthy, ragged, animals. Worse. Just looking at you, stupid, imbecile. I couldn’t get a one of them to say a word. And the smell. Dear Christ, it was like a filthy old bear den in those hovels. Their gray old filthy clothes and stupid, staring, dumb, blank faces. And all those cruddy dogs’ (p180).
Through his lyricism, Harding lays bare the tragedy of those who have seen the inhabitants of Apple Island as only subhuman and insentient.
Most of the novel is given over to showing rather than telling just how much the inhabitants feel, and how deftly they work and survive. When made to evict their island home, Eha Honey dismantles the house he built with his own hands. Before he does, he sits and contemplates it:
the house soundlessly explodes and radiates into every separate board, post, shingle, hinge, and nail and every element soundlessly stops as if conforming to an invisible boundary, every part still in perfect relation to every other, soundlessly suspended in the air in front of him, arrested, transfixed, and Eha sits on the keg inside a sphere of retracted sound, and time, contemplating every piece of the house he and Zachary Hand to God fashioned and put together, comprehending its whole anatomy as it hangs before him, plosive, cubit, disassembled, perfectly projected. (p178).
All the detail and the painstaking work goes unnoticed by those who would evict them with the excuse of rehoming the feeble-minded, to clear the island for hotel building.
This is not a novel about protest, or resistance to development, or even about survival against the odds. This is just a celebration of a group of descendants from a hodge-podge of people washed up from shores all over the world, who eke out a living on practically bare rock, but who live with their loves and sorrows, just the same as anyone else in far more cultured, sophisticated, privileged circumstances. They are here and gone, wiped out, and all their talent and hope and futures snuffed out in an instant. It is a novel with such intensity in every line, in every small deed, in every gesture, that the words all but glow on the page. This is a novel which demonstrates what can be done with the language when in the hands of a master craftsman. A society that throws away such a community because it has deemed them useless, is a society which has lost another Eden.
“Reading this book is like watching sunshine on water, the light bringing sudden colour and life, vitality and fascination into what seemed a mere muddy puddle. The depictions are so beautifully crafted that every sentence seems so perfectly placed, so vibrant with illustration of meaning. …”
This is one of the cases when the review itself becomes an engaging piece of literature. Lovely review of what seems like an wonderful book. Thanks a lot.
Hi Samir, thank you for your kind words,so encouraging! After reading this amazing book, I tried Paul Harding’s earlier 2 novels, Tinkers which was his debut novel and which won the Pulitzer in 2010, and the sequel, Enon. I could see the seeds of his unique writing style in these two small books, the folksy but extremely literary way he thinks and communicates, which was charming. But Tinkers and Enon did not blow me away – beautiful as the forms were, the content seemed to lack direction and push. They both just described and described and seemed to get nowhere really. This is a literary style many authors used these days, and sometimes it is okay, but perhaps I was not in the right frame of mind when I read these two, I confess I sped up the reading half way through or 2/3s way through and skimmed to the ends. In contrast, This Other Eden had a a better defined shape, less amorphous, it moved purposefully, while retaining the beauty of the writing and the luminosity of the sentences. I shall read the next Paul Harding when it is published, because I still have faith in his tremendous craftsmanship, and perhaps as his oeuvre grows, it will grow from strength to strength.