[I read this 2023 novel in parts, starting with the long Part 1 that takes up almost the first half, and wrote about each part in turn. Spoiler alert: If you read this running commentary, you will find out everything that happens in the book.]
7 July 2024
Part 1
Is this novel as good as I was hoping after all the praise that has been heaped on it? I can see why people like it—there are some really good things in here. Not least is Paul Harding’s ambition to make this tale of a tiny island into an allegory of oppression and colonialism going back to biblical times. He has made Matthew Diamond, the only white man who ever spends time on the island, a former missionary with an imaginative line in Old Testament myth-making. Noah’s family, peopling the world after the Flood, were everybody’s ancestors—we’re all one big family. It’s a pity that he admits to an almost visceral revulsion towards anyone with a dark skin, i.e. most of the people he’s trying to educate.
With his pronouncements on God’s justice he’s pushing at an open door. One of the island’s origin stories, its own version of the Flood, is based on the vision of one of their forebears of them being led, like the Israelites, through the parting waters of the sea. The old woman telling the story, deeply suspicious of Matthew Diamond and all the whites, knows who the pharaoh’s people are. And she’s right. She is Esther, the closest thing to a materfamilias in the novel and she has her own reasons for being suspicious. The inhabitants are a mish-mash of every possible ethnicity, and her own father was light-skinned. He, we later discover, raped her and made her pregnant with the son who lives with her now, the father of the little family we come to know best.
It’s all very right-on in terms of post-colonial thinking. In fact, Harding makes it explicit that what white Europeans thought, or pretended, they were doing when they imposed their own values on to the people they were supposedly educating was culturally disastrous. Diamond, the well-meaning racist who becomes their teacher is an archetype. ‘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.’ In fact, his attempted good works on the island bring the islanders’ supposed impoverishment to the attention of the authorities on the nearby mainland. And we already know what will happen, because this is a highly fictionalised version of a true story. ‘Apple Island’ in the novel is based on Malaga Island in Maine, and we are told its story in the Epigraph before Part 1 even opens.
Malaga Island … was home to a mixed-race fishing community from the mid-1800s to 1912, when the state of Maine evicted 47 residents from their homes and exhumed and relocated their buried dead. Eight islanders were committed to the Maine School for the Feeble-Minded. “I think the best plan would be to burn down the shacks with all of their filth,” then Governor Frederick Plaisted told a reporter [at] the time ….
In other words, Harding’s intentions are clear from the start—if anything, all too clear. We know before we start reading that the inhabitants’ little Eden is going to be cruelly torn apart—and who the bad guys are going to be. It feels like post-colonial history for dummies.
(There’s another problem, that I only learned about after reading an article about the reception of the novel by some historians. Harding had hoped that he had made it clear that this is a fiction, despite the inspiration being the true story, and a photograph of a family of inhabitant of Malaga Island. The old Black woman in it stares at the viewer with what Harding saw as deep suspicion, and she becomes Esther—who shares her name with a Jewish heroine in the Old Testament. The first Esther, of course, had been determined to uphold the faith in the face of foreign oppression. She is the one who sees the white man as bringing no good to them. Harding’s selection of what bits of reality he includes have led historians object to Harding’s presentation, and it’s easy to understand why they do. The island is entirely recognisable, had real inhabitants whose descendants, now dispersed, are still alive. Now, here comes a white, no doubt well-meaning graduate of a creative writing course who uses this community and its real, still untold history as a springboard for his own dark satire of white colonialist attitudes. A liberal pat on the back for him, no doubt, but… but what? If he was going to use a real story, couldn’t he have shown more respect towards the real community he entirely ignores in his prize-nominated fiction?)
But I’m not telling you the plot. Esther, a descendant of one of the original squatters over a hundred years before, is the bearer of the island’s origin myth: ‘A hurricane struck in September of 1815, twenty-two years after Benjamin and Patience Honey had come to the island and begun the settlement, by which time there were nearly thirty people living there….’ The island is small and unpromising, across a channel a few hundred yards from the coast of Maine. Benjamin has worked in orchards in Europe, and plans to use the seeds he has brought to fill it with apple trees. The seeds do not germinate, but he persists with varieties he gets by working in orchards on the mainland. He calls it Apple Island, but life is hard for them and other families now living there. Generations later, she and her grandchildren gather around a meagre stove for warmth in winter. The story they beg her to re-tell has all the characteristics of a fairytale, of a great wave that had drowned many of the islanders nearly a century before. In the mouth of the old woman it really has become the stuff of myth. She imagines herself as her own forebear, saving her child from the hurricane’s wrath and flying a little home-made flag from the tree she’s climbed up.
‘She always said later, I just decided right then that if we were all going to Judgment, I was going to fly our little flag until the last possible second. the wind took the flag up and snapped it and practically tore it from of my grasp but I kept hold and there it flew. Then the water rose over the baby, who’d gone past wailing and just stared, wedged between my body and the tree, dumbfounded at the pandemonium, wide-eyed and quiet as it burbled under, and the water reached my mouth and covered my face and went over my head, and still I held that foolish flag as high as I could, and the water rose up my shoulder, and the water rose up to my raised elbow, and the water rose up my forearm, and the water reached my wrist, and so there was just my one hand holding that motley little tattered flag sticking up above the surface of the flood, and the waters rose up my fingers, and just as my hand was about to disappear and that flag and all us Honeys be swallowed up in the catastrophe, the water stopped rising.’
The parting of the waves, the pharaoh’s army—it’s all here in the old story. But it’s preparing us as she tells it for the more squalid truth. White men arrive, and set about disrupting their lives in preparation for a mass eviction. There’s a scene in which Esther’s family are given not only health checks, but are measured up like ‘livestock’—I can’t remember who uses the word—and photographs are taken that later become sensational postcards of the disgusting squalor and interbreeding of the community. This is the white community’s narrative, which couldn’t possibly be any further from what the islanders themselves know to be the truth of their lives. Harding doesn’t pretend their ‘Eden’ is any such thing. The islanders really are poor, and there really is incest and interbreeding. And murder. After giving birth, and finding herself unable to drown the child in her disgust, she had pushed her abusive father from a nearby cliff to his death.
The island is full of stories, and critics praise the poetic nature of the novel. There is old Zachary, the man who makes detailed carvings that are seen by nobody but himself because he is working on the inside of a hollow tree. There are almost miraculous stories of how the islanders survive in what seem to be impossible circumstances. And there are the Honey family, the children of Esther’s son, himself the issue of that incestuous rape. They are all, busy, competent, remarkable in their own ways. And one of them, Ethan is such a gifted artist—and he happens to be so light-skinned—that Diamond has found a way to send him to the mainland for proper art training. There are other remarkable sisters, one of them gifted in Latin and the other in mathematics so complex Diamond can’t help her beyond the age of ten or eleven.
Which, not in a subtle way, is starkly contrasted with the white community’s perception of the place. The text of the state governor’s report is in the public domain, and it is an archetype of a eugenicist, racist mindset. The epigraph of the novel is taken from it and, after the insolent invasiveness of the assessment of the islanders, we are not surprised by their findings. A real or fictional newspaper report sums it up.
‘A reporter recently accompanied a Governor’s Council to notorious Apple Island, to investigate that little rock’s queer brood of paupers and the squalor in which they live. The formation of the Council no doubt was inspired in large part by the meeting of the first international congress on eugenics, held this summer in London—a most welcome gathering of the greatest minds. … The typical Apple Island family traditionally has had a turncoat white for a father, a scrawny frau black as coal for a mother, or vice versa, and a litter of tan children their issue. What a blood inheritance for the little ones. The settlement is more like a shantytown than a village. All souls cohabitate this way and that, black, white, mulatto indifferent. All are related by blood, and many or most are clinically idiotic as well as lazy.’
Before the end of Part 1, the islanders decide to give Ethan a big send-off. Harding expresses the once-in-a-lifetime extraordinariness of the event in his most poetic fairy-tale style. ‘The islanders were so used to diets of wind and fog, to meals of slow-roasted sunshine and poached storm clouds, so used to devouring sautéed shadows and broiled echoes; they found themselves stupefied by such an abundance of food and drink. For that evening it seemed to them as if they were sending Ethan off on all their behalves. And it seemed as if by sending him off to paint his beautiful pictures they all might somehow unhouse homelessness, might somehow bankrupt poverty. It seemed to all of them that evening as if they somehow might even starve hunger itself.’ If only.
But this is becoming Ethan’s story. Harding emphasises the age-old truth of family disruption and separation—they are all going to have to go through this soon, because the authorities will be without mercy if it deems some inhabitants mentally deficient. And Ethan is forced to face his own new separateness—which, we realise, has been foisted on him by a well-meaning white man. Esther uses kerosene to de-louse him, so he will have to sleep outside alone before his departure. As ever, the beauty of the island pervades him. ‘Ethan lay wrapped in a century-old wool blanket, freshly washed by Iris and Violet [the island’s laundresses] and bug-free, looking into the reaches of stars. His head stung and felt perforated. As he lowered into sleep the salty pined breeze and cricket songs and schools of stars poured into and birled around his brains so the night became his mind and his mind the night and the mother owl watching over him swooped down from her tree and through his dreams.’
Which is how Part 1 ends.
Part 2
This is short, less than half the length of Part 1. Its scope is reduced to the points of view of three characters, Ethan, his new sponsor Hale, and the maidservant he meets, Bridget. It’s a 50-page doomed love story, in which Harding throws his lyrical book at the chance coming together (no pun intended) of these two displaced islanders. She is from Ireland, still unused to working in the big, high-spec house of a gentleman, three thousand miles from home. And along comes this boy, about her own age, who—who what? Who thrills her to her very core—I’m paraphrasing—while he, the artist, can’t help noticing her beauty. They are, from the start, clearly made for one another.
Is it Romeo and Juliet? Yes, but not at first—and the outcome is more immediately brutal. In fact, this section feels much more Hardyesque than Shakespearian, the fates more unforgiving. Bridget is Tess, while Ethan is more like a Gabriel Oak, made to suffer through no fault of his own. Except Bridget isn’t as innocent as Tess—or, rather, whereas Tess is the victim of an unforgiving morality that makes her new husband condemn her for having been raped, Bridget is the victim of an author who glosses over the moral implications of her unthinkingly going to Ethan’s bed unbidden. And, also like Tess, and almost any other Hardy character, she is the victim of an appalling coincidence. She is uncharacteristically careless when she leaves Ethan’s room in the barn, having seen Ethan’s family photograph and suffering her own tortured moments of realisation—Ethan, whom she had talken to be white, is not—and I wonder what Harding will do with this carefully described moment of near-revulsion. Her mind is a growing storm of confused emotions, so that she cuts her finger on the breadknife, and we leave her as the toast bursts into symbolic flames. Meanwhile Hale has risen uncharacteristically early and has seen her, coming away from the barn looking guilty and furtive—as she never has before now, we are told explicitly. He immediately understands where she has been….
The expulsion that is about to take place—it does, immediately—is almost identical to what happens on Apple Island. Harding has presented Bridget and Ethan, during their summer of ecstatic discovery, as though unconnected to the reality of conventional society. It isn’t their fault, but unconventional lives face pitiless treatment by the upholders of convention. Apple Island, despite the presence of inbreeding and incestuous rape, is in an idealised bubble suddenly punctured by (historically documented) prejudice and power. For most of Part 2, we are in a different Eden, another idealised bubble, in which conventional sexual morality plays no part. But then Hale’s judgment is as immediate and final as the state governor’s. Harding has played the same hand a second time, and Ethan is out of there. How does it go? ‘You do not need your paints anymore, Mr. Hale says. Leave them there and come with me.’
Meanwhile, Harding relies on his skill in descriptive writing, often foregrounding the richness of the interior lives of his characters. From the first couple of pages, almost entirely made up of Bridget’s perceptions of an environment that is still unfamiliar to her, Harding layers the narrative with a detailed, sometimes moment-by-moment unfolding of burgeoning discovery, like an almost endlessly extended epiphany. And hyperbole is in there, as when Bridget first sees Ethan’s unfeasibly professional-sounding portrait of her. And, after only briefly presenting her unpolished first perceptions, Harding seems to give up on trying to make it seem like Bridget’s own consciousness. He goes for the kind of honed poetic prose an ambitious prizewinning novelist might come up with, and it doesn’t quite work for me.
‘She … saw the painted girl and it was like a mallet striking her heart and like her heart was a bronze gong inside her ribs and its sounding somehow unstrung and remade her. She did not see herself. She saw how she was seen. … The girl looked her straight in the eye and smiled slightly, but bowed her head a little, too, like she was sturdy and shy at once. The girl was placed in the left part of the canvas. Behind her on the right were the fields and haycocks and the high horizon full of light and clouds, a veil of rain sweeping past and, nearer, thick, matted bright and shadowed grass and long looped thorned vines and Queen Anne’s lace and delicate fanning ferns and, almost without substance, dim at the edge of the coarse heavy dark grass directly behind the girl, a strawberry plant with a mass of shadowed green fruit. Bridget wiped tears from her eyes and gasped a little laugh. To think how closely, with how much care, how much courtesy and gentleness he had looked at her.’
Harding has given up on offering us an unschooled girl’s first thoughts about a portrait of herself. And Harding’s reliance on vivid, often over-wrought prose can often becomes a problem in this novel. Harding relies so much o4n the kind of writing he does that it feels to me like almost like a gimmick. He creates a Paradise for his young lovers, as newly-minted—this is how he does it—as his own writing. And this is the poetry the tone-deaf ears of the white men can’t begin to understand. Philistines..
Parts 3 and 4
These are short, especially the final section. Part 4 feels like an epilogue, presenting the unceremonious exhumation of the island’s buried dead by uninterested labourers drafted in by a cynical overseer. I guess it’s Harding making his point again about how the white man judges the ‘mulattos’ of the island, while his society has people like this in it. Only one labourer stays for the whole day, the most desperate of them all.
For me, Parts 3 and 4 have an air of having nowhere new to go. Part 3 is about the serving of the eviction notices by a different timeserving white man, the inhabitants’ different responses… and so on. There are little set-piece scenes, like Eha’s careful dismantling of the timber house he built with the hollow tree-carving Zachary. First he remembers the building of it when he was a young man, guided by the skilled backwoodsman to the great pine tree they will fell and split. It’s a set piece of its own and a celebration of the pioneer spirit these people represent more than the white men who are evicting them. And if you think this is going over territory Harding has already covered, you aren’t wrong. Implicitly and explicitly, he wants to show us—as if we need showing—how unjust this eviction is.
Such as, Matthew Diamond’s vain appeals to the sheriff and governor of the intelligence of some of them, like the two sisters with their Latin and maths, the boy so talented he has been sent away to be trained in art—by implication, the all-round value of these people. This is his flaw, or one of his many flaws. He can only appeal for justice on his own terms—and, sometimes, I think Harding falls into the same trap. The best thing about these people, both he and his hapless missionary-teacher seem to be saying, is that really, they are just like us. From a (real or imagined) survey of mainly household objects a hundred years later: ‘These items serve as reminders of what everyday life was like on the island in spite of the prejudice the islanders suffered, and show that it was nearly identical to that of any other nearby community at the time.’ Thanks again, Paul.
And cruelty? There’s been plenty of prejudice and harsh judgment, but there hasn’t been any physical cruelty yet… so Harding fills the gap in Part 3. The Lark family, made up entirely of what the authorities call feeble-minded, is forcibly rounded up to be taken to an institution. This being the novel it is, Harding has previously taken us inside the viscerally thrilling world of experience lived by the youngest, known as Rabbit: ‘fan-shaped and turbinate shells appeared in the stone in front of her and she reached forward and ran the tips of her fingers across them, deciphering. She found a narrow groove in the rock with her big toe and gently flicked it and laughed into the island’s ear. No naïf; she knew and loved the island as any child knows and loves its mother. She was the crown princess of Apple Island, she its rightful heir because girl and island were one another’s dearly beloved.’
But she doesn’t understand that the sheriff’s men want her to come to the boat to be taken away, and… one man’s rough attempt to carry her to it leads to a catalogue of horror. Her mother Candace misunderstands his actions and tries to intervene. But she stumbles in the waves. He, believing the propaganda, thinks she is going to attack him, and ‘Candace could not find her balance and swallowed seawater and could not see with the salt and sun straight in her eyes. She swung her arms around and tried to grab on to the man to get her balance. The man staggered back as if feinting blows. He made a fist and punched Candace on the side of her head then punched her nose as hard as he could. Candace’s nose split with a crack.’ It gets worse. Another man has a club, attacks the now confused and flailing woman and, after a struggle, ‘yanked the club from Candace’s grip and it glanced off Rabbit’s head. As a block of ice splinters at the tap of an awl, Rabbit’s brain broke inside her skull. Her eyes rolled backward then closed and she died.’ Oh dear.
We are also told that only one of the Larks survives beyond six months in the institution they are taken to. Thanks, Mr White Man. And thanks again, Paul Harding, for making it so obvious even a member of the Lark family would get it.
Next…. I almost feel I’ve said enough. We knew it was going to end like this, because that epigraph has told us. Harding set himself the task of making an appalling action by white people over a century ago feel immediate and therefore moving. What he does is throw poetic language at it, and sometimes it really does feel immediate and real. Those times when he takes us inside the experience of one of the characters, and especially so in Part 2 with the burgeoning perceptions of both Ethan and Bridget, really do offer something quite exciting. But… none of it actually takes us inside what should feel like a gut-wrenching, shattering sense of injustice. Part 3, despite the violence perpetrated on the Larks, is largely understated, even elegiac. Zachary, who had protested loudly and unforgettably at the violence—he had even removed all his clothes in an act of King Lear-style defiance of the inevitable—goes to his elaborately carved tree and burns it.
This novel is extraordinary in parts, but it doesn’t match what appear to be Harding’s great ambitions. For all the mythologising, it doesn’t feel like an archetype of oppression. Instead of becoming ever more universal in its scope, in the end it feels like the sad little pile of domestic detritus found by those archaeologists: ‘the fragments here have a variety of designs, such as Dutch windmills, gilt fleur-de-lis, and other common motifs.’ Yep. Ordinary, like us—which, unfortunately, Harding hasn’t been able to turn into the stuff of tragedy.
We can read it for you wholesale 