From the “I don’t review books, but I have some things to
say about these books” department.
Takeaway: I really liked Clay
and At Hawthorn Time. You might, too.
Over the past couple of years, I’ve been doing a lot of
reading about nature, the environment, and climate change. I’ve been reading
mostly nonfiction, because I need to know THINGS, from policy and promises to
deadlines and measurements to definitions and examples. But I also read
personal essay collections—some focusing on the writer’s relationship to one
plot of land or geographic region, others about a specific subject (such as trees
or moss). The fact-and-policy nonfiction is interesting but often hopeless; the
personal essays are lovely and helpful, even if the writer’s reality doesn’t
mirror mine.
Recently I’ve been thinking beyond nonfiction to
fiction—specifically, about the ways writers of fiction show relationships
between their characters and the natural world. From long-ago literature classes,
I dimly remember that novels were deemed “good” if they were set in a place so special
that the story couldn’t be extricated from it. When people say “the landscape
was like another character,” I think they’re somehow getting at the same thing.
Writers like Ivan Doig, Kent Haruf, and Willa Cather come to mind. Off the top
of my head, Louise Erdrich and Angie Abdou (especially The
Canterbury Trail) are a couple of contemporary novelists working in the
same space.
But—and there’s nothing WRONG with this—these writers’ work
feels people-centric. Natural things happen and influence what the people do,
but the books are still all about the human characters.
Enter Melissa Harrison, author of two novels: Clay (2013) and At Hawthorn Time (2015). In both novels, “nature” (it feels so
dismissive to refer to the huge giant natural world in that way) is the center
around which the human story revolves. The two novels do it a little
differently.
Clay begins—and
ends—with a “little wedge-shaped city park,” a purposely nondescript sort of
place that exist in cities, and is often a neighbourhood’s only form of
“nature.” The novel begins (after a prologue) on St. Bartholomew’s day (August
24; I had to look it up) and continues through a full year, with chapters generally
dated by the Anglican calendar. Throughout this year, people cross paths,
develop relationships, come and go, see lovely and horrible things, and
generally do the things that people do.
At Hawthorn Time also focuses on land with relatively
definite boundaries—not the whole of England, just one part. There’s a modern
highway, which we know from the prologue plays a role in the plot. There are
also the old highways—Roman remnants, and even pre-Roman tracks—that are
remembered only by the landscape itself and by people like Jack, a man used to
“living rough” and working as an agricultural labourer. There’s a village, a
vicarage, a manor house, a Georgian house, walking paths, car parks, working
farms, and named places—this landscape is inhabited. As in Clay, the people who live in the area have their own desires and
concerns, their own paths (haha) to follow and choices to make.
It’s not a spoiler to either book to say that at the end, it’s
the land that remains. In Clay, at the
end of the year, the park is still there, though many of its human neighbors
have moved on and all have changed in some way. In At Hawthorn Time, the ending (which is sad for some, neutral for others, and even hopeful for yet others) reminds you that this region has been inhabited
for a long time, by many generations of people who have come and gone.
That’s what I find to be different. One of the simplest
questions to ask about a book is whether it ended in a satisfying way—whether that’s
a “happily ever after,” a “sadder but wiser,” a “missed opportunity,” or
something else. I found these books to be immensely satisfying. And that’s
partly because the characters, though interesting in their own ways, are
temporary. A century ago, someone put in bulbs; today, someone may tend a
garden in that same spot, or it might lie under a highway. The point is, the spot
is still there. The humans are different. It's oddly reassuring.
I also found the books just lovely to read. The vivid images
and close observations have made me look more closely at what’s growing around me now, in
August, before the summer inevitably turns toward autumn.
So: read and enjoy.
