Review of Booker Prize-shortlisted This Other Eden by Paul Harding, a slice of American history 1912 Malaga Island

Paul Harding’s novel This Other Eden echoes the Bible in ways that are as ominous as they are beautiful. What lack ye, my little oysters?” But these are characters whose practice is no less mischievous and colourful than the Greek goddesses and demi-goddesses: “The women’s teeth were stained from the tea and smoke but otherwise strong and straight except for an impressive gap between Violet’s top front teeth, through which she could launch a jet of tea and hit a dog in the ear from ten feet, to the glee of the island children.” The quickfire visuality of such character-sketches draws out the sinews of fiction to float along the workings of painting and cinema. But this is a unique milieu where characters are not only individuals but also make a community and even the pulse of a neighbourhood, such as in the making of Zachary: “He let them fidget and juffle a while then opened one fierce bug-eye, slowly, and glared, which made them scream.” The polyphonic fatality of this language pervades the most crucial trajectories of the narrative, which is the design of the mainstream white society on this isolated mix of Irish and African blood. In the eyes of Esther Honey, “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.” Shocking romance The well-meaning cruelty of white society does not cast the mixed-race community of Apple Island in any romance of innocence or beauty; there too, a brutal savagery runs amok: “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 pits and eaten them headfirst, like backwoods Saturns, and tossed the bones into the dirt for the dogs to gnaw, licking their own children’s grease from their fingers, glutted and serene, then lain down and fallen into the gentlest, most peaceful of sleeps.” Romance arrives in the novel as an equivocator between races and nurses the unveiling of a reality that has the sharpest potential to shock and tear apart one’s world. Soon after the white Bridget starts to develop tender feelings for Ethan Honey, the boy from Apple Island pale enough to pass as white, the discovery of his photos with people who are obviously “colored” threatens to rock her universe.