Harding sets his tale in 1911 and 1912, to coincide with the real-life Maine legislation to evict a small group of settlers from Apple Island, a small, hardscrabble bit off the state’s coast. First settled in 1792 by a former slave and an Irish woman, Apple Island has been home for more than a century to abjectly poor people, some directly descended from Benjamin Honey, the original slave, and others whose forebears immigrated and stayed. Collectively they display an uncertain racial heritage; most are undernourished and only rudimentally educated, and barely eke out an existence.
The retired missionary Reverend Diamond tries to tend to their souls and to educate their young; this well-meaning soul doubts himself even to the very moment he brings destruction and diaspora. The only exception to the eviction plan is Ethan, a young and highly talented artist, who rates the consideration not only by virtue of his gift, but also his light-skinned, red-haired appearance. The preacher arranges for him to be sent the the home of his distinguished friend in Massachusetts. The boy Ethan,15-ish years old, meets Bridget, a lovely maidservant in the old gentleman’s mansion, and in a bright, golden chapter, they fall in love in their own Edenic time.
The state takes it upon itself to catalog the evils of the other residents, observed and checked off on a list, to be “epileptic, feeble-minded, insane, interbred…paralysis, migraine, neurotic, criminalistic, sexually immoral, self-abusive…” etc. etc., and proceeds to arrest and assign some of the squatters to state institutions for the insane. They consign the rest to the four winds. Thus is this other Eden cleansed.
There are levels of prejudice, levels of narrative nuance, reverberant images, and thought-provoking language here, enough to satisfy, and indeed to surfeit, the most demanding palette. Here is Esther Honey, direct descendant of the island’s original patriarch, musing over her offspring as they return from digging up clams about 33% through the book:
Esther followed their progress and as they got closer she found herself overjoyed by them, each her own little modest person, each unself-consciously taking care of one another, even as they teased and screeched and laughed and complained.There is the careful and minute observation of Ethan’s artist’s perception of color: how his sister’s skin changes color as daylight and evening proceed. The staggering sights and sounds of busy, crowded Massachusetts as Ethan tries to process it all after his arrival there:
Shock and aftershock struck and echoed and shaped the vastness of the world across the inside of his skull, or so it felt. It was no more than seeing his first automobile idling at a train stop, and so also seeing his first driver, in a mud-spattered long coat with a pair of goggles strapped to his face…It was no more than seeing brick mills that appeared to be larger than the whole island he came from, with smokestacks that appeared not just to reach the clouds but actually to be making them or possibly venting them from the insides of the earth…”Such vivid passages draw the reader’s sight and capture the reader’s heart in this novel which pierces to the bone. Take this up and compare it to Harding’s prior triumphs, Tinkers and Enon. It has the same mastery of image and plot, and hits as deeply as either of these masterpieces on the higher thematic plane of faith and prejudice, and the higher artistic plane of language and image, rhythm, mood, and reflection. From Harding, another for the ages.
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