Fiction recommendations

I thought I’d highlight a few things I’ve been reading recently. Here are a handful of excellent novels I’ve read so far this year – nonfiction may or may not follow in another post!

Firekeeper’s Daughter, Angeline Boulley

A young woman tries to understand her community and her family, and gets involved in an undercover police operation as part of that process. This is a great story with some really interesting and nuanced reflections on what it means to be part of a community, or more than one community, and what options you have when tragedy seems to be endemic. I found the violence genuinely upsetting – an important feature of this sort of writing, even if I can’t really call it ‘enjoyable’ – and also appreciated the way in which teenaged characters are able to share with the reader their growing insights into the structures, often unjust structures, which shape their world.

Set in Stone, Stela Brinzeanu

A different set of questions about how far you would go to challenge society and build your own life. Where the main character in Firekeeper’s Daughter moves towards her community to try and understand it, the characters here end up moving away from their communities, but not before a good deal of struggle with the assumptions people make. I enjoyed the way the two main characters come to rely on each other, and – although I don’t want to give away spoilers – the ending.

Acts of Love and War, Maggie Brooks 

Lucy goes out to Spain during the Civil War, intending both to help the Quaker relief efforts there and to bring home two young men she grew up with. The effort to persuade them not to see non-partisan views of the situation or to change their minds is mostly futile, but their letters provide a lot of the contextual information about the war; if anything, Lucy changes her perspective as she sees more of the situation. She discovers the satisfactions as well as the challenges of supporting refugees and orphans, and becomes much less dependent on her relationships with men. For fans of historical fiction, this is closely based on academic research, and accurate as well as engaging.

The Garden of Evening Mists, Tan Twan Eng

This story is both beautiful and heartbreaking. It explores how a traumatic experience (being in a prisoner of war camp) changed the whole shape of a woman’s life, including directing her to a particular career and to a fascination with gardens. Having been imprisoned by Japanese soldiers, but wanting to learn to create Japanese gardens, Yun Ling has a deeply complex relationship with Japanese culture, and hence with the Japanese gardener with whom she studies. I don’t have very much patience left for fiction which explores the legacy of the Second World War, especially if it’s clumsy, so believe me when I say that this is the very opposite: beautifully and thoughtfully shaped, like the gardens it describes, with a real focus on the effects on the victims of war. 

Ember of a New World, Ishtar Watson 

Ember has only just come of age when she is suddenly given a mission to travel as far through her world – Mesolithic or just pre-Neolithic Europe – as she can. She sets off alone to explore, and along the way introduces the reader to different hunting and farming methods, cultures and languages, and dangers (some natural, but mostly human). Ishtar includes non-fiction sections at the beginning of each chapter so that you can see how each section is based on research, which adds depth, and although this isn’t a romance story, there’s also a charming plot line in which Ember begins to fall in love. 

Have you read any of these? What have you been reading?

Fiction: From Long Barrow to Museum

(In a new departure for this blog, I thought I’d share this short story which explores time, change, wishes, and the uses of West Kennet Long Barrow. Content notes: death, burial, human remains.)

I was expecting to be visited. When my daughter moved my bones into this little side-chamber, after I’d been staring at the sky for a month while the red kites and the ravens took the flesh from my body, I was expecting that she, and her boyfriend, and my son and his wife and their children and hopefully one day their children’s children, would visit me in the way I visited my parents. I remember my father bringing the long bones of his family out from the tomb every year. His people are gathered together in a pile, in this same side-chamber with me, and because he brought them out to spend time with them every year their thigh bones and skulls are jumbled up with their arms bones and all their smaller bones have been lost to the cracks in the stone floor. 

They are still here, too, of course. They don’t talk much. My father used to talk about his mother and father by name, but further back than that he just called them ‘ancestors’, so now I’m here with them I don’t know what to call them. My father is here and sometimes I tell him that I expected my son and daughter to visit. “I didn’t expect you to arrive so soon,” he says to me, every time. I hoped I wouldn’t arrive so soon, either, but to be honest I worried about it from the moment I realised I was pregnant again. A woman with an almost adult son who carries another pregnancy… it’s always risky, you always get close to death when you give birth, in fact I thought I was going to go both times before, and this time I was right. 

My children did visit for a while. The ones who lived, that is. The baby is almost here. I never met her in life but I feel her next to me sometimes, or maybe she crawls around. I hear her crying. My father says, “Hello, baby,” when that happens. I’d like to comfort her but what can I do? The worst actually did happen. I can’t feed her, we don’t sleep. I’m not sure we’re really awake, either, though. To begin with the daylight would come down the passage on my right and my bones would be touched by it, not much but a little indirect light, and I’d remember that days and nights come and go. That was when my daughter would visit. But they stopped bringing everyone’s bones out, and my bones stayed mine, instead of mixing in with the other ancestors.

“You’ll join us soon,” my father says, but I won’t if my daughter doesn’t come and look after all her ancestors. 

The daylight doesn’t come in any more. I think they blocked up the entrance – there’s darkness, and no air movement, and no visitors. My bones are just resting here. My baby’s bones are next to me, but they’re almost gone, and my father’s bones and his ancestors’ bones are in the pile to my left. There are other chambers in the tomb, other families, but we have to shout to speak to them and there’s nothing to say. 

At first we heard ceremonies outside. The visiting stopped but the singing, the dancing, the fires, went on. I wasn’t the last in, either – they brought someone into one of the side chambers on the other side of the entrance – but it’s been a long time since then. I hoped it meant that nobody had died, that everyone was healthy and happy. But I think it means they buried them somewhere else. It’s been too long. 

It’s been much too long, actually. With no days and no movement, no sleep and no meals, time slips away from me unmarked, but I know it has passed. Soil has settled into all the gaps around the stone which blocks the entrance. Water seeps through when there’s a heavy rain, and sometimes the root of a plant or a little earthworm comes and goes, somewhere in between the huge stones of the roof. Nobody visits. I assume the sun rises and sets. I wonder if the stars still turn above us. Recently I started to hear humming – sometimes almost a buzzing or a whine, something a distant drone. Maybe it’s an insect, or some sort of music, far away.

–

Well, this makes for a change. I do get visitors now. I’m not sure where I am anymore, but most of my bones are still here and my baby’s bones beside me, and people come to see me. The lights seem very bright and the air is dry. I was in a stone-walled room, in the tomb, and the air was damp with the rain from above and the water in the chalk underneath. Here I’m in… I think it’s a large room, I can’t see it all, and there’s something strong and clear around me. Visitors who lean towards me can’t touch me. I haven’t been put in with the bones of my ancestors, although I sometimes hear them nearby. I hear my father asking where we are. 

At first I thought we were in another tomb. Maybe we are, but people have changed their ideas about death since our day. They have lights on around us, almost every day, and they’ve put a lot of our cooking pots and things in another box with a clear front where I can see them. That seems weird. They aren’t usually supposed to be in tombs. And there are things I don’t recognise – pots with odd designs. 

The people who come to visit carry odd things. They have shoes in interesting colours and clothes that rustle like no fabric I’ve ever known – more like the leaves in the trees in autumn. They have little boxes which glow on one side. I don’t understand what they say. I recognise the children, of course. Exploring, poking in the corners, staring at my bones wide-eyed. That’s normal. That’s how my eldest was, always wanting to go a few steps further than I’d like. She fell in the stream once. I thought of that the other day when a little one carrying a carved animal – teeth like a wolf but the skin had been painted greeny-brown, more like an adder – anyway, this little one with his strange toy wanted to touch everything. He couldn’t touch the pots, and he couldn’t touch my bones, and he couldn’t touch the stone knife they’ve displayed on the other side of me, and he wept bitterly over every one of those things. I thought of my daughter wanting to touch the water and falling in. I thought of her wanting to touch my bones, but the big old tomb being shut up, and my bones left separate with the family pile just over there.

I can’t touch them from here, either. My father and my ancestors are gathered within sight, but these clear boxes in this new tomb separate us.

A woman who came to visit was very sad to see me here. She didn’t want to look at my bones at first. She turned her back, looking at the pots again and again, but eventually she looked at my skull. When she did, she looked and looked. She looked at the little squiggles on the side of the clear box, where they all look to start with, and then she looked at my bones for a long time. I wondered if she wanted to touch them.

She used the glowing box she held to show a friend who was with her a picture. She held the picture over my box and I could see it – and I recognised it. The trees have changed but the outline of the hill and the tomb are much the same. It was the place I was buried. I could see the big stones at the entrance, the new ones which closed the tomb, and the curve of the soil which covers the tomb. You see it against the sky from some places, and that’s the picture this woman was showing to her friend.

They looked from the picture to me, mouths downturned. I realised what they thought. They don’t want to touch my bones. They want me to go back to the old tomb. They think I should stay where I was put.

They did look at the pile of bones of my ancestors, but I’m not sure they understood. The picture disappeared and didn’t come back. They spoke, but the language has changed so much and I don’t understand them. I wish my daughter could visit me. I wish someone would bring out my bones every year, the way my father did, and put them back in a jumble with the other ancestors. I don’t mind this new tomb – at least there are visitors – and I’m glad my baby is with me, but I miss the whispers of the rest of my family.

Queer History in Fiction

One way to approach queer/LGBTQ+ history in fiction is to set stories in the past and create lesbian, gay, bi, trans, and other queer characters there. That’s the approach I took in Between Boat and Shore, and it’s been done by lots of other writers as well. However, I realised recently that I’ve read three books which take another approach, setting a story in the present and giving characters evidence of a queer past to reckon with now. I think this is interesting for the way it allows authors to explore both the possibilities of the past and how we, as a modern interpretative community, relate to it. In this blog post, I want to talk briefly about these three, all very different, books and comment a little on what insights they might have for other readers and writers of both real and fictional LGBTQ+ histories.

The three books are:

– The Bones of Our Fathers, Elin Gregory

– Documenting Light, E. E. Ottoman

– Little Fish, Casey Plett

The three are very different in style and genre. Gregory and Ottoman are working within the romance genre, with their focus on a couple; Plett’s novel is more literary, with the focus on a single central character. All three involve some difficulty, and Ottoman’s deals with poverty, illness, and the closet, but Plett’s is noticeably grittier in tone, with poverty, suicide, alcoholism, and sexual abuse recurring themes. Gregory’s central characters are gay men, while Ottoman’s are a trans man and a nonbinary person, and Plett’s is a trans woman. The narrative voices tend to be clear about this, taking advantage of the modern setting to use explicit language, but at times older confusions surface: can the past be understood in modern terms, and is it possible for someone who thought of himself as a gay man, for example, to have actually in some sense been a trans woman? An advantage of exploring these questions in fiction, as opposed to academic or other theoretical writing, is that they can be approached indirectly and their complexities and unanswerableness given space.

Another difference between them is the explicitness and nature of the evidence each author creates. I think all three are fictional but plausible. In Gregory’s novel, the archaeologist main character is excavating a Bronze Age burial cist (small stone chamber) in which two men were placed together – I don’t know of a case exactly like that, but the Weerdinge Men, a pair of bog bodies initially assumed to be a male and female couple because of their pose but now interpreted as two male bodies, would provide a very similar example. In Ottoman’s novel, an old photograph is the central piece of evidence – again, one of the main characters has professional expertise as an archivist, although perseverance is shown to be just as important in the research process. Old photographs with similar aesthetics, if not the same level of known background, circulate frequently online and some have been researched and published. The evidence Plett gives her main character is thinner, less concrete – stories from someone who knew her grandfather, a letter which says nothing explicitly – and extremely plausible. Having an ancestor about whom there are suggestive stories or some things which make you wonder is a common enough experience that the situation felt familiar to me. There are few ways to prove or disprove such theories, though. 

What they have in common is the challenge of discovering more about the past. This is most central in Ottoman’s novel, a bit less so in Gregory’s, and more like a background or framing device in Plett’s. Together, they ask questions about the relationship we have with the past. Does it matter whether people long ago had similar experiences to our own? Is it useful to know whether they were happy or sad in their situations, whether they embraced their sexual desires and expressed the genders they felt, or whether they embraced social or religious rules which encouraged them to focus on family, tradition, or heaven? Many of the characters in Plett’s novel are Mennonites and the religious background of the community heavily shapes what can be said and done both by the main character, Wendy, and her grandfather. In contrast, in Ottoman’s novel the characters’ own hesitations about what they can claim to know become more of an issue.

As both a reader and a writer of queer stories in historical (and prehistoric!) settings, these books helped me to think about the kind of emotional feedback I and others like me might be seeking in such stories and in historical and archaeological research. There is a sense of recognition, of seeing oneself in history, which is similar to the desire to be represented and see oneself in fiction set in the present. (And these novels also do that – for example, although Plett’s main character is trans and I’m cis, she has sexual relationships with both men and women and I found her reflections on changing sexual attraction over time very relatable.) However, I think it goes beyond what can be broadly characterised as representation. Finding or creating historical characters who are LGBTQ+ also allows the creation of a continuity. It’s not an accident that in Plett’s novel the potentially queer historical character is literally family, the main character’s grandfather. In Gregory’s novel, the connection is more about locality, the place in Wales where the burial is found – but the title, with its reference to ‘Our Fathers’, makes the image much more explicit. And in Ottoman’s writing, the theme of kinship and recognition, knowing about the past by finding something there which matches present experience, becomes a key research tool for the characters. 

To give an example from another area of life, I had accepted that being vegetarian was a modern thing and, while convinced about the moral rightness of my decision, it hadn’t occurred to me to look for other people in the past who made the same choice. There are plenty throughout the centuries, of course, but the possibility only really opened up to me when I read a label in a museum which identified the bones of an Iron Age man who, according to a chemical analysis of his remains, derived his protein mainly from plants. Bam! An ancestor in the tradition. (If memory serves this was the East Riding of Yorkshire Museum in Hull, but I don’t have details of the find location etc.) Finding examples like that enables us to broaden our imaginations and widen the network of connections in our chosen families. This is important in many areas of life, but especially if – as many people who are other gender conforming and straight are – you are told that your experience is a phase, a trend, etc. 

It also enriches our understanding of people in the past – however much I know intellectually that people in the past were the same species with the same cognitive and emotional skills (and diversity) as people today, just with different technology and culture, it can be hard to understand this. That’s especially true of prehistory (someone said of my novel that it was a surprise at first to read about Neolithic people speaking in such a modern way – but genetically, they were modern humans the same as us, and their language would have felt modern to them), but it can also be true of much more recent periods. When I was at school, there was a brief attempt to help us connect with history by working backwards from our family trees towards the Victorians… but even though that is only a short gap, even though I remember meeting my great-grandparents who were born only ten years after Victoria died, it can still be difficult to make that imaginative leap if the people described there seem to have little or nothing in common with you. The evidence of queer pasts explored in these novels helps the characters to make that leap in various ways, and to look at the past with insight and compassion, even love.

With all those factors in mind, my conclusion at the moment is that the emotional impact of that connection is strengthened when it is personal and felt directly in some way: family connections, connections through place or religion, connections through shared experiences of some kind. Sharing this experience with a fictional character through reading a novel about it might help readers to create those pathways for ourselves, and seeing the possibility of ancestral connections can bring us to the existing evidence in new ways. This might help us to create a more accurate image of the past – one which gets closer to taking into account the full range of human experience – but also opens up new directions for telling stories about the past. All historical work involves interpretation, always drawing on our own experience and ideas as well as original artefacts and documents, and although these examples are stories of fictional pasts as well as fictional presents, understanding better the motivations and feeling involved in interpretation can help us to navigate the complexities of it better.