A cruel eviction: This Other Eden, by Paul Harding, reviewed

When Paul Harding won the 2010 Pulitzer for Tinkers, he was a literary unknown who had all but abandoned hopes of his debut novel getting published until a tiny independent publisher chanced upon it. That story, about George Crosby, a dying clock- repairer who lived in Maine, heralded Harding as a great new voice, championed by Marilynne Robinson, no less.

But huge success brings huge expectations and Harding’s second book, Enon, which returned to the Crosby family and the same New England landscape, lacked the narrative perfection of Tinkers, despite the beauty of the prose as he explored a father’s collapse after the sudden death of his teenage daughter.

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For This Other Eden, Harding tries something that is both startlingly different and reassuringly familiar. Most of the novel is set over a few months in 1911 on Apple Island, a ‘granite pebble in the frigid Atlantic shallows’, across a channel from mainland Maine and up the coast from the tiny town of Enon, Massachusetts. Yes, the very same.

Harding’s fictional island is home to a mixed-race fishing community, inspired by Malaga Island, from which 47 residents were evicted in 1912 by the state of Maine. According to the epigraph:

‘I think the best plan would be to burn down the shacks with all of their filth,’ the Governor Frederick Plaisted told a reporter at the time.

The action centres on the Honey family, descendants of Benjamin, ‘American, Bantu, Igbo – born enslaved – freed or fled at 15, only he ever knew’, and Patience, a Galway girl, who arrived in 1793 with little more than a bag of tools and some apple seeds. By 1911, there are five Honeys: Esther, the ‘rawboned grandmother’ who smokes mugwort in her clay pipe and drinks tea, ‘black as oil, smelly as tar’; Eha, Esther’s son, who is also her brother (her father forces himself on her); and Eha’s children, Ethan, Charlotte and Tabitha.