Geraldine Mills

Alienation permeates, like a debilitating fog, the world of Orchard Territory where survivors of a volcanic catastrophe live with their families at the mercy of the violent climate and the despotic Sagittars. Twin boys, Starn and Esper, were born after fall of ash that killed a huge proportion of the world’s flora and fauna, leaving the remaining humans to perform the mechanics of life in a dystopian, unjust and profoundly artificial life.

As the humans have to perform the task of pollination previously taken care of by the natural world, everything about the way they live every day is at a remove from any recognisable natural activity. Their world is one in which pineapples and marzipan are meaningless words and food is spoken of in words that are as scientifically derivitive as the substance itself – “orgone water”, “vita-shakes” and “electro-fluid.” Starn loves the things of the sky while his brother Esper loves the things of the earth, but neither one has seen so much as a bird or a badger except in illustration. The boys, their widowed father and their friends all try to keep at a remove from the Sagittars, and from the indigents, the homeless outcasts. There is no indulgence in the physical world, no fun in the snow, no lounging in the sun, the boys don’t even recognise apple-blossom.

Though the boys are accepting of life on Orchard, it is thrown vividly into relief in comparison to the Virus Islands. The islands – cut off from Orchard by a strait infested with the fabulously nightmareish zanderhag fish – are complete worlds, unlike Orchard Territory. On Orchard, the ash and the charred stumps of trees are perfect symbol of the stunted lives of its inhabitants, whose adults are shaped by what has been lost and by memories of the dead. The scavanging birds, wild weather and the poisonous plants found on the islands are as material as the dazzling colours and real food and the birdsong. The fear the breath of a wolf engenders is not like the fear that accompanies an ideology of keeping your head down in a grey world.

Starn is the narrator and is a combination of inarticulacy – he “floors” his brother more often than he talks to him – and clarity. His words for plants he does not recognise are effective so anyone who has seen a blackberry will know what he means by blackfruits on spikers and when his brother is ill his “silence bounces off the walls.” Starn seems particularly sensitive to exclusion, and to being unwanted, despite knowing his father calls them both “precious”. Starn resents Esper but cannot do without his brother and his narration has a constant, underlying resistance to isolation and desertion.

If there is a criticism of the book it is only that, having brought the brothers to their destination the story whisks them away again too quickly. Their acceptance of the reality of the mystery left to them by their great-aunt and their life-changing decision with regard to their next move occupy fewer than twenty pages. There is an appropriate inevitability about the decision, but the reader cannot help regretting the final briskness with which they are escorted out of Mill’s finely-imagined and language-loving world.
Aside from the vigorous and thrilling narrative, a couple of themes are worth mentioning. Firstly, while gender is not relevant in the narrative, exactly, it is noticable to begin with because of the very strong absent presence of Starn’s deceased mother and sister. This gendered theme is then echoed in the depiction of balances of power as the boys encounter representations of different forms of human social structure. What is interesting, though, is where there is ambiguity, and where the balance is between human, rather that female or male, and the environment.

Secondly, and like Patricia Forde’s stimulating The Wordsmith, there is a hint of A Canticle for Leibowitz about Gold. The person in charge of the Biblion glories in the job title of Defender of the Page. It is from his glimpse of da Vinci’s notebooks and his first encounter with an actual book that Starn finds a way for his brother and himself to go to the Virus Islands in pursuit of treasure. If The Wordsmith depicts the philosophical relationship between language and reality, Gold provides a robust and engaging depiction of the impact of words on a practical and adventurous mind. The only response is to read both.… (mais)