Remarkably Bright Creatures: Nice Novel, but Remember it's Magical Realism

 

 

 

 

 

 

Remarkably Bright Creatures

By Shelby, Van Pelt.

Harper, 384 pages.

★★★

 

 Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt was a runaway best-selling novel about a very intelligent giant octopus. It takes place in both California and Washington State and centers on the forementioned octopus, Marcellus McSquiggles. He has a friend at his aquarium, Tova Sullivan, widowed septuagenarian a cleaning lady. She is Swedish, though her parents immigrated to the United States when she was quite young.

 

Readers of National Geographic and viewers of shows such as Nature have learned that octopi demonstrate intelligence that one would not expect in such an unlikely marine body. They can solve all manner of startling tasks, such as opening locked boxes, untying knots, and demonstrating awareness that indicates high intelligence. They also share with crows (another remarkably bright creature) an attraction to bright objects and a love of hoarding. Marcellus likes school rings, keys, and drivers’ licenses. Van Pelt’s debut novel builds upon such findings. Of course, observations alone are not scientific evidence of human-level understanding. You can train a dog to do incredible tricks, but you can’t teach it to hold a philosophical discussion. We infer, but simply don’t know what constitutes intelligence in the animal world because we can’t speak dog, whale, crow, octopus….

 

Remarkably Bright Creatures has been made into a Netflix film. The consensus opinion is that the book is far more engaging than the movie. I’ve not seen the movie, but novels are usually better crafted than a flick told in under two hours. Van Pelt’s book is satisfying and uplifting, but it is magical realism, not science. I enjoyed Van Pelt’s novel, but I also found that it telegraphed what is going to happen in both improbable and obvious ways.

 

As noted, it also takes place in California, which is where we meet Cameron. He has had a lot of trouble getting started in life. He has been a mainstay in a punk band, called Moth Sausage, but the lead singer and his best friend have gotten married, are starting a family, and have taken “responsible” jobs. Cameron hasn’t had an easy life either; his mother Daphne split and gave him to her sister Jeanne when he was a child. She has been generous and patient with Cameron, but he knows that he owes her big-time. Cameron’s serious abandonment issues and horrible work history have given him wanderlust. Cameron sets off in a down-market camper van hoping to trace what happened to his mother and identify his father. He lands in Sowell Bay Washington, where he meets Ethan Mack, a friendly Scottish grocer/rock fan, who allows him to park his van in his yard. We soon learn Ethan has a crush on Tova, who has other plans.

 

Circumstances, including Cameron’s desire to pay back his aunt who sacrificed her vacation funds for the van, leads him to take a job in the aquarium owned by a friend of Ethan’s. He’d also like to have some pocket change to charm the lovely Avery, the owner of a surf shop who is two years his elder, the owner of a surf shop, and definitely Cameron’s senior in life lessons. Tova has long been the nighttime cleaner in the aquarium and has struck up and unlikely friendship with Marcellus the octopus. She speaks to him all the time and he shows signs of understanding her. Marcellus also intuits that Tova is deeply grieving for her dead husband their son Erik, who is presumed to have drowned. In other words, we have a lot of human creatures during what alas they do unremarkably: endure emotional pain, but get stuck.

 

I remind again, the tale involves magical realism. Marcellus is indeed intelligent, but I doubt he keeps a mental diary involving the more than 1300 days of his “captivity.” Nor do we have evidence that sea creatures have an exacting sense of their lifespan. Marcellus has made escape efforts because he “knows” that his species only lives for 4 to 5 years. You also will need loads of tolerance for, dare, I say, remarkable coincidences. Perhaps because I read so many mysteries, I don’t like it when I can see what’s coming and how. Mind, I’ve nothing against happy endings. I admire this book for not dragging me through mud and murder; I just wish it had taken turns I hadn’t anticipated.

 

Rob Weir

 

Mary Oliver: An Uplifting Documentary

 

 

 MARY OLIVER: SAVED BY THE BEAUTY OF THE WORLD (2026)

Directed by Sasha Waters

Kino Lorber, 91 minutes

 

I worried a lot. Will the garden grow, will the rivers

flow in the right direction, will the earth turn

as it was taught, and if not how shall

I correct it?

Was I right, was I wrong, will I be forgiven,

can I do better?

Will I ever be able to sing, even the sparrows

can do it and I am, well,

hopeless.

Is my eyesight fading or am I just imagining it,

am I going to get rheumatism,

lockjaw, dementia?

Finally, I saw that worrying had come to nothing.

And gave it up. And took my old body

and went out into the morning,

and sang.

 

 

Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World is an uplifting documentary about the woman who might be the most famous poet in the history of Western society. There are many poets more renowned for their literary grace, more praised by scholars, more philosophically profound, more socially significant…. But have any been more embraced by ordinary folks, the sort who would rather endure a root canal than wrestle with iambic pentameter or trochaic meter?

 

Whenever someone professes to dislike poetry, somebody is bound to ask, “Have you ever tried Mary Oliver?” Chances are good that query will come from the last person in the room you would have expected to read poetry. Oliver (1935-2019) is generally considered a nature poet, though she was more than that. She eschewed fancy rhymes, meter, and structure for commonplace expression that evokes deeply emotional responses. In the film we watch Stephen Colbert struggle to recite from memory Oliver’s “The Summer Day.” He is fine until he gets to its most famous line, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” It took numerous takes before Colbert could recite that line without choking tears. Surely wise guys like John Waters or Steve Buscemi are not so sentimental. Wrong! They too worship the ground upon which Oliver sat among resplendent nature.

 

Numerous poet-talking-heads appear on screen. You might not recognize some of their names, but all sing Oliver’s praises. So do Helena Bonham Carter, Lucy Dacus, and Oprah Winfrey. Oliver won a Pulitzer Prize in 1984, a National Book Award in 1992, collected five honorary doctorates, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and countless other prizes.

 

Though Oliver was loved by millions, she was more guarded; director Sasha Waters reveals a lot about Mary’s wild and precious life. She was born in a Cleveland suburb, but hers was not a happy childhood. Details are sparse, but Oliver later spoke of being sexually abused as a child. Emily Dickinson sought solace in her room and front yard; Oliver retreated to nature. Some have compared Oliver to Dickinson, but to me she seemed like a plain-spoken Ralph Waldo Emerson with the ego stripped away. Oliver always listed Emerson and Thoreau as among her poetic inspirations, along with Millay, Whitman, the 13th century Persian/Sufi poet Rumi, and Elizabeth Bishop. She also admired haiku master Matsuo Bashõ (1644-94), which helps explain Oliver’s penchant for succinct verse.

 

Oliver tried college, but it didn’t take. She landed at Steepletop, Edna St. Vincent Millay’s home in Austerlitz, New York, where she befriended Millay’s sister and spent more than six years organizing Edna’s papers. She held multiple writer-in-residence positions (Case Western, Bennington, Sweet Briar, Bucknell, and others) but in Austerlitz she met photographer Molly Malone Cook, her lover, partner, and agent for 40 years. Mary and Molly moved to Provincetown in 1964, and Cape Cod became one of Oliver’s greatest joys and creative sparks. She was known to spend hours lost in local forests, sitting by the sea, wandering alone, and silently following her inner muse. It has been said that she loved the natural world, but such a statement is inadequate; Mary saw a personified Nature as her teacher and spiritual advisor. Oliver was spiritual, but not religious in any conventional sense. She had little time for dogma or doctrine.  

 

There is one glaring dodge in this otherwise superb documentary. Molly died in 2005 and Mary still had 14 years of life remaining. As has been documented, Cook’s death devastated Oliver. Shortly after Molly’s death, Oliver shocked those who knew her best by leaving Provincetown at the behest of her final partner Anne Taylor. Oliver moved to Hobe Point, Florida–north of West Palm Beach and south of Stuart–to be with Anne.  Waters and Oliver’s friends hinted that that the Taylor/Oliver relationship was toxic and that Mary disliked Florida, but details are sketchy. Why pull punches? An attempt to keep Oliver’s reputation intact? Taylor’s silence? Fear of being sued?  Perhaps none of it matters. Were Oliver here she’d probably ask, “… what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life,” tell us to give up worrying, go into the woods, and sing.

 

Rob Weir

Icelandic Film The Love That Remains is Missing More Pieces than One

 

 

 

  

THE LOVE THAT REMAINS (2025)

Directed by Hlynur Pálmason

STILL VIVID, 109 minutes, Not-rated (language, an up-the-dress shot)

In Icelandic, English and Swedish

★

 

My Wednesday posting is late because I needed to contemplate The Love That Remains. Director Hlynur Pálmason’s previous film, Godland, was among my favorite films of 2022. His latest reminded me of past days of evaluating submissions for the Northampton Film Festival. There were two categories of films I felt should tossed into the Coliseum with the lions: those whose point was how hard it was for the filmmaker to make the film, and those whose point might have been apparent to the director, but no one else. The Love That Remains is in the second category. 

 

I have had Icelandic friends, rank my trip to Iceland as among my best travel memories, read a lot of Icelandic folk tales and mysteries, and watch Icelandic TV shows and movies. To date, nothing Icelandic comes close to being as boring as The Love That Remains. It should have told me something to discover that only Panda won an award at the Cannes Film Festival; he won a Palm Dog for Best Lead Animal Actor. I’ll give the film one star because Panda, an Icelandic sheepdog, is cute and cuddly.

 

This film is ostensibly about a coming-apart-at-the-seams family in which Pálmason cast his own children as eldest daughter Ída, and her brothers, þorglis (THOR-glis) and Grímur as her younger brothers.  Anna (Saga Gardarsdóttir) and Magnus (Sverrir Guðnason) are the parents, though they are separated. Anna wishes to leave their coastal home and live in “the city,” which can only be Reykjavik, as its metropolitan area contains two-thirds of Iceland’s 350,000 residents. She fancies herself an artist and blames her isolation for why her art isn’t selling. I’m no expert on contemporary Icelandic art, but I hold open the possibility that Anna simply wasn’t a very good artist. Her work consisted of cutting metal sheets into geometrical shapes, placing them over pieces of canvas, weighting them down with wooden skids and rocks, and leaving them to the elements. At the end of the year there are rust patterns on the canvas. It’s conceptually interesting, but aesthetically unappealing.

 

Magnus is an involved separated husband and parent. He loves Anna and wishes to be with his children. Unless he’s at sea on a herring trawler, he’s at his old home frolicking with Panda, rough-housing with the boys, chatting with 17-year-old Ída, eating dinner with the family, trying to bed Anna, leading family outings, and dealing with things Anna would rather not (like getting rid of a troublesome rooster). When at sea, he’s morose and misses all five. (Let’s not forget Panda!) “Maggi,” as Anna calls him, is so betwixt and between that he’s surly and clashes with his ship mates.

 

These are things we can understand, but Pálmason throws in surrealistic elements, such as a giant rooster attacking a sleeping Magnus and a Joan of Arc dummy that comes to life and pulls out arrows shot into her by Anna and her children. For the record, only research told me the dummy was supposed to be Joan of Arc; it’s another of Anna’s “art” projects and looked like a soggy soft sculpture scarecrow with a tinpot head. (Gee, how could I have not seen Joan of Arc in that mess?) Anna is no happier with Magnus out of the house, except she only laughs when he’s there. The boys drop F-bombs and ignore her chastisements. Soon we realize that Ída is the closest thing to an adult in the household. What we never figure out is why Anna can’t live with a man who adores her, supports her art, and wants to co-parent.

 

That said, Saga Gardarsdóttir is the most interesting actor on the screen. She intrigues physically, as we can see world-weariness etched on her face. She is pale, blonde, heavily freckled, and tall (6’0) like many Icelandic women, and would have been 37 when the film was made. In the film, she dresses in an unkempt manner and looks as if 50 are rushing up to greet her with the intent of bypassing her 40s. Her aloofness and the fate of Magnus ultimately tell us as little about the collapse of a family as the film’s opening sequence of a crane lifting a roof from a shed. Slowly. Like the rest of the film. 

 

Rob Weir

Let Me Be Frank With You and the Literary Magic of Richard Ford

 

 

 

LET ME BE FRANK WITH YOU (2014)

By Richard Ford

HarperCollins, 238 pages.

★★★★

 

Welcome to another book from my recent book fair shopping extravaganza. Richard Ford has long been a favorite of mine, though I confess his fiction is often on the cranky white male end of the literary equation. Lots of writers have alter egos, most famously Samuel Clemens (“Mark Twain”) and John Updike (Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom); Ford’s is Frank Bascombe. In earlier books, Frank has been a sportswriter, a grieving parent whose oldest son has died, a divorcee, and a New Jersey realtor, but in Let Me Be Frank With You he’s a 69-year-old retiree in a happy second marriage. His greatest desire is to empty himself of his past and pretty much everything else that bothers him or requires effort.

 

This novel’s cover features the skeletal remains of the roller coaster at Seaside Heights, New Jersey, in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. In a case of the (not-so) great American pastime of historical amnesia, 2012’s Hurricane Sandy has faded from collective memory, but if you lived on the Eastern Seaboard anywhere from Jamaica to Ontario, Sandy took out power, produced floods, killed 254 people, and left billions of dollars of damage. (Remember footage of Vermonters kayaking along Montpelier streets by the State House?)

 

Frank was lucky, as a few years earlier he sold his Sea-Clift waterside dream house to Arnie Urguhart when made an offer he could not refuse. Frank hadn’t spoken with Arnie in ages before getting his request to come to Sea-Clift and advise what should be done with the remains of the house and ruined property. Despite the fact that Frank closed his realty office years ago, he is badgered into telling Arnie he’d be lucky to get $500,000 for the land.

 

What he doesn’t tell Arnie is that he has no desire to rekindle old clients or friendships, and that even being asked for an opinion is more mental effort than he cares to expend. Let Me Be Frank is not a novel in which much happens, rather a journey inside Frank’s thought bubbles. If you will, it’s an internal war between what Frank says and what he thinks. It’s a breezy read divided into four sections: “I’m Here,” “Everything Could Be Worse,” “The New Normal,” and “Deaths of Others.” Ford pared down themes to unleash Bascombe to be Ford’s mouthpiece for his opinions on scores of random subjects. They’re not really unrelated, rather they show us Frank (Ford) carries a lot of mental baggage for a guy who allegedly wants to unburden.

 

For those who might wonder why they’d wish to be part of some old guy’s rants, I offer this: There’s a reason that Richard Ford was a Pulitzer Price winner. He is a literary stylist, has an enormous vocabulary, and knows how to walk the tightrope between pathos and bathos (though parts of the books are quite funny), satire and maliciousness, awkwardness and overly mannered, and intrusion and genuine interest. Through it all, Frank at least thinks his mind, even when he feels the pull of social constraint not to speak it. I leave it to readers to determine whether Frank is disingenuous, disengaged, cowardly, intellectually lazy, or sensible. I will say, though, that the “Everything Could Be Worse” section is an incisive look at white liberal guilt. It unfolds when an older black woman rings Frank’s doorbell. Frank twists his liberalism into knots into how to deal with a woman whose family used to live in Frank’s house in Haddam when his neighborhood was black working-class rather than upwardly mobile white middle class. Frank parses his conversation, but is never sure if what he said was the right thing or unintentionally offensive. Through it all we can tell that he is working too hard to prove he’s not a racist.   

 

In many ways Frank is a fraud, but he knows and feels that. There is an air of toxicity in his attempt to be civil to his ex-wife, who is in a memory care unit; or attend the deathbed or a guy he only pretended to like.  Frank is either frank with himself or the kind of jerk he believes others to be. Again, it’s up to the reader to decide, though Frank wouldn’t care one way or the other! But the prose… the boldness… the style… Ford is a writer par excellence.

 

Rob Weir

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Eugenics in Vermont

Vermont for the Vermonters: The History of Eugenics

            in the Green Mountain State (2023)

By Mercedes De Guardiola

Vermont Historical Society, 177 pages + appendices and back matter

★★★

 

 

 

When I was a high school teacher in Vermont, Nancy Gallagher was one of my favorite colleagues, even though she taught science courses and I was a social studies instructor. Years after I left, Nancy published Breeding Better Vermonters (1999), the first major work on the eugenics movement in Vermont.

 

Gallagher’s work concentrated heavily on Henry Perkins, who headed Vermont’s Eugenics Records Office for 11 years. Breeding Better Vermonters was a major inspiration for Mercedes De Guardiola, who looked deeply into available records across Vermont and published Vermont for the Vermonters. Guardiola would be the first to admit that even her study is incomplete as many records are missing–thrown away, destroyed by floods and fires, misfiled, or still undiscovered.

 

Eugenics is soiled by its association with racism, ethnocentrism, ableism, intolerance, and other now-unsavory assumptions. Because of its unsettling association with Nazi Germany, the eugenics movement is not broadly taught in the United States. Nor is it comfortable to acknowledge that eugenics passed for “science” in much of the Western world or that Hitler’s reign of hate drew upon American sources as well as European sources. Although adherents in Vermont and elsewhere argued that “positive” eugenics would literally produce better traits among humans, selective breeding was an ideal more suited to crops and livestock than humans. It thrived between the 1890s-1940s and its logical extension was to identify “subnormal” humans and prevent them from passing on their “defects,” either by voluntary or forced sterilization. In Vermont and elsewhere, chapters of the Ku Klux Klan endorsed eugenics. A large KKK rally in Montpelier during the 1920s was thus less shocking than one might assume. In retrospect, the truly shocking takeaway from Vermont eugenics is that so many educated and prominent luminaries embraced eugenics, including doctors, college presidents, governors, women’s club members, judges, scientists, and other professionals. 

 

De Guardiola pored over records from the Waterbury Hospital, the Brandon Reform School, the Perkins-led Eugenics Survey, state records, gubernatorial speeches, newspapers, and Vermont Country Life Commission reports. Among the many contradictions of eugenics is that “improving” the human race involved identifying those who would drag it down. Vermont eugenics dovetailed with the 1931 Vermont Commission on Country Life, whose 1931 Rural Vermont: A Program for the Future, sounded the warning that the state’s “Old Stock” was in decline, which in turn threatened to alter Vermont’s special rural characters. Thus, other commissions on everything from potatoes, apples, poultry, and dairies to woodworking, tourism, land use, and “religious forces” voiced opinions on eugenics. In essence, what was at stake was old-time Vermont versus emergent Vermont. The Old Stock was Protestant, Yankee, and rural. Eugenics targeted those of supposedly low IQ, but it was far too easy to assume that African Americans, French Canadians, Catholics, Native Americans, mixed bloods, delinquents, epileptics, the poor, and the under-educated were prone to mental deficiency. Not to mention unscientific assumptions that retardation and intelligence were genetically based. Today, many would also find it distasteful to deny the right of procreation to those of lower IQs or physical challenges. (Some genetics advocates did allow for the possibility that “high grade imbeciles” and “morons” could perhaps handle family life, but not “idiots” or “low grade” and “medium” imbeciles. 

 

Classification also lacked academic rigor. The Eugenics Survey of Vermont highlighted six “families”–the “Pirates,” the “Gypsy,” the “Chorea,” the “Doolittle,” the “Rector,” and the “Furman.” Of these, the first three were not families at all, rather generalized collectives to describe those who lived on boats, travelers and peddlers, and those poor souls driven insane by Huntington’s Chorea. Nor is the data from the latter three biologically-related families consistent, as some family members led quite productive lives.

 

It would be far too simplistic to condemn all eugenicists as bigots. I reiterate that eugenics passed for science at its height. Science is a dynamic field in which rigorous observation drives conclusions until new tools and methodologies proves them wrong. I am a historian, not a medical doctor or scientist. I would say, though, that one of the jobs of a historian is to warn citizens to ask hard questions lest the errors of the past repeat themselves. Hats off to my old friend Nancy Gallagher and to Ms. De Guardiola for illuminating the dangers of predetermined assumptions.

 

Rob Weir

 

 

  

Fail Mary: A Good Book Badly Interpreted

 

 

 

 

 

 

PROJECT HAIL MARY (2016)

Directed by Phil Lord and Christoper Miller

Amazon-MGM Studios, 156 minutes, PG-13 (intensity, mention of suicide)

★★

 

Project Hail Mary was a megahit, but the film gets very little love from me. It is ever-so-loosely based on the 2021 novel of the same name by Andy Weir (no relation of mine). Weir’s book was quite good, an exemplar of what is sometimes called a “hard science novel.” It was also “hard” in the sense that Weir didn’t shy away from throwing math equations, chemistry, and physics at his readers. Those things are also present in the movie, but it’s ultimately a buddy film between astrobiologist Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling) and a xenon-based alien nicknamed “Rocky” (James Ortiz voicing a rather obvious puppet).

 

The story is rather straightforward. Grace is a wise guy scientist whose nonconventional behavior and lack of ambition have wrecked his chances of working at any sort of high-powered university or research lab. He has been reduced to teaching middle school science and he’s really good at it; it fits his slacker-like demeanor. He is, however, aware of the frightening buzz over mysterious celestial dots, the infrared “Petrova line” extending beyond Venus, and rumors that is has been sucking radiation from the sun at such a rate that within 30 years tens billions will die from global freezing.

 

Ryland is commandeered to do research on astrobiological problem he wrote about when he was a serious graduate student. Somehow this makes him the world’s expert above those malingering deadbeats at crappy schools such as Arizona State, Cal Tech, Colorado University, Harvard, MIT, Stanford and university labs in Beijing, Cambridge, Edinburgh, and Tokyo. Ryland almost immediately identifies that a microbe dubbed astrophage is the culprit. (How did those lab-coated dolts elsewhere miss it?) Ryland also realizes that the scenario is much worse than a frozen earth. The Petrova line upon which astrophage travels could wipe out all of creation, except for a faraway small planet named Tau Ceti. A team is needed immediately to be put into induced comas, go to Tau Ceti, determine why it is unaffected, and send probes back to earth–nearly 12 light years away. The odds of all this happening are so low that their spaceship is named “The Hail Mary,” a term that infers an act of desperation.

 

Ryland believes that his work is done, before Petrova Taskforce head Eva Stratt (Sandra Hüller) tells Ryland he is one of the three chosen for the one-way suicide mission. He protests that he is not an astronaut, doesn’t want to go, and isn’t ready to die. His refusal is ignored; the stakes are so high that he is forcibly sedated, plonked aboard, placed in a coma, and wakes up 4-5 years later (roughly 13 years by earth time). Ryland is alone in space–both of his colleagues died in their receptacles–until he encounters a giant array. After some gawking, he approaches the array and eventually meets an alien he dubs Rocky, whose language is based on music and echolocation. (Shades of Close Encounters of the Third Kind.)  The two learn to communicate and Ryland writes a computer program that allows them to “talk” to each other. Rocky, an engineer from the Eridani A system, is also alone in space, his 22 crew members dead from radiation exposure. Despite their linguistic, cultural, and physical differences, Ryland and Rocky become good friends.

 

From this point on, Project Hail Mary plays more like a buddy film than any sort of thoughtful first contact movie. (For my money, Star Trek: First Contact tops the thriller/insightful list.) Like almost all buddy films, there are funny moments–Ryland is a klutz and playful goof-off–times in which they save each other, mutual homesickness, and teamwork to stave off disaster. A lot of the “cute” cultural misunderstandings skirt the boundary between character development and cheesy. The bonding process is even worse, as in Ryland’s efforts to hug Rocky through his protective sphere. Not to mention that the Eridian Rocky looks like the Horta from Star Trek’s first season crossed with a Muppet decked out in sepia and ash.

 

I do give credit to Greig Fraser for his stunning cinematography. I wish the movie itself had been more worthy of Fraser’s craft. Andy Weir’s novel made me think; the movie made me sigh.

 

Rob Weir

John of John Shortlisted for the Booker Prize

 

 

 

 

JOHN OF JOHN (2026)

By Douglas Stuart

Grove, 400 pages.

★★★★★

 

In May, I was in England. Back in the States there was a discussion of what the “big” books of summer would be, a list peppered with schmaltzy romances, graphic novels, and the usual suspects (Collen Hoover, John Grisham, Stephen King, Danielle Steel…). In the U.K. the reading public anticipated John of John by Douglas Stuart. If the name rings a bell, he’s the author of Shuggie Bain, which won the 2020 Booker Prize for fiction. He followed with Young Mungo, which was highly regarded, but John of John is already shortlisted for this year’s Booker Prize. Stuart is Scottish and lives in New York City part of the year with his husband. He has been called a queer writer, but mostly Stuart’s characters are complex people some of whom simply happen to be gay.

 

John of John is set on the remote Outer Hebrides Isle of Harris during the late 1990s. As for the title, in many places individuals introduce themselves according to their lineage. The novel’s main character calls himself “Cal,” but that’s short for John Calum McLeod. His father’s name is also John. As Cal ferries across The Minch to Harris, he is asked his name and replies, “John of John of Ian of Ian the Breabadair,” the last word meaning weaver. His recitation situates Cal within four generations. In a wee place like Harris, with a population of just 1,900 souls, this matters. It now adjoins the Isle of Lewis; though they were once separate islands, and are quite different. I’ve been to both and rock-strewn Harris looks as if the glacier just left last week.

 

Twenty-two-year-old Cal has been told that “Ma,” actually his grandmother Ella, is seriously ill. He leaves his art school in Edinburgh to care for her, only to arrive and find she is as feisty as a golden eagle. Speaking of birds, Calum actually means dove in Scots Gaelic, but you can be forgiven if thought it might mean Calvin, as in the dour Reformation figure John Calvin, whose Scottish acolyte John Knox was even more strict. Harris is one of the last toeholds of the Free Presbyterian Church–pronounced “kirk”– as “ch” is usually sounded as a hard K in Gaelic. There’s little that’s “free” about the predestination-centered Presbyterians of Harris. You can imagine that Harris is a hard place to be gay, especially when your sheep-farming father is a kirk preceptor and deacon with decided views on how one should observe religion and a white-hot temper used to smack the wrongdoing out of his son. Cal cannot tell his father of his predilections, even though he has committed several “sinful” acts between Glasgow and Harris. Ella has suspicions, but she’s decidedly not a kirk-goer, refuses to speak Gaelic, and curses worse than any of the island’s fishermen.

 

Only a handful of islanders know Cal’s secret. A childhood friend, “Doll” Macdonald, has been a partner during bouts of drunkenness, though even he shares the view that Cal might marry his fair, book-smart sister Isla. She would welcome that, but she reads Cal pretty well and pivots to wanting to escape Harris and attend the University of Glasgow.

 

John the Elder has a very good friend, the soft-spoken Innes MacInnes and he, too, will factor into the gathering drama. Harris might be sparsely populated place, but how many humans do you need for big secrets, raging passions, hypocrisy, and violent temperaments to raise mayhem? John of John is a sometimes-harrowing tale of isolation, repression, pain, and a father-son relationship. For all of his good intentions, Cal can be as cruel as his father, and that’s not the only way in which he hasn’t fallen far from the family tree.

 

This is not a novel that depends upon thrills, high-energy plotting, or mystery. We see most things through Cal’s eyes, but can he be trusted to curate how his own drama transpires? In many respects, what is left unsaid or swept under the proverbial rug is more toxic than what is. I mentioned The Minch earlier, which has a reputation for being unpredictable to the point of treachery. In Harris legends, The Minch is the home of malevolent kelpies, shape-shifting spirits who lure fishermen to their doom. John of John often portends such dangers, but we have to wait to see how the various crossings wash ashore.

 

Rob Weir