This Other Eden - Paul Harding

Although I personally would not have chosen Paul Harding's This Other Eden as one of the more likely survivors of the 2023 Booker Prize longlist, it did become one of the final six books under consideration for the prize before ultimately losing to Paul Lynch's Prophet Song. 

This Other Eden was inspired by a horrendous real-world eugenics program that was inflicted upon a small group of people off the coast of Maine on Malaga Island. Harding's fictitious stand-in for Malaga Island is Apple Island, an island so-named for the abundance of apple trees hand-planted there by its first male settler, former slave Benjamin Honey, in the late 1790s. By 1912, almost all of Honey's descendants still preferred living in relative isolation and poverty on the island to taking their chances on the mainland. By this point, the bloodline of Honey and his Irish wife had been further racially diluted by the occasional straggler seeking shelter on the island, many of whom were there because they were avoiding the mainland for reasons of their own. Still, the population of Apple Island was inbred enough that to outsiders a number of the residents appeared to be cripplingly feebleminded or physically impaired.

Harding populates the fictitious island with a colorful and memorable group of characters - my favorite thing about the novel. Among these are: Zachary Hand to God Proverbs, a Union Civil War veteran who has made a home for himself inside a hollow tree; Esther Honey, matriarch of a family consisting of her son and three grandchildren; Esther's grandson Ethan Honey, a young man of tremendous natural artistic ability; and Bridget Carney, an Irish immigrant housemaid who will come to know the Honeys intimately.

Certainly the island residents are poor, and with the exception of a few of the children who are schooled a little by a retired mainland schoolteacher, they are uneducated, but they take care of each other, and are content with their day-to-day lives. But this is not enough for the mainland do-gooders, who truth be told are offended by what is happening on the island, and decide that the islanders need to be institutionalized or otherwise relocated for their own good. Needless to say, the effort does not end well for anyone, especially those who have never known a home other than Apple Island.

This Other Eden at times read more like a fable than a historical novel, and it is heavy-handed enough to give the overall impression that it is trying just a little too hard not to offend today's so easily offended readers. That effort not to stray, along with what is at times a densely packed prose style, often makes for slow reading. The novel has a worthy theme, something legitimate to say about America's (and the world's) past in regards to racial prejudice, but I think it better belongs on the Booker longlist than on its shortlist. 

Paul Harding