Review of NORTH WOODS
You may never look at an apple the same way ...
Several years ago, Amitav Ghosh of Ibis trilogy fame, wrote a compelling series of essays about the utter silence in the fictional universe when it came to climate change. He rightly suggested that this mirrored our state of denial. Amitav must be relieved that if the density of denial correlates to its presence in our fiction, then, though with so little to show for it, we have succeeded in waking up. So much of the GOOD fiction I read these days is either directly or indirectly addressing the existential dread and sadness that accompanies even the most cursory awareness of what we are doing to ourselves. With sex, love and violence being the condiments, the main course of fiction has always been what man brings on to himself whether it be in the shape of the hubris of Greek and Shakespearean tragedy, the folly of the 19th century protagonist or the narcissistic delusions of the postmodern man. Climate change and the self-inflicted loss of our environment and ways of life is Ahab’s sinking ship or Lear’s blinded eyes writ large, disguised by the slow motion of everyday life. To be serious and NOT to think about this is to NOT BE a serious person. Historical fiction is more popular now than ever before because to write in our current times and NOT allude to what is happening around us is to flirt with irrelevancy. Notice how many novels today take place twenty of thirty years ago. Striking out on his own, making a stand of woods his place in time, David Mason’s elegiac utterly original North Woods is a “climate” novel that fits together, like a timeless set of tree rings, the past and the present and our ominous future.
Mason’s descriptions of nature are at the center of a novel filled with every kind of human being. The humans are often strange, sometimes too much so. They are all people without or struggling to achieve some kind of perspective. Pieces of his mosaic do not fit as well as others. It is an uneven work but like the book it reminded me of, Richard Power’s stunning The Overstory, its flaws are woven into its genius. As happened with Powers’ novel, I finished North Woods and collapsed into sadness … a sadness rooted in all that has been lost and will be lost. I want to go back in time to see the carpet of flowering chestnut trees, the flights of birds that cast shadows on sunny days, streams filled to the brim with fish and woods traced with the trails of wildness. They say that over 90% of the earth is to one degree or another “smoggy”. Less than 5% of the earth is truly dark at night … a darkness that covered over 90% of the earth only 150 years ago. This book captures the departing – the departure – of a world we clearly did not deserve.
North Woods
David Mason
2023 384 page
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