This Other Eden tells the story of Apple Island as an imagined, somewhat simplistic, utopia and is skillfully written in a mellifluous and poetic style, giving it a complete personality of its own. While based on a real place and events, I do not consider it an historical novel but rather more speculative in nature.

The book requires concentration and focus despite being brief (just over 200 pages), yet it covers multiple characters and time periods. There are references to eugenics that was a popular movement during the beginning of the twentieth century which were definitely upsetting, yet they were necessary to the story and to present the real temper of the times. The effect on the primary characters in these passages was devastating, but the narrative voice handled the main characters with kindness and respect. I was drawn into its setting and era and discovered that I was moved by an emotional connection to the people living on Apple Island.

While I enjoyed the book and would recommend it to discerning readers, especially those interested in the social history of the period, mainly because it has such a deep concept, exquisite details, and lovely prose. ( )

A fictionalized glimpse of a unique community, in beautiful, spare prose.

Lost Island Home
Review of the Recorded Books audiobook edition (January 24, 2023) narrated by Edoardo Ballerini of the W.W. Norton & Company hardcover original (January 24, 2023).

Shortlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize, with the winner to be announced Sunday November 26, 2023.

Malaga Island was home to a mixed-race fishing community from the mid-1800s to 1912, when the state of Maine evicted 47 residents from their homes and exhumed and relocated their buried dead. Eight islanders were committed to the Maine School for the Feeble-Minded. “I think the best plan would be to burn down the shacks with all of their filth,” then Governor Frederick Plaisted told a reporter at the time. - Epigraph.

Author Paul Harding took his inspiration for his fictional Apple Island from the real-life story of the community evicted from Maine's Malaga Island in 1912. The island's inhabitants in the novel are completely fictionalized however, with even the founding of the settlement thrown back to 1792 instead of the actual 1860. This was still a moving and dramatic story of the outside forces of greed and discrimination acting to destroy those they did not understand or appreciate. That message is a timeless one regardless of the fiction.

See photograph at https://images.downeast.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/LI-770x513.jpg
Entertaining the missionary - Sunday on Malaga Island 1909. Image sourced from DownEast Magazine (see links below).

I didn't think I would be able to get through too many more of the 2023 Booker Shortlist in the time remaining, but an Audible Sale on November 8, 2023 offered this reading by the always excellent Edoardo Ballerini and I snapped it up immediately. This might a 4-star rating, but for me the narration kicks it up to a solid 5-star.

Soundtrack
The Story of Benjamin Darling Pt 1 by State Radio, a song about original Malaga Island inhabitant Benjamin Darling. Note: see in the YouTube comments for the lyrics which someone has transcribed.

Other Reviews
Paradise Lost by Rachel Seiffert, The Guardian, February 16, 2023.

Amid Literary Praise for This Other Eden, Critics Fear the Novel Could Undo Work to Dispel Myths About Malaga Island by Megan Gray, Portland Press Herald, November 12, 2023.

Trivia and Links
Read the magazine story which was the original source of inspiration for author Paul Harding's fiction at The Shameful Story of Malaga Island by William David Barry, Downeast Magazine, November 1980.

Read a follow-up story about how Malaga Island has gone from Dark Secret to Source Material by Jaed Coffin, Downeast Magazine, January 2023.

Listen to an audio documentary about Malaga Island at Malaga Island: A Story Best Left Untold at Maine Memory.

Read the 2023 Booker Prize Reading Guide for This Other Eden here. ( )

I am often not drawn to books on the Booker prize list, but the subject of this one caught my eye. It's loosely based on a real place, Malaga Island. In Harding's novel, the island is Apple Island, settled in the late 1700s by a motley group of people who find there way there over the 1800s - a mix of escaped slaves, Penobscot Native Americans, the Irish, and others. They aren't exactly thriving when a pastor from the mainland starts visiting them. They are hungry, cold, uneducated by modern standards, one of them lives in a tree, there has been a lot of inter-marry in a small genetic pool. But even so, the pastor, Michael Diamond, finds glimmers of greatness - a girl who learns Latin with ease and a young man with real artistic talent.

But, the island draws the attention of the government and they decide it's time to civilize this island. It doesn't take much imagination to guess what will happen to the residents.

I liked this. It has a memorable cast of characters. I also liked how it flipped my view of the island. Really, at the beginning I was not impressed with how these people were living. They were in poor health, practically starving, one living in a tree! But by the end, I was convinced they had it right, and the life they'd built there was one they should be allowed to continue.

Recommended. ( )

First off - the writing in this book is fantastic. Each sentence is concise and descriptive at the same time and it needs to be because there is a lot of story to tell in just over 200 pages. Some of the sentences are very, very long but for very good reasons, which I will come to later on.

Based loosely on a true story in Maine, a group of people, mixed in race and therefore colour, lived on a small island off the Maine coast called Apple Island (in real life Malaga Island) where a Black man and White woman settled and raised a family. This family grew, there were additions to the island, but not many, and there they lived in abject poverty financially, but free of all ideas around in the early 1900s about what colour meant and how they should live their lives. In the summer a teacher/preacher, Matthew Diamond, would row over every day and teach the children and preach on a sunday. Matthew was a strange mix of a man: he taught the children and grew to realise the incredible talents in the Honey family yet felt a 'visceral, involuntary repulsion in the presence of a living Negro'.

Diamond's activities draw the attention of state officials and they visit the island. Unfortunately, two of the members of the group are part of the 'Eugenics in the American Breeding Society' and so bodies are measured as if they are cattle and pronounced 'morons' or 'degenerate squatters'. Diamond wants to speak up and say that one of the children has outstripped him in her learning about algebra, another can speak in Latin and the third, a boy, can draw exceptionally well. But, and it is a big but, he doesn't. His guilt gets the better of him and he asks a friend to take in Ethan, the boy who can draw, so that he can escape the island. Esther, the grandmother, knows he is the only one who is given an opportunity because he passes for white and that they will never see him again. The rest of the family are Black.

The story is an exercise in the misuse of science - children and adults ended up in the School for the Feeble-Minded and died not long after, and also the part racism plays in how we treat people who are different to ourselves. History has a habit of repeating itself with the idea that those who are in power, who are convinced of their rightness, abuse those whose identity or whose way of life doesn't conform to their own. We had an example last week which is scarily close to the book when Suella Braverman stated that being homeless was a 'life choice' and that she was going to ban charities from giving out tents. Way too close to the story.

There is little in the plot that is a surprise to the reader: the fact that Ethan was from a Black family was telegraphed by the mention of his full lips and the ramifications of this identifying and the ending is no shock. For me, it is the writing that carries this story. The island gathered together to send Ethan off with one last meal and one incredible sentence.

The islanders feasted on lobsters, the tenderest they had ever had, they all agreed, drenched in the melted fresh butter, bowls and bowls of the chowder, the creamiest and richest they'd ever had they all said, fresh bread, with the crustiest crust and the softest insides anyone had ever eaten, broken in chunks from the loaves, slathered, too, in the fresh butter, oysters, the coldest and briniest and most succulent ever, everyone shouted in between sucking them from their shells, corn that everyone agreed was the sweetest they'd ever tasted as they munched their way along and around ear after buttered ear, the darkest, muskiest, most mysterious and beguiling truffles ever to have sprouted, and the sweetest, plumpest, freshes berries anyone had ever tasted, they said, popping one after another down, or cramming handfuls at a time into their mouths, as the children and Annie Parker did. And the beer. Glorious, they all said.
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Yes , a child leaving the island was truly Eden collapsing and the loss of innocence for the child. Nowadays, the food sounds luxurious - how could people who live in such poverty and who often went hungry, have had so much? Well, most of it was foraged and were local foods that they lived on when they could get them. The only additions that were bought were the butter and cream. They knew this was a turning point and so in trying to believe that they were doing the right thing, everything took on a slightly romantic glaze. It is the only time in the book anything does. I love the contrast of the short sentence about the beer, almost as if we have to come up for breath after eating all that food to take a slug.

The next morning Ethan uses a small mirror and sketches a portrait of himself, only to discover he is a child, not the man the thought he was. He had been smoking roll-ups since he was twelve years old. And in that moment, your heart breaks and you know no good will come of it.

Interspersed with the prose are documents from state officials about the people and the island which in the third section morph into information about Ethan's paintings which are on display with the collective guilt of what was done to the people on the island and at the very start of the book, an apology for their treatment. We are left with the question about how history will treat us. ( )