Land of the Living by Georgina Harding Reviews
T he 5th novel from the Orange prize shortlisted Georgina Harding opens in a landscape of the near arrestingly beautiful exoticism, a Shangri-La of mist and orchids and vivid birds, with mossy valleys, torrential rains and peaks ascension out of blue oceans of cloud. It is also a place of farthermost and immediate violence: the first image is of a severed monkey hand nailed to a woods branch, its significance opaque simply ominous and followed before long later past glimpses of a terrible massacre.
The time is the Burma campaign in the closing stages of the second world state of war, and our witness to the severed paw – and the massacre – is Lieutenant Charles Ashe. By the time nosotros come to him, Charlie is alone in the jungle, and lost. His fellow soldiers in the Royal Norfolks are all dead, although their faces haunt him nevertheless: dogged, reliable Walter, a Norfolk gamekeeper; Luke, an impulsive, frightened boy soldier; Tommy, the bow-legged Newmarket stable lad. As Charlie makes his way through uncharted territory, he circles the terrible facts of the atrocity he has witnessed, as well every bit circling the indigenous headhunting Naga tribesmen and Japanese troops still combing the jungle for survivors. He faces both a growing sense of the futile brutality of the war that has brought him there to desecrate other men's territory in the name of civilisation, and guilt over his own survival.
We know, very quickly, that Charlie does survive, because the brilliantly exotic mural of the jungle is presently contrasted with one more muted, domestic and familiar: the grey, frosted Norfolk farmland to which Charlie has returned, where his young married woman, Claire, is waiting for him. The deceptively serenity narrative of home, family unit and piece of work alternate with the blinding bloody one of battle. In the aftermath of Charlie'due south war the young couple find themselves barely able to communicate, and the silence betwixt them grows dangerous. Claire is set on conceiving a child as a way to intermission their frightening deadlock, but the prospect of pregnancy and a babe only increases the pressures on their frail entente. Land of the Living, as the championship suggests, is not then much a novel about conflict as most the return from conflict. As the ii narrative threads bind tighter, survival, it becomes articulate, must still be fought for.
The idea that life's existent battles are fought on the home front, when adrenaline recedes and the soldier must settle back to the bland challenges of the everyday, with a adult female who has no idea of what he has experienced and has quite likely become a stranger to him, is not a new i, but Harding makes it feel fresh. The foundation is a placidity, intense, exquisitely descriptive and extraordinarily accomplished focus on the physicality of both her settings. Her prose is enriched with small epiphanies – on the nature of language and of solitude, on the human need for violence and for land, and on the unknowability of the other – and immediately seduces the reader. The jungle'due south wide vistas, intense colours and narrow, dripping paths offer one reality, live with danger; but the blackness breakwaters of Holkham beach and the bleak flatness of Norfolk'south "cold waves of upturned world", where Charlie walks with his canis familiaris and his gun, provide neither safety nor comfort. Harding evokes the latent violence in both with chilling accuracy.
Inside this bright frame Harding's light but unerring manus at characterisation operates beautifully. Even the graphic symbol of Claire, very much an ancillary role and a adequately thankless ane as the well-intentioned, blundering married woman, is brought off successfully. She is as convincing equally she is maddening – both to reader and husband – in her stubborn insistence that simple biology can provide resolution. Simply information technology is Charlie'southward anguished numbness, as he makes his way through a territory that feels like no other – at once teeming and utterly empty, a identify out of time – and so through dogged, dangerous silence on the return home, that is at the book'south heart, and the thudding repetitions of his days on the farm audio like a drumbeat to alarm. Each ordeal the return brings, from touching his married woman, to visiting Walter'due south widow, to managing to express mirth, is subtly handled, layering the dangers inherent in the couple's isolation from each other as tangibly as the "soft English language basis-hugging mist". Vivid, illuminating and unbearably tense, Land of the Living is a masterly meditation on trauma, on beauty, on the thought of home and on the limits of love.
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Source: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/dec/15/land-of-living-georgina-harding-review
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