Labrador by Kathryn Davis

The snow fell faster and faster outside, encasing us all. In Labrador, Willie, the snow sometimes rises in drifts so high that a person can walk up to the bell in the church steeple and set it ringing with their hand. In Labrador there is always too much of something or none of it at all. Jacques Cartier called it "the land God gave to Cain." For my part, I think of it as your kingdom--the kingdom of the queenly Willie, whose neck I would have broken gladly, had it not been so fragile.

When I picked up Kathryn Davis' novel Labrador I expected--quite reasonably, I think, based on the synopsis on the back of the book--a realist sort of novel about a young girl who travels to Labrador with her grandfather to escape a complicated relationship with her older sister. I've always had a predilection for novels about the Canadian far north, where people live improbably, and while this is an improbable novel, that synopsis of it isn't really worth much. I didn't expect the lyrical and metaphorical intensity of the narrator, a teenager named Kathleen, and I didn't expect so much of the story to be about a literal angel named Rogni who speaks with her:

So I entered the language of the angels, the dangerous territory through which quills shot--where the heart of a human child is most vulnerable. A wing folded around me; I was bound in by pinions, the hooks and barbs of enormous feathers; the other wing rose and fell, beating a dark chord, and we flew, higher, through the thick yellow rapture of souls stewing in heaven's pot. An then there was the silver and judgmental silence.

"Look, Kathleen," said Rogni, pointing to where I could see myself standing on a silver and empty plateau under a silver sky. "An event is taking shape here," he said, "if only you know how to recognize it."

Is Rogni real? Probably not. He's probably a manifestation of Kathleen's intense devotion to Willie, a white-hot and inexplicable love for her more graceful and admired sister that is undermined by Willie's capriciousness and cruelty, and the way that Willie, as older siblings inevitably do, wanders away from their shared imaginings as small children. Rogni attaches himself to Kathleen but he, too, loves Willie, and seems to want to use Kathleen to get closer to her. But Labrador is written in such a way that the question really doesn't matter, like really effective narratives, it has its own logic upon which the world outside its pages is unable to intrude.

"Fantasies," Willie tells Kathleen, "are supposed to give you what you want. They're not supposed to make you jealous." But Willie, like real world logic, has it all backwards; though Rogni may be a story Kathleen is telling herself, he also suggests that he is the one writing the story of Willie and Kathleen: the love that creates the world, rather than being the part of creation. The reader might well ask, "Is Kathleen real?"

Into this family, which is completed by a pair of unhappy and quarrelsome parents, Kathleen's grandfather appears. He has been living in Labrador, in the far north city of Nain, since abandoning his wife several years back, and neither Kathleen nor Willie has ever met him. The grandfather is the first person ever to take a shine to Kathleen, rather than Willie, and Kathleen begins to see returning with him to Labrador as an escape from her crippling love.

Labrador begins as an idea and becomes a place, and the sudden shift is so powerful that the narrative style changes; while most of the book is in the first person, written to Willie from Kathleen's perspective, the section "Labrador" is in the third person, holding Kathleen perhaps at arm's length. Kathleen's fantasies about what Labrador might mean for her seem close to fulfillment; she meets and falls for an Inuit boy named Jobie, for instance. But a boat trip and a sudden storm put their lives in danger, and the grandfather--who, honestly, she seems to have met just a moment ago in narrative time--is suddenly face to face with a very real polar bear.  Davis wants us to know just how real:

It was a real bear filled with the breath of this world, putrid and immense, its tongue a grayish pink, its teeth crusty with green sediment. Believe me when I tell you it was not a story bear; not a legend bear; not a bear preparing to shuck off its skin and reveal itself to the youngest sister as a suitor--the prince, at last, static as paradise and requiring only admiration.

In this way Davis, as she does throughout the novel, blurs the line between the mythical and the real. Perhaps Kathleen is a story told by an angel; perhaps Labrador is an idea only, but an idea is as deadly as anything else and has its own consequences. The failure of Kathleen's brief Labrador trip forces her back home, to deal with Willie once and for all, to find a way to control the story of the two sisters herself.

Every year I discover a couple of "surprise" novels: books that seem to come out of nowhere and floor me with with their beauty or their brilliance. I picked this book up at a used bookstore in Rockport, Maine, for no other reason than I like reading about Canada, and I had a vague sense that the author's name was familiar. (It's possible I was thinking of Lydia Davis.) Labrador is so shimmeringly weird, so tremendously written, to have found my way to it feels like an amazing stroke of luck. A gift, maybe, from a guardian angel.

The Chrysalids by John Wyndham

'So you're in love with her?' she went on.

A word again... When the minds have learnt to mingle, when no thought is wholly one's own, and each has taken too much of the other ever to be entirely himself alone; when one has reached the beginning of seeing with a single eye, loving with a single heart, enjoying with a single joy; when there can be moments of identity and nothing is separate save bodies that long for one another... When there is that, where is the word? There is only the inadequacy of the word that exists.

As a child, David is taught by his father that genetic aberration is a sin. When a crop shows signs of mutation, it is burned, and the same is done--in secret--when genetic aberrations appear on infant children. This belief is woven into the society in which David and his father live: according to their Bible, because man is made in the image of God, those things which seem to differ from the standard image are works of the Devil to be feared and destroyed. "Accursed is the mutant," goes one verse, "in the eyes of God and Man."

These ideologies, Wyndham suggests, are the result of some kind of nuclear cataclysm. David and his family live in post-apocalyptic Labrador (sweet), ringed in by "Fringes" where mutants are exiled, which themselves bleed into the horrible "Badlands." Nuclear disaster, it seems, has caused these "aberrations," but so too has it created a religion in which the pre-disaster "Old People" are revealed and genetic purity seen as the route back to a pre-lapsarian state. Truth be told, it's an idea that's been done to death, from X-Men to Divergent: mutants are always symbolic of the repressed other, but Wyndham did it early and well; nothing about The Chrysalids seems hackneyed or shallow.

There's only one way this kind of story can go: David slowly comes to realize, by befriending a mutant, that not all difference is bad. Here that's Sophie, a young girl who David plays with before noticing, after she gets her foot stuck in a crevice, that she has six toes. But as David grows up, he realizes that he himself is a kind of mutant: he shares a telepathic link with six other young people in his community, including his cousin and lover Rosalind and his little sister Petra. What feels natural to him turns out to be a genetic aberration so severe that its discovery could send his entire community into uproar and lead to his own destruction.

The link between David and the others seems like a classic symbol for radical empathy. I've been thinking about that, empathy. You see it in books everywhere. Is it a copout? You could make a case, I think, that a science fiction novel like The Chrysalids offers an insufficient solution to social diseases like nationalism and racism. Individual empathy is good, but only to the extent that informs structural and systemic reform. But there's a reason, I think, that the most dogmatically social realist books seem so forced: a novel can reflect social structures and propose new ones, but it can't enact them. A novel, however, enacts empathy by putting us in someone's head; here, it puts us in several heads, minds that are so closely tied together they become one mind. As a political solution, it doesn't help, but it makes The Chrysalids something more than a mere allegory or fable.

The Chrysalids hit a real sweet spot for me. It's not afraid to go for broke: Petra's telepathy skills turn out to be so powerful she can communicate with a colony of telepaths in New Zealand, who come to the rescue of the protagonists. It seemed to draw from some of the best parts of mid-century pulp science fiction, but it was written before those aspects had to be done with a tongue in cheek to seem relevant. The worldbuilding is smart, but not too smart or complex, and the simple chase narrative of the second half really worked.