I grew up watching ghosts rise in swirling gusts of autumn leaves. In the pitch dark of the bathroom, I dared to summon the local legendary specter Black Aggie in the mirror. I consorted with midnight skeletons of light that danced on the walls. I probed the cosmic mysteries with charts I gleaned from astrology books and consulted my Magic 8-Ball with the seriousness of a soothsayer. Everything, it seemed, could be read, if one let her sight adjust to the darkness.
A few years ago, I discovered a more sophisticated Magic 8 Ball: oracle cards. A friend I was visiting had just presented me with a cup of tea and a box of cards with a dove hovering in sunbeams on the front and the words Gaia Oracle.
The renaming of Brontosaurus was scientific but also narrative, born of a mission to revise the story of the prehistoric world. Like palaeontologists, authors of fiction routinely revise their narratives. They expand them by inventing new stories, some placed in the current moment, others inserted between past events. Some of those insertions reinterpret parts of the past, altering some previous stories. Other revisions start the whole world over, altering all previous stories.
Metaphors of combat seem hyperbolic — unless you’re a victim. In both books, Hjorth deftly conveys the psychological warfare of familial conflict in circuitous, searching sentences. Fragments replicate the stab of betrayal, run-ons rummage for truth amid lies. In “Is Mother Dead,” Hjorth abandons a single, lethal sentence on a full page of white space: “If we knew, if we understood when we were young how crucial childhood is, no one would ever have children.” Childhood, the source of our earliest wounds, leaves enduring rivalries and rifts — the stuff of precise and affecting novels.
And as much as I wish he hadn’t had to write it, I am glad he did. Because such deaths do happen. And they largely happen in private. The reality of medical care, especially social and palliative care, is often shrouded in silence. Those engulfed in it, from workers to “clients”, are often too tired, physically and emotionally, to shine a light on its strengths or its fault lines (although Delaney, an American, is full of praise and wonder at the very existence of the NHS). Those who don’t need it don’t like to hear about it. Indeed, the more severe the pain, the more desperate the need of others to avoid it – they don’t want to intrude or don’t know how to help, scared of confronting their own and their children’s mortality. And those suffering stay in their cottages in the woods. So as much as Delaney is writing to offer succour and companionship to people who have experienced something similar, he is also rallying those who haven’t to understand and listen, and to chisel away at the stigma of pain. That he is able to do so with such guiltless, funny and disarming honesty is testament to the profound effect of Henry’s short but meaningful life.
There was once hardly any part of London that didn’t boast its very own department store, as a glamourous landmark on the high street offering everything from mundane household goods to clothing for a night out. Now mostly a fond memory told by the older generation, a compact but richly illustrated book tells the story of the heyday of London’s department stores.
“The Ruin of All Witches” provides a deft example of how a historian can avoid “presentism,” the practice of examining the past through a contemporary perspective, and inhabit a reality different from ours by “suspending hindsight.” As for his story’s relevance, Gaskill never mentions Donald Trump and his cries of “Witch hunt!” or his QAnon fantasies. He doesn’t have to. Whatever hallucinations are arising from our current state, like smoke from a fire, it’s obvious they’re not much different from what was going up the chimney in the 1600s.