Month: June 2025

Meet Fred!

Rohan Maitzen8 Comments

I had barely recovered from my jet lag after my recent trip to Vancouver when I got caught up in another big distraction: I have adopted a cat! Her name is Fred, short for Winifred (she happily acknowledges either Winifred Holtby or Winifred Burkle as her namesake—or both), she’s approximately two years old, she’s tiny, she’s sweet, and she’s a bit of a pest in the wee hours of the morning.

I had thought for a long time about getting a cat. I had one growing up, an elegant Siamese named Bothwell—I was in a big Mary, Queen of Scots phase when he joined the household. (Maybe Fred should consider herself lucky?) He was a great companion: loyal, eccentric, and independent, so basically a lot like me. During my marriage having a cat wasn’t an option, as my ex-husband is allergic; so too is my daughter, but only to some cats, and she encouraged me to take a chance. (So far, so good: she has visited Fred a few times and even held her, without any noticeable reaction.) I am extremely good at overthinking things, and I also don’t much like making decisions when I can’t clearly foresee the outcome, which is obviously the case when taking on a pet that is going to have her own personality and needs. I just could not get the pro / con list to be decisive either way! Then while I was away I missed out on an opportunity to adopt what sounded like the perfect cat for me, a ragdoll in sudden need of re-homing. My disappointment at not getting her clarified that I did want a cat in my life, and after an unsuccessful visit to a local shelter where the cat I went to meet first threw up at my feet then hid so I really could not get to know him, I got lucky with some help from Cat Rescue Maritimes . . . and here I am, and here we are.

I admit I do feel somewhat overwhelmed at the moment, both at the change to my routines and by my new responsibilities. Also, pet stores have a bewildering array of options now, and the online cat-care debates are already making me crazy. The sleep deprivation definitely adds to this! (Don’t worry: I have set up an appointment with a vet and will try to follow only evidence-based advice rather than random Redditors’.) But Fred is a sweet and incredibly affectionate and trusting little cat. I was cautioned that she would probably just hide somewhere for the first few days, but she immediately explored all the available space, spent a lot of time watching out the windows, then settled on her favorite places to nap. She loves to be held and stroked and purrs like mad when you scritch her head and around her ears—just what Bothwell liked best too. I’m hopeful that we will get better at our nighttime routines. I mean, if she can sleep in this position, surely she can also figure out how to sleep more or less when I do, right? RIGHT?! 🙂

Frogs in a Saucepan: John Ironmonger, ‘The Wager and the Bear’

Rohan Maitzen5 Comments
We are frogs in a saucepan. All of us. We never noticed the water getting warmer and warmer. And now it’s almost too late to jump out. We tolerate the slow erosion of our climate the way a frog in a pan tolerates the rising heat. This year, we lose one percent of our coral reefs. Never mind. We can live with that. Next year, we lose another one percent. Hey. Never mind. And then another. And another. And in a hundred years they’re gone and we never noticed it happening.
“Frogs are smarter than we imagine,” John Ironmonger reveals in the notes at the end of his novel The Wager and the Bear, “and will escape from the saucepan if they can.” Frogs, that is, are smarter than we are. After all, not only can they not be blamed for starting the fire or putting the pot on to boil in the first place, but given a chance, they overcome their inertia. We, in contrast, just keep denying either that there’s a problem or that we can do anything about it. By “we” I don’t mean each of us individually, of course. I mean society, nations, governments, humanity collectively. Lots of people keep trying to make better choices, but our individual efforts (recycling! giving up plastic straws! taking shorter showers!) feel increasingly pointless in the absence of the kind of massive reforms that can happen only with total commitment from the people in power across the globe. How hot will our pot have to get before enough people agree that it’s intolerable? I’m writing this with Halifax under a heat warning; it’s worse elsewhere and it’s only June. And, as Ironmonger’s protagonist Tom Horsmith explains angrily to a political operative accusing him of pessimism, it’s not as if we only just learned about the looming climate crisis:

We’ve known about global warming for decades. The first COP conference was in 1995, for God’s sake. Way before I was born. Al Gore made a big deal about it in 2006. Remember him? . . . We’re on a rowing boat heading towards a massive waterfall, and the people in the front of the boat are yelling for us to stop, but the people rowing the boat are all facing backwards, and they can’t see the falls.

For both principled and personal reasons, Tom is determined to fight as hard as he can for change, but even he can’t help but wonder if it’s worth it:

And if all the people who give a shit about the planet manage to change anything, maybe they’ll get us all to slow the climate collapse down by ten years or so. But what’s the point of that? If humanity hangs on, it will be a miserable shitty existence for the next hundred thousand generations. What does ten years matter either way?

The Wager and the Bear is not, thankfully, just speeches or rants of this kind strung together, and Tom is more than a device to deliver this kind of bad news. The instigation for the novel’s plot is an encounter in a pub between Tom and another (better off, less popular) resident of his Cornish town, Monty Causley, who has become an MP. They get into an argument about climate change in which Tom shows up Monty’s ignorance. “You shouldn’t try to argue if you don’t understand the science,” Tom concludes—or should have concluded, except that he has been drinking and is enjoying the appreciative audience. So he bets Monty that in 50 years he won’t be able to sit in his front room without drowning. Riled up, Monty counters with a “real wager”: in 50 years, either he will sit for an hour in his front room at high tide and drown . . . or Tom must “walk into the sea and drown.” It’s a ridiculous wager, but as happens these days, it is captured on video and goes viral. As a result, Tom and Monty’s lives are linked in various ways over the years until (and this is not a spoiler, as it’s on the back cover!) they end up on “an iceberg with a ravenous polar bear”—and even this is not quite the end of their adventures! Ironmonger’s challenge is to sustain the drama and humanize his characters while keeping the novel’s underlying polemic vivid and urgent. This is really what interested me the most about the novel, and one of the reasons I was curious to read it: I think Ironmonger was trying to create what I might call a “condition of the planet” novel, akin to the 19thC “condition of England” novels I have read and taught so often. He even uses some of the same tools as Dickens and Gaskell: melodrama, coincidence, suspense, symbolism (yes, it’s an actual polar bear, but what ensues when it joins our antagonists on their floating ice carries more than literal resonance, I thought). Where Gaskell’s task was to help her middle-class readers really grasp the nature of urban poverty, Ironmonger’s is to make us frogs feel the heat and think about the costs, especially to the not-us. He lavishes his attention (and his best writing) on the ice-world of the Arctic:

It was a seascape of unimaginable, ethereal beauty. The flat ocean was a patchwork of swirling blues, some areas dark, and some pale, and some almost green, or turquoise, as if an artist had splashed every blue from a watercolour paintbox onto a pure white canvas, and crusted the surface with pack ice. The backdrop was the great precipice of the glacier, and behind it, a horizon of white mountains fading into a clear blue sky. Only the cracks and pops of the glacier disturbed the majestic solitude of it.

When I commented on Bluesky that The Wager and the Bear had left me feeling bleak, Ironmonger himself showed up in my mentions and said he was sorry about that. I don’t think he should be. I have talked so often with my students about the value of dissatisfaction. What is there left for us to do at the end of Pride and Prejudice? But the end of Middlemarch leaves us asking precisely Dorothea’s question: what can we do, what should we do? It is dispiriting to know that we aren’t making and probably won’t make the kinds of decisions that could cool things down. We seem condemned to boil in a pot and on a stove of our own making. Ironmonger does leave us with a better vision, though, or a mission statement:

We owe this to our children. To our grandchildren. To protect the meadows, the woodlands, the jungles, the savannahs, the oceans, and the ice caps. We owe our children the pristine world we were given. It is our duty. It should be right at the top of every action list we write. It should also be our joy.

“Dear reader!” exclaims Dickens at the end of his most overtly didactic novel, Hard Times; “It rests with you and me, whether, in our two fields of action, similar things shall be or not.  Let them be!” The Wager and the Bear is a good read—suspenseful, emotional, neatly structured in episodes that carry us across generations—but the Victorianist in me especially appreciated its unabashed sense of purpose.

Moving Away: Carys Davies, Clear

Rohan Maitzen2 Comments

Into her mind a picture came of this vast emptying-out—a long, gray, and never-ending procession of tiny figures snaking their way through the country. She saw them moving away with quiet resignation, leading animals and small children, carrying tools and furniture and differently sized bundles, and when at last they disappeared she saw the low houses they’d left behind, roofless hearths open to the rain and the wind and the ghosts of the departed while sheep nosed between the stonework, quietly grazing.

I really liked Clear. It’s a slight book in a way, not very long, not very dense. The small personal story it tells, though, is like the visible tip of an iceberg, three people whose options and choices are very much functions of much larger social contexts. Davies’s author’s note explains that the novel takes place in 1843, during the “Great Disruption” that led to the formation of the Free Church of Scotland and also during the ongoing “Clearances,” during which landlords removed tenant farmers, driving them off the land to clear it for more profitable uses—profitable, that is, to the landlords, but with devastating consequences for those displaced from their homes and their ways of life.

The plot of Clear is very simple: John Ferguson, part of the new Free Church, is having trouble making ends meet so his brother-in-law pulls some strings and John is assigned to do a bit of work for a local landowner, traveling to a remote island to “clear” it of its one remaining inhabitant, a man named Ivar. We move between John’s point of view and Ivar’s, getting to know John and learning about Ivar’s solitary but full life. We see the two men’s stories converge: John falls off a cliff soon after landing, and Ivar discovers him and nurses him back to health. Ivar does not suspect the real reason for John’s visit; John does not have the words to tell him even if he wanted to, which he doesn’t.

Davies gives a lot of attention to the importance of language, first as a barrier and then, as John laboriously gains some ability to speak Ivar’s language (a version, Davies’s note explains, of “Norn,” which died out in most areas after the Shetlands passed from Danish to Scottish control), a means of halting but profound understanding. “Before the arrival of John Ferguson,” Ivar reflects,

he’d never really thought of the things he saw or heard or touched or felt as words . . . He wondered . . . if there was a word in John Ferguson’s language for the excitement he felt when he ran his finger down the line between the two columns of words, which seemed to him to connect their lives in the strongest possible way—words for ‘milk’ and ‘stream’ and the flightless blue-winged beetle that lived in the hill pasture; words for ‘halibut’ and ‘byre’ and the overhand knot he used in the cow’s tether; words for ‘house’ and ‘butter,’ for ‘heather’ and ‘whey,’ for ‘sea wrack’ and ‘chicken.’

It was as if he’d never fully understood his solitude until now—as if, with the arrival of John Ferguson, he had been turned into something he’d never been or hadn’t been for a long time: part brother and part sister, part son and part daughter, part mother and part father, part husband and part wife.

Those last words have a bit more significance than they might initially seem to when they land just as part of that long list of vocabulary. By the end of Clear John and Ivar, and then John and Ivar and John’s wife Mary (who has bravely come to find him, worried that he has been sent unknowingly into a more dangerous situation than he suspected) have to rethink their relationships, their commitments—but I will leave the details to be discovered.

There was a moment in the novel when I thought Davies had given in to melodrama—a gunshot rings out, and I thought . . . well, I won’t say what I thought, again so that you can discover the moment for yourself if you want to. If things had gone the way it seemed at first, it would have cheapened the novel, which I think finds its beauty in its simplicity, which is not to say it ignores complexity, just that it takes us through its chosen scenario with a kind of quiet well suited to its people and its setting. Overall Clear reminded me of Emma Donoghue’s Haven, which is also about remoteness, isolation, essentials. Haven is a plottier novel, but both books trade in the imaginative appeal of clearing away the noise and demands and expectations of an uncongenial modernity. At the same time, neither novel romanticizes its setting. In both, it’s togetherness that leads to grace, if any such as possible.

No Good Way: Yiyun Li, Things In Nature Merely Grow

Rohan Maitzen5 Comments

There is no good way to say this—when the police arrive, they inevitably preface the bad news with that sentence, as though their presence had not been ominous enough . . .

There is no good way to state these facts, which must be acknowledged before I go on with this book. My husband and I had two children and lost them both . . .

I wrote a little bit about Yiyun Li’s Where Reasons End, first in 2019, when I could only imagine, and again in 2022, when I no longer had to. I didn’t actually say much myself either time. “Some books,” I said in 2019, “are hard to write about. Imagine how hard this one was to write.”

When I reread it, it was because I was still looking for and sometimes finding comfort in what seemed like the right words. I didn’t bring my critical self to the book, and I can’t bring it to Things In Nature Merely Grow either. Well, I probably could, but I don’t want to: sometimes, what I want from words is to let them do to the work. I appreciate the work Li has done with her words here, again. Her experience is not exactly my own: she is herself; her sons are themselves; she has lost them both. Loss may be universal but every loss is intensely specific. There are also ways in which I don’t actually find Li that congenial a writer, or a thinker. We are not the same person, the same kind of person, at all, I don’t think.

Still, she says things in this hard, painful, honest book that I completely understood and was glad to have articulated. Some of them are things that, for various reasons, I have not been able to say, or not wanted to say, myself. It turns out that there are good ways to say them: unadorned, unapologetic.

As before, then, excerpts.

1.

I did not feel any anger when Vincent died—not at him, not at life either. But I did feel baffled and wounded by life. That a mother could do all things humanly possible and sensible for a child but still could not keep him alive—this was the fact that I would have to live with, I thought, every single day, for the rest of my life. It was Vincent’s death that made me begin to use that phrase, “every single day, for the rest of my life.”

2.

I don’t want an end point to my sorrow. The death of a child is not a heat wave or a snowstorm, nor an obstacle race to rush through and win, nor an acute or chronic illness to recover from. What is grief but a word, a shortcut, a simplification of something much larger than that word?

Thinking about my children is like air, like time. Thinking about them will only end when I reach the end of my life.

The only passage in which grief appears in its truest meaning is from King John, when Constance speaks eloquently of a grief that is called madness by others in the play.

Grief fills the room up of my absent child,
Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me,
Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words,
Remembers of all his gracious parts,
Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form:
Then, I have I reason to be fond of grief?

3.

That a mother can do all things humanly possible for a child, and yet she can never understand the incommunicable vastness and strangeness of the world felt by that child; that a mother cannot make the world just a little more welcoming so the child feels less alone; that a mother cannot keep that child alive—these are facts I have to live with now, every single day, for the rest of my life.

4.

We like to set our hearts on a finish line, hoping to take the right actions so that we can reach that finish line fast and with the least hassle and pain. Perhaps this urge reflects a desire to mark time in a different way: to harness time for gain. And yet in life, time cannot be harnessed.

Marking time after a child’s death is not about overcoming grief or coming out of a dark tunnel—all those bad words sound to me as though bereaved parents are expected to put in a period of hard mental work and then clap their hands and say, I’m no longer heartbroken for my dead child, and I’m one of you normal people again, so now we can go on living as though nothing had happened and you don’t have to feel awkward around me.

How often we return to the problem of time, as we go on living, eventually learning—at whatever cost—to seem “normal” again. (“Children die,” Li repeats throughout the book, “and parents go on living—this too is a fact that defies all adjectives.”) “Until the end of time” is also what A. S. Byatt said about her son: “He is dead . . . that will go on and on till the end of time.”