"First a colony of moss speaks or rather, does not speak, but if such a colony could tell the story of its life, here's some of what it might say. Then we have Agnes in 2018, American, tall, awkward, expert in forensic pathology and uncertain about everything else, including much of life in England. And then, in the first person, there is an iron age teenage girl, the druid of her village,"
"Agnes has a post-doctoral fellowship in Manchester, from which she is summoned to the discovery of a body in a peat bog in Ludlow. The story shadows that of Lindow Man, found by peat harvesters in a bog near Wilmslow in 1984. In this novel, Ludlow is a town in which the steel mill has closed down leaving nothing but [a] few shops, a Tesco, a Pizza Express. It's the Gateway to the north and a bus ride from Manchester."
"Agnes's weak social skills are balanced by joy in her academic specialism, which allows her to see immediately both that this body is 2,000 years old and that the young woman lived for weeks after her obvious injuries. Her knowledge and instinct for individual living and dead bodies is the strongest element of this uneven novel. She can read the way people move and keep still in ways she can't read voices and faces, and she cares about particular lives"
The narrative opens with a colony of moss imagining its life, then shifts between three intertwined perspectives: moss, Agnes in 2018, and a first-person Iron Age druidine. Agnes is an American forensic pathology postdoctoral researcher in Manchester who is called to a peat-bog discovery near Ludlow that echoes Lindow Man. The Iron Age voice recounts druidic duty and a journey toward a Roman town. Forensic detail reveals the bog body is about two thousand years old and that the young woman lived for weeks after severe injuries. The prose emphasizes bodily experience, landscape, textiles, and the tensions of social awkwardness and regional dislocation.
Read at www.theguardian.com
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]