Tonight's diary is a bit different. Instead of writing about an entire novel, the focus is on just one part. The part does feature later in the book, but it can stand alone on its own. And, tonight there are spoilers. Because I want to work through the implications of what happens, and want to know what you think.
Daniel Mason's North Woods is one of the most highly regarded novels published last year. It chronicles hundreds of years in the life of a property, the housing that is built on it, the plants that thrive there, the animals and insects who call it home, and the people who live there for a time.
The first to build a cabin on the site are a young couple in love and on the run. Many important parts of life are showcased throughout the different stories of the various people who come afterward. But love remains a recurring thread. One family's story features many ways to love.
It begins when Major Osgood, after fighting in the French and Indian War, seeks to reset his life. Traveling through the countryside, he finds a single apple tree that produces the most remarkable fruit. Since the reader knows the origins of that tree, it is not surprising that this tree is special. He buys the abandoned land, builds a big house, does hundreds of grafts to plant more apple trees, and brings his two young daughters to their new home.
Osgood is mad for apples in general and this variety in particular. It controls his life. He even has to get past his family's attempt to show him he's crazy, and their attempt to cure him by having him sniff some putrid stuff that overpowers them.
The girls, Mary and Alice, are as alike as can be in looks. But they all know there is an extra spark to Alice that Mary does not have. And as the girls grow up on the farm, Mary becomes the one who works hardest, especially in the orchard. Alice is the one who loves the beauty in nature, especially a grove up on the hill.
The farm seemed smaller as she [Alice] grew older, and there were times when she needed to escape. On the hottest days, she lay on a bed of moss in the darkness of Broceliande. Ferns as high as ostrich feathers waved above patches of partridgeberry. She brought her fife and Fifer's Companion, but mostly she was silent. Birds sang from the branches. The moss was cool and soft, and sometimes she would open her blouse and lie against it, or lift her skirts, to feel it against her legs. Her thoughts would wander, to the young men and women she'd met over the years, and she wondered how they passed their days. if they also felt so cold in the winter and so listless in the heat.
Mary is definitely cut from another cloth.
And she preferred to work, loved work, loved her father's praise for her strength and mind for business, the assiduous guard she took against the waxwings who came to eat the apple blossoms, marching through the orchard with a musket full of shot.
The girls spend part of their childhood being "educated" by the neighboring pastor. But they learn more from the pastor's motherless son. But that's just an episode in their lives, and the orchard remains the most important part of their life. This continues when their father goes to fight in the Revolutionary War. He remains a loyalist, and the girls have to work hard to overcome the neighbors' view of his choice. Which they do.
The sisters spend their lives in harmony. Until men notice Alice, and she notices them. She spends one lovely, innocent afternoon with a potter and cannot wait to see him again. But Mary figures it out, accompanies her to the potter's shop and makes sure they will never, ever get together. Others are shut down over the years.
Then, just when it seems they are too old for love, George comes back to the neighborhood. He wants to court Alice, and he wants to turn the extra apples into cider. Alice finally spends the night with a man, a good night.
Mary is livid at Alice being interested in a man and breaking from her. She also is beyond enraged that George wants to use their precious apples for cider.
Spoilers coming:
When Alice returns from her night of passion, Mary is in the orchard chopping down trees. She will not let them be used for cider. When Alice tries to physically stop her, Mary cuts her down with the axe.
Did she kill her sister out of jealousy? Because she could have her own life with a man? Or was it because of the apples? Did she love them more than anything?
It's easy to lean toward love for her sister, although it is a jealous love. After the only time they attend a country dance, there is a fierce storm in the night. Afterward
When at last Alice drifted off, Mary sat up in bed and looked down upon her sister's sleeping form, framed perfectly within the glowing rectangle, and thought how she had everything she'd ever need.
It is made clear that Mary does not hate her sister. When a letter arrives from George, who chickens out of a new life and leaves, she is glad she saved Alice from knowing this. Just as the potter died the winter after Alice's afternoon with him, there wasn't going to be a happy ever after.
Mary cannot bear to bury her sister. She pulls a Norman Bates for the rest of her life. When it's apparent she is dying, she buries herself and her sister's body in a space under a trapdoor in the cellar. It's not their last appearance in the novel.
My first impression was that Mary couldn't bear to be alone, and so she killed Alice out of selfishness. But with the hints of the importance of letting nature thrive, I wonder if saving the apples, so they could be used for themselves and not turned into a by-product, really was Mary's reason. Her entire existence was the orchard and her sister, so it is hard to say which mattered most to her.
That an author would pose such a choice, and it's not even the over-arching story of an entire novel on its own, shows the strength in Mason's North Woods. There is a lot going on in the book, in stories told in many ways. I can't say it coalesces into one story, but I can say that the various parts are fascinating.
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