“No utopia has ever been described in which any sane man
would on any conditions consent to live, if he could possibly escape.” -- Alexander Gray
While
Gray may be right about the utopias of social engineers, from Plato to Skinner,
I think many of us would be happy to live in the worlds created by imaginative
writers, past and present. As a
boy, I lost myself in King Arthur’s and Robin Hood’s England, Tarzan’s Africa,
Arthur Ransome’s Swallowdale, and many others. C.S. Lewis’s Narnia and J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth came
later and lasted much longer; I still dip into their Otherworlds occasionally.
But
these days I have less interest in dwelling among knights, apes, fauns or hobbits,
and more in imagining plausible communities of ordinary, or not so ordinary,
humans who promise a richer moral and social life than exists in contemporary
America. In my reading over the
past few years I’ve found three such imaginary places, all of which I share
with others as often as possible.
Two are from the frequently underestimated world of mystery writing, and
one from a master of the short story, the novel, the essay, and the lyric poem.
To
start with the detectives, my first recommendation is P.A. Gaus’s Amish
mysteries. Gaus, a college professor
in Ohio’s Amish country (despite Pennsylvania’s greater prominence,
Ohio’s Amish population is equally large), has written seven – and counting –
mysteries in which the pacific world of the Amish is rent by violence, and
three “English” characters (as the Amish call all outsiders), come to their
assistance. The primary one of
these is, oddly enough, a local college professor, ironically, of military
history. (Gaus himself was a
chemist until his recent retirement; obviously no connection there.)
Along with his alter ego, the
irascible local sheriff, and occasional help from a non-Amish pastor and
carpenter, Professor Michael Branden often takes on himself the burden of
protecting those who will not fight either to avenge or to defend themselves.
In one novel, an Amish bishop explains why his people believe so completely in
non-violence: “We are taught that
we are to be harmless as doves. It
means a lot of things, but one thing is that the harm we do is always harmful
to us, if for no other reason than the guilt that we shoulder for it.” Like HBO’s The Newsroom,” some
will find these books “preachy,” but in my view they’re none the worse for
that, and the leaven of crime and mystery can attract even readers who may
slide over the homilies – to their own detriment. (The novels, beginning
with The Blood of the Prodigal, are
published by Plume.)
A more secular Shangri-la can be
found in the woods of southern Quebec, in Louise Penny’s Three Pines, the setting of another ongoing series
featuring Inspector Armande Gamache of the Sureté de Quebec (the Chief
Inspector for the whole Francophone province). Penny has won an extraordinary number of mystery writer
awards, so a lort of people must agree with me.
Three Pines is a hidden gem of a village, with a gourmet bistro, a
bookstore, several practicing artists, a national treasure of a poet, a great
house with a grim history, and, unfortunately, a penchant for attracting
murderers as well as refugees from the urban world.
Penny’s novels delve much deeper into the art of the mystery
novel: Gamache is a French Canadian version of such thoughtful British sleuths
as Inspector Dalgleish and Lord Peter Wimsey (note that they were all created
by women, and none is a muscular, quick-on-the-draw Lothario). His skill is not the ratiocinative brilliance
of Holmes, but an ability to delve deep into human motivation; he always
insists that the strangest crime makes complete sense if seen from the
viewpoint of the killer, and that the roots of crime are often buried far in
the past.
Gamache is also a deeply kind man, giving second chances to junior
officers who have failed and even betrayed him. He serves as a center around whom circle a collection of
complicated characters, especially in Three Pines, which is home, among others,
to a gay couple who own the bistro and the B&B, a former psychologist now
running the bookstore, and Ruth Zardo, a brilliant poet with a heart of – well
something slightly soft – buried beneath geological layers of rage. Penny also has two unusual
characteristics for a series writer – she can allow her characters to change radically
(or reveal totally unexpected layers), and, like David Simon in The Wire and Treme, has not hesitated to shock us with the loss of favorites from
her cast. Every new Penny
therefore, is not only a whodunit, but a who will surprise us and how. (The
first in the series is Still Life;
all are published by Minotaur.)
Wendell Berry’s Port William
Kentucky, like Ohio’s Amish country, is an American enclave in which different
mores and values survive the political and economic distortion that so plagues
most of our world. The key
term in Berry’s vision is “membership.”
In his good society, people understand that they are connected by more
than blood, marriage, proximity, or even friendship. Rather they are connected by a common humanity that appears
sometimes as secular, sometimes as spiritual. As one of the town’s eldest members says, "The way we are, we are members of each other.
All of us. Everything. The difference ain't in who is a member and who is not,
but in who knows it and who don't."
Being
members of each other means many things to Berry’s characters. It means protecting a stranger who is
hurt in a Saturday night brawl; it means helping a young couple purchase a farm
where they had worked for years, but to which they have no legal claim; it
means taking care of a drunken uncle who falls again and again, without ever
hoping that he will change, and it means loving a woman from afar all her life,
just because you believe she deserves to have someone love her.
It
does not mean living in eternal peace and harmony. In and around Port William there are not only town drunks;
there are abusive husbands, greedy landowners, thieves, and even an occasional
murder. Because of course there
are those who don’t know or won’t admit they are members of each other. For the ones who do, however,
there is a deep awareness that we are more than producers and consumers. As an older character says to a
younger, “we’re dealing in goods and services that we didn’t make, that can’t
exist at all except as gifts.
Everything about a place that’s different from its price is a gift. Everything about a man or woman that’s
different from their price is a gift.
The life of a neighborhood is a gift…you’re friends and neighbors, you
work together, and so there’s lots of giving and taking without a price – some that
you don’t remember, some that you never knew about. You don’t send a bill. You don’t, if you can help it, keep
an account. Once the account is
kept and the bill presented, the friendship ends, the neighborhood is
finished.”
That’s
the kind of Shangri-la that just might exist, or be brought into existence for
a time, like an evanescent subatomic particle. I’d like to be there when it happened. I’d like to help make it happen.
(Berry’s Port William
appears and reappears in novels and short stories over the past half century,
and tell about more than a century of the town’s life. His short stories are
collected in That Distant Land; among his several novels my favorite is Jayber
Crow. Most are published by
Counterpoint.)
