St Agnes' Stand, by Thomas Eidson

As a bookseller, I read an awful of lot of children’s books, especially young adult titles, and when I do read adult books they tend to be recent releases. This is great, and I read these books because I want to read them, but it does mean that I miss a lot of good stuff that has been around for longer. Like St Agnes’ Stand, a book I most certainly wouldn’t have looked at twice had it not been for a recommendation by my cousin, someone who is so extremely well read that perusing her bookshelves can have the effect of making me feel very small. Ironically, really, my role as a bookseller should be to introduce readers to these rarer, lesser publicized titles, to champion the books that get tucked away into corners, but it’s so easy to become swept up by the marketing machine that I had almost forgotten. So, thank goodness for my cousin C and her fascination, in particular, for the literature of the American West.

Nat Swanson is a young man with a dream: a piece of Californian land. He has the deed in his pocket and a plan in his head, but already things are going awry: in the last town he stopped in, he got into a fight and killed a man. Pursued across the desert by the man’s friends, can he reach California before they catch him? But when he comes across a band of Apache holding up a wagon trail he’s haunted by the face he sees hiding there, and something makes him turn back to help. What he finds is not what he expected: three nuns and seven small children desperate for their lives. For the next five days, Swanson and Sister St Agnes must face their personal demons, overcome loss and injury, and struggle against drought and starvation while the Apaches close in around them.

Thomas Eidson’s language is simple and bold, and he tells his story through a series of different perspectives: Swanson, Sister St Agnes, and the Apache warrior Locan. St Agnes is adamant that God sent Swanson to save them, and she and her companions do seem strangely blessed despite their circumstances, but Swanson is determined – mostly – that it was just chance; chance that he was passing by and chance that made him turn around to help. Locan, however, as Swanson picks off his men, sees this luck as an evil magic created by the strange black-clad women and, while his compatriots wish to cut their losses and leave, he sees that if they follow that path his reputation will be forever lost – the only way to restore it will be to destroy the white man and the black-clad women.

I was a little wary, to begin with, with the depiction of the Apache as a group of blood-lusting warriors who, as St Agnes says, “know no better”. However, I assume that Eidson has based their aspects on historical behaviors by the Apache. What is not explained is exactly why the Apache raided the nuns’ wagon party to begin with. Once things begin to go wrong for them, it becomes a matter of pride and honor for Locan to see things through to their conclusion. That I understand. But what was the original purpose? Just theft?

Of course, all of mankind is entirely capable of carrying out atrocities equal to and worse than Locan and his compatriots. What is frustrating in traditional Westerns is that cultures are frequently painted in a right/wrong, white/black way – white good, everyone else bad. Eidson treads a difficult line here, but his intention is not to dispel such myths, rather to step authentically into the minds and opinions of his characters, the people of the time in which he is writing, and tell a story. This he does with aplomb. Furthermore, although he dabbles in the discussion of God and faith, by telling the majority of this aspect of the story from the mostly agnostic Swanson, Eidson avoids making it into an agenda. It is a deft and accomplished piece of storytelling, and certainly makes me want to read more about this era and/or setting. Cormac McCarthy’s The Border Trilogy has been on my list of must-reads for a while, and I think perhaps it’s time I brought it the top, and I’ll be thinking more about reading and recommending those rarer seeds, books that are as evocative and unusual as St Agnes' Stand.

Things We Didn't See Coming, by Steven Amsterdam

Things We Didn’t See Coming follows a nameless narrator as he navigates his way through the 21st century. It begins on the eve of the millenium, the narrator a nine-year-old boy torn between his father, who is panicking and paranoid about the Y2K bug, and his mother, who is trying to maintain a semblance of normality. Chapter by chapter, the story moves through the following thirty or so years, jumping about five years at a time, as he encounters an increasingly devastated world.

The overall feeling I took away with me after finishing Steven Amsterdam’s debut was one of bleakness. The chapters are peopled with floods and drought, plagues and cancer, medical advancements and societal deterioration. Nevertheless, the blurb on my copy describes it as mesmerising, and this is a description I would have to agree with. I had to keep reading to find out what was going to happen next - would he find peace and contentment? Would he be able to stop moving,? Would the world sort itself out? Would I ever learn the bigger picture?

Ultimately the bigger picture is not revealed. This is one man’s story and, as thus, it is highly biased toward his lone perspective. Consequently, there is never a clear outline of the state of the country or its government, or an explanation of why the narrator is caught up in these devastating events. Only the ‘how’ as he sees it is covered: its the way of the world he is living in, its impossible to escape, and he is simply trying to find the best way to survive. I can only assume the ‘why’ is that this is a world racked by climate change.

Even the ending is ambiguous and left open to interpretation. It’s strange that sometimes, when reviewing books that I didn’t massively enjoy, thinking about how they are put together, I find myself awed by the author’s approach, their technique and story building. Although I certainly didn’t dislike Things We Didn’t See Coming, it was so overwhelmingly bleak that I couldn’t really categorise it as an enjoyable reading experience. But: it is well written and is interesting and has made me think. From a writer’s perspective I find it has a lot of value.

This is a book that has been likened to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (which is, incidentally, incredible), and I can see the link: a desolate world with little to hope for. Yet somehow The Road leaves you with a feeling of hope, and the love between the man and his child is heartbreakingly beautiful and pure. Because these positive emotions are stronger, so the feelings of tension and danger and anticipation are stronger. Things We Didn’t See Coming doesn’t quite manage to strike the same line - even though the world still functions (in The Road it does not), it is more depressing. Our narrator seems permanently lonely and struggling, even when he has a partner. The only hope I have is that the other citizens of the narrator’s world have a more hopeful and love-filled tale to tell.

Things We Didn’t See Coming is certainly one to add to anyone’s wish-list of apocalyptic fiction. As someone who is fairly obsessed with this particular genre, as well an interest in environmental catastrophe, I am left thinking of a small speech the narrator’s father makes in the opening chapter. Although he is referring to Y2K, its a speech that, to me, resonates very strongly when put in the context of climate change: “This whole thing is symbolic, symbolic of a system that’s hopelessly shortsighted, a system that twenty, thirty years ago couldn’t imagine a time when we might be starting a new century. That’s how limited an animal we are... We are arrogant, stupid, we lack humility in the face of centuries and centuries of time before us... What we know now is that we didn’t think enough. We know we aren’t careful enough and that’s about all we know.” (pg. 22-23) Should we be afraid?