Annie Dillard: The Living

I’ve been a fan of Annie Dillard’s writing for many years now and, if I was forced, I would probably have to say that ‘Pilgrim at Tinker Creek’ would be in my top three books. I bought a first edition of her only novel, The Living, in the Strand Bookshop on Broadway in NYC several years ago and looked forward to getting to it. But having started it two or three times I never really indulged it’s slow, melancholy beginnings. So when I picked it up again a couple of weeks ago, I set my face to finish it. I confess that I worked at it for about 100 pages without truly losing myself, but it proved to be a slow burner. By the time 200 pages were gone I was utterly bewitched.

It’s an unusual book, written in the prose style of a 19th century novel and meticulously researched. There is minimal dialogue, but her descriptive powers are evidenced all over the book.

The book is an epic of local proportions, concentrating on the settlement of the Pacific Northwest by the European pioneers. To say it was a tough life is too simple; it was the kind of living that brought them into constant contact with death and this is the core of the book.

To truly appreciate life, a person must first be reconciled to mortality. In life one is constantly surrounded by death, and one either dies in its shadows, or learns to live. Thus did Clare Fishburn learn to understand the richness of his living breath once he became aware of how fragile it was. The revelation of this to him is one of the luminous passages of the book.

It is balanced beautifully by the death of his mother who, in the slow run in to the eventually embrace of her end, numbers the richness of her life in the ordinariness of it all. The community celebration at the launch of a boat. The relationship with the Lummi and Nooksack tribes of the area are life affirming. Through it all the feebleness of human life is mocked by the sheer immensity of the surrounding forests and mountains, and here Dillard excels. How many ways can a writer describe a tree? Well she exceeds it and the sections where she paints pictures of the bizarre and unusual will be so familiar to those who read what she writes.

In places there are echoes of John Steinbeck’s ‘East of Eden’ as the poor and powerless live at the mercy of the rich and their markets. Melancholy Minta Honer employs hundreds of drifters to pick her crops so that, as Hugh informs her,

‘Down at the fields now every last old white berry has its own personal picker’. Nevertheless she employed those who came.

Those first 100 or so pages are filled with tragic deaths, which seem at odds with a book titled ‘The Living’. But they make sense by the end. So many deaths are witnessed by sad and intense Hugh Honer, whose story closes the book as he learns, in the face of all the death to fling himself loose into the stars. Simply beautiful.

Full of colossal kindnesses and deep cruelties the book pulls no punches in presenting life in its reality and variety. The question of the book comes from the mouth of Vinnie Fishburn, beloved of Hugh,

‘How was it possible to endure the losses one accumulated just by living?’