Bog Queen Review by Anna North – A Tale That Could Go Deeper | imaginary

ANa North’s fourth book, Queen of the Swamp, is a braided novel. First, “a colony of algae” speaks — or rather, it doesn’t speak, but “if this colony could tell its life story,” here is some of what it could say. Then we have Agnes in 2018, an American, tall, eccentric, a forensic scientist and unsure about everything else, including much of life in England. And then, in the first person, there’s an Iron Age teenage girl, the priestess of her village, heading toward a Roman town with her brother Eso and her boyfriend Crabbe: “I’d been a priestess for two seasons at that point and everyone said I was doing pretty good.”

Agnes did a postdoctoral fellowship in Manchester, where she was called to discover a body in a peat bog at Ludlow. The story brings to light the story of Lindow Man, who was found by peat pickers in a bog near Wilmslow in 1984. In this novel, Ludlow is a town where the steel mill “closed down, leaving nothing but”[a] A few shops, Tesco and Pizza Express.” It’s the ‘Gateway to the North’ and a bus ride from Manchester. Novelists may of course invent time and place as they see fit, but it is strange to borrow the location of a bourgeois town belonging to Manchester and give it the name of a pretty medieval market town in Wells Marsh, with a history that belongs to neither.

Agnes’s poor social skills are balanced with enjoyment in her academic major, allowing her to see immediately that this body is 2,000 years old and that the young woman has lived for weeks beyond her obvious injuries. Her knowledge and instinct for individual bodies, living and dead, is the strongest element of this uneven novel. She can read the way people move and stay still in ways she can’t read voices and faces, and she cares about particular lives in ways she doesn’t care about ecology or archaeology in general.

People gather after the discovery of the body: environmentalists who want to save the swamp from developers, the niece of a woman whose husband confessed to killing her and dumping the body there 40 years ago, and archaeologists who see a career-making discovery, but Agnes is the only one primarily concerned with the life and death of an ancient girl. Its backstory is well told, and its American setting is as solid as present-day Manchester/Ludlow is wobbly.

Readers who do not have much knowledge of Iron Age archeology and bog bodies will likely find these sections comfortable enough. North constructs and maintains a material world clearly and with close attention to physical experiences of light, landscape, and textiles. The scene in which the young priest encounters some of the power and goods of the Roman Empire is unforgettable. But even from a position of amateur enthusiasm rather than experience, I am distracted by the oddities of this world: obviously the modern shame of pregnancy outside of “marriage”; Archaeologists speculate that those who placed the bodies in the swamp intended to find them later, while there is widespread evidence that many were taken from swamps, kept inside and returned several times over centuries. There is always an interesting question about the representation of historical and prehistoric discourse and worldview, and there is no right answer, but North’s solutions are unthinkably modern in ways that Sarah Hall’s, for example, are not.

The extent to which fiction can express or represent the lives of plants and animals is of interest to many contemporary writers whose ideas include the ecological crisis. The danger is in anthropomorphism, and the disclaimer at the top of each section that “the algae colony does not” imagine/tell/remember anything it will do next, is not enough to avoid the error. North’s mossy chorus is little more than a projection of human environmental anxiety, in the same way that her Iron Age story does not stray far from the assumptions and traditions of twenty-first-century America, and her mixture of English cities and towns does not acknowledge the particularities of place and time. The Bog Queen can be beautifully bizarre, and sometimes it is, but overall, the imagination and research doesn’t go far enough.