BITTER HARVEST
Novel rooted in real-life tragedies of fashion industry
A Harvest of Thorns Corban Addison HarperCollins
“It’s possible that the sweater I’m wearing right now was made by a slave. My shirt could have been made in a sweatshop by a young teenager working 84-hour weeks. My pants could have been made by a girl whose manager raped her. My shoes might have been made in a factory about to collapse or erupt into flames.”
That’s novelist Corban Addison addressing his readers in an afterword to his explosive new novel, A Harvest of Thorns. And he isn’t indulging in exaggeration here. In the course of 354 meticulously researched pages, he lifts the lid off the seamier recesses of the international fashion industry.
Now that the book is out — published in Canada by HarperCollins — he still feels anger at what his research revealed.
“I suspect you sense my passion coming out at certain points in this book,” says Addison, who made his first impact with A Walk Across the Sun, an international bestseller about human trafficking.
“Global injustice deeply enrages me, especially when I see it in the form of the rich and the powerful taking advantage of the poor and weak.”
It was those concerns that brought him to Bangladesh and to a meeting with survivors of a catastrophic fire that broke out at the Tazreen Fashions Factory in 2012. It was an eight-storey building with no fire escapes, no emergency exits and some 1600 employees working overtime to fulfil last-minute orders that would eventually travel through the supply chain to major U.S. retailers. At least 117 workers died that night, although many other bodies remained unclaimed, and more than 200 were injured.
“I’ve now written four books,” the 37-year-old human rights lawyer says from his home in Virginia, “and each time I feel that I feel like I’ve become a custodian in a sense of people’s stories and the emotions that go along with them.”
But he was particularly affected by the stories from the women who survived the Tazreen disaster.
“I met with them in a room in this rabid warren of lanes. There were about 10 of them and they sat down on the bed which was basically the size of the room. All of them were permanently disabled from the injuries they sustained jumping from windows. Some fell from dizzying heights, like 60 or 70 feet up. They should have died and would have if they hadn’t fallen through roofs or bounced off bodies already on the ground. Some had sustained traumatic brain injuries.”
One pathetic victim suffered recurring spells that made her feel as though her head were boiling. “And she had one of those spells right in front of me,” Addison says.
Addison begins his novel with a similar fictional disaster. “My prologue was taken directly from these Tazreen victims, so although I changed little details and made this a fictional factory, it was still their story, taken from the mouths of the women I met.”
Addison’s primary target is corporate malfeasance in the highest places, and he raises disturbing questions about the real history of those items of clothing we purchase from our favourite retailer. Too often, he warns, they arrive in North America by way of a corrupt supply chain that exploits the poor and breaks the law. And his novel charges that, in an era of globalization and inadequate enforcement internationally, wilful corporate blindness and a readiness to coverup the truth are too often the norm.
So ultimately, the novel becomes a sizzling corporate thriller that, among other things, examines the morality of big-business damage- control methods aimed only at keeping shareholders happy. It focuses on two protagonists.
One is Cameron Alexander, general counsel for Presto, America’s most powerful retail chain, and a man who — in Addison’s words — is “custodian of the company’s reputation.” When a photo flashes around the world of a gravely injured Bangladeshi child with a Presto-labelled garment covering her face, Cameron goes into full spin — only to encounter revelations that test his own moral conscience.
The other key character is Joshua Griswold, a disgraced former journalist who sees professional and personal redemption in his move to expose corporate chicanery from the lowest field manager to Presto’s board of directors.
Addison says it’s easy for big business to plead ignorance about what’s happening at the other end of a supply chain because of globalization’s nature.
“Everything in our shops is just there for us, waiting for us to purchase it, and a lot of it is incredibly inexpensive because businesses can buy items for less than ever before. And that’s because of these supply chains that are like an overgrown garden that literally circumnavigates the earth.”
But the supply-chain system can also spawn corruption and humanrights abuses.
“This story taught me the limits of the law in a way that no other story has,” Addison says. “The global supply chains are basically an independent republic that operates outside of any legal strictures.” So, as he points out in his book, the chances of holding a company like Presto accountable for events thousands of miles away are dubious — unless a miracle occurs.
“In the political environment of today, it seems like we’re just giving business a free pass,” Addison says. “So the purpose of the book really is to unpeel the onion. We’re all complicit without knowing it, and my hope is that the book will take the layers off the onion, and expose the core — but not at the expense of the poor. My hope is that the book really expose to consumers what’s really going on.”
Nevertheless, Addison has hopes for a better future.
“Right now, among young consumers, there is a level of social consciousness that generally doesn’t exist among older consumers. It’s a generational thing. So right now there’s a shift going on that I think will absolutely mature over the next 10 to 20 years.”
I suspect you sense my passion coming out at certain points in this book.