San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
A postapocalyptic, dreamlike California
“Bewilderment” was a word I thought a lot about while reading Bay Area native Sylvia Linsteadt’s folkloric fantasy novel, “Tatterdemalion,” both because it — this is not an insult — bewildered me, and also because the novel takes place in California’s postapocalyptic wilderness. My reading experience and the subject matter seemed curiously related, so I looked the word up: To bewilder, in its archaic form, means “to thoroughly lead astray” or “lead into the wilds.”
The wilds of “Tatterdemalion” are daunting to summarize, but I shall forge ahead: A gifted young boy, Poppy, travels from the tattered remnants of West Marin to the Sierra Nevada with a wheeled elephant creature named Lyboobov, seeking his origins and the cause of their fallen world. A juniper tree envelops Poppy, and ghostly figures begin to relay mythic stories of the centuries following the world’s environmental collapse.
These stories are based on paintings by Rima Staines, an English artist whose work preceded Linsteadt’s writing and served as the novel’s inspiration and guiding force. It’s highly unusual in the publishing industry for visuals to come before story, but high unusualness is part of Linsteadt’s purpose. In the stories Poppy hears, women become owls and hands become wheels; children are born of buckeye trees and have spiders for dads; the wild wilderness returns after centuries of repression.
“We arrived at a place of despair,” Rose the fiddler confides, when “our dreams didn’t
By Sylvia Linsteadt (with paintings by Rima Staines) (Unbound; 192 pages; $17.95)
These stories are based on paintings by Rima Staines, an English artist whose work preceded Sylvia Linsteadt’s writing and served as the novel’s inspiration and guiding force.
fit at the edges the way the straight highways, the power plants, the oil refineries, cellphone boxes, stories printed in newspapers (did).”
The earnest, often touching interlocking vignettes that Poppy absorbs in the juniper generally take place over 300 years — from roughly the present to 2315 — which spans the fall of the civilization, the casting out and punishment of the imagined Other, something called the Fool’s Revolt, and the rise of wiser, often magical Wild Folk. It’s a highimmersion narrative, in worldbuilding speak, so there’s not much context for this history outside of characters’ firsthand experiences. The moral of these fables — as with traditional folklore and fairy tales, there’s not a ton of ambiguity herein — is that humans need to rewild themselves, both for their own sake and the sake of the planet.
Linsteadt’s nostalgia for a civilizationless past and imagined future, her longing for primordial wilderness, is frequently found among wilderness advocates. For good reason, sometimes.
“People tell themselves stories of what they are meant to see. … They see their own stories, and not the world,” says Ffion the witch. “Not the rage of a fox, dead and skinned in the road, rotting. Not the grief of whales as one by one they died until they were gone.”
Yet nostalgia has always been a tricky business, especially in America, and there’s a logical fallacy at the core of “Tatterdemalion’s” yearning. Staines has said her paintings are rooted in Old European mythology, yet the novel takes place in a future California. When Poppy looks to the longago past, then, to imagine a better future, he is looking not to the Karok, Maidu, Cahuilleno, Mojave, Yokuts, Pomo, Paiute and Modoc and other native peoples, but to European bodies and European myth. However earnest this project in its intention, its impact is complicated by this essentially colonialist maneuver.
Which in fact has been a problem for centuries among white wilderness advocates. Take John Muir, who helped expel native peoples from places like Yosemite Valley so that white folks could bask in the “pristine wilderness” of the National Park System. The Ahwahnechee who lived there, Muir wrote, “seemed to have no right place in the landscape.” Oof. All I’m saying is, erasure takes many forms. If we see our own stories, and not the world, as Ffion the witch tells us, we better be extra careful about what stories we tell, and how we tell them.