Volume 53, Number 13 · August 10, 2006
The View from the Bridge
By Christopher Benfey
Brookland
by Emily Barton
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 478 pp., $25.00
Emily Barton has written two remarkable novels in which advances in technology threaten the delicate equilibrium of a community. In The Testament of Yves Gundron (2000), Barton imagined a pre-industrial society on an island off the coast of Scotland, mysteriously untouched by modern civilization. In the village of Mandragora, 'a man used a sharp stick to dig a hole for each seed, and furrowed his fields by dragging his fingernails through them and picking out each small stone.' Horses died young, asphyxiated when cords around their necks tightened as they pulled heavily laden carts balanced on a single wheel. Then a farmer named Yves Gundron, inspired by a dream in which he himself is dragging a cart, invents a harness, thus ushering in what he calls in his testament 'the coming of the new world.' 'Had I known then what terrors my invention would bring us along with its joys, perhaps I would have allowed the idea to drift off like a thousand other daydreams.' An anthropologist from Boston arrives in Mandragora followed by other inquisitive visitors. 'Our newfound brethren are mad with questions,' Gundron ruefully concludes, 'and everywhere they travel they send beams of light tearing through the countryside and our homes, which brightness strikes terror into my heart. I am done my inventing.'
Review, 3360 words
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