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Anna North’s fourth book, Bog Queen, is a stranded or braided novel. First “a colony of moss” speaks – or rather, does not speak, but “if such a colony could tell the story of its life”, here’s some of what it might say. Then we have Agnes in 2018, American, tall, awkward, expert in forensic pathology and uncertain about everything else, including much of life in England. And then, in the first person, there is an iron age teenage girl, the druid of her village, riding towards a Roman town with her brother Aesu and friend Crab: “I had been druid for two seasons at that point and everyone said I was doing very well.”
Agnes has a post-doctoral fellowship in Manchester, from which she is summoned to the discovery of a body in a peat bog in Ludlow. The story shadows that of Lindow Man, found by peat harvesters in a bog near Wilmslow in 1984. In this novel, “Ludlow” is a town in which “the steel mill has closed down” leaving nothing but “[a] few shops, a Tesco, a 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’s an odd choice to borrow the location of a bourgeois satellite town of Manchester and give it the name of a pretty medieval market town in the Welsh Marches, with a history that belongs to neither.
Agnes’s weak social skills are balanced by joy in her academic specialism, which allows her to see immediately both that this body is 2,000 years old and that the young woman lived for weeks after her obvious injuries. Her knowledge and instinct for individual living and dead bodies is the strongest element of this uneven novel. She can read the way people move and keep still in ways she can’t read voices and faces, and she cares about particular lives in ways she doesn’t care for ecology or archaeology in general.
People pile in after the discovery of the body: environmentalists who want to save the bog from developers, the niece of a woman whose husband confessed to killing her and dumping the body there 40 years ago, archaeologists seeing a career-making find, but Agnes is the only one primarily concerned with one ancient girl’s life and death. Her own backstory is well told, its American setting as solid as the present-day Manchester/Ludlow is wobbly.
It’s likely that readers without much knowledge of iron age archaeology and bog bodies would find those sections comfortable enough. North builds and sustains a material world vividly and with close attention to the bodily experiences of light, landscape and textiles. The scene where the young druid encounters some of the power and goods of the Roman empire is memorable. But even from a position of amateur enthusiasm more than expertise, I’m distracted by oddities in this world: distinctly modern shame at a pregnancy outside “marriage”; archaeologists speculating that those who put the bodies in the bog intended them to be found later, when there is widespread evidence that many were taken from bogs, kept indoors and put back several times over centuries. There’s always an interesting question about the representation of historic and prehistoric speech and worldview, and no correct answer, but North’s solutions are unthinkingly modern in ways that Sarah Hall’s, for example, are not.
The extent to which it’s possible for fiction to voice or represent the lives of plants and animals is important to many modern writers whose thinking includes environmental crisis. The risk is anthropomorphism, and the disclaimer at the top of each section that “a colony of moss does not” imagine/narrate/remember whatever it then goes on to do is not enough to avoid the error. North’s mossy chorus is little more than a projection of human eco-anxiety, in the same way that her iron age story doesn’t step far from the assumptions and traditions of 21st-century America, and her mash-up of English cities and towns doesn’t recognise the specificities of place and time. Bog Queen could be, and occasionally is, beautifully strange, but overall, imagination and research don’t reach far enough.
