In her latest novel, The Night Field, Donna Glee Williams gives body and weight to a dark magical dream of a narrative, a novel that is as engaging as it is heartbreaking, that is at times nightmarish yet for all its pain and suffering is woven together with the tensile strength of hope.
The novel opens with our heroine Pyn-Poi, a young woman, wrists bound, being led by four boot-men with whips into a bleak, barren and treeless place which we learn is The Farm. The Farm, not unlike a Nazi concentration camp, is a brutal slave labor camp where Pyn-Poi joins a group of several other women forced to labor under the harshest conditions, worked to the bone and scarcely fed. They, like the rest of The Farm, are dedicated to cultivating a single fiber crop reminiscent of cotton. Like cotton it robs the soil of nutrients, and like cotton, with its requisite pesticides, it poisons the land.
Upon her arrival at The Farm, Pyn-Poi is stripped. Her long hair is roughly shorn to the point of her scalp bleeding. She calls it an amputation. A boot-woman throws a handful of harsh yellowish powder into her face:
I double over coughing, pawing at my face. My eyes burn like red coals in their sockets—I try to shield them while the boot-women throw more of the evil powder and rub it all over me, even the places strangers should not touch.
But Pyn-Poi doesn’t fight the boot-women, because she’s shocked by the smell of the evil powder. “… I smell it and recognize it and I hate it with the hate you can only feel toward killers of your close kin: Your sister. Your grandmother. Your trees.” She’s found the Stink, the very thing she’s made such a long, treacherous journey to find.
After the opening chapter, The Night Field backs up in time and explores Pyn-Poi’s childhood idyllic years with her family in the Real. We learn that Pyn-Poi is the daughter of father Sook-Sook and mother Marak. The family lives among one of several tribes in the Real, a verdant jungle-like world rich in plant and animal life. In this ecological Eden, The People respect and nurture the natural world, and in return, the natural world sustains them.
Pyn-Poi is especially conscious of this connection with nature since her father serves as a Tree Man, a tribal consultant who oversees the health and management of the trees, which are an essential part of life in the Real, providing food, shelter and refuge. As a child, Pyn-Poi learns about the trees from her father who she often helps with his arboreal duties. He teaches her to train tree roots to grow into bridges, platforms and ladders, to sense when tree shoots need thinning and when drooping leaves are signaling distress and a need for attention. Over time Sook-Sook teaches her how to communicate with trees and other plant life, a talent that years later becomes essential for her survival as well as the tribe’s.
But Pyn-Poi’s mother, Marak, having had her own plans for her daughter, is frustrated by Pyn-Poi’s preoccupation with Sook-Sook’s tree work. She expects Pyn-Poi to fulfill a more traditional role as clan matriarch like herself. She wants to teach Pyn-Poi how to cook, how to make medicines and how to take care of the people of the clan. But Pyn-Poi rebels. Early on, there’s a scene with Pyn-Poi running through the thick jungle, hoping to elude her mother and the chore she has planned for her. The trees help her hide from her mother as she heads away from the village and walks upstream along the Durma River tributaries. Finding herself alone in the natural world, she feels relieved and restored. She’s at home here:
It is delicious, being away from people like this, able to concentrate for once, able to listen to the quiet. Behind the rush of the water, you can almost hear the trees thinking, watching me, taking my measure. They are making up their minds about me … .
The deeper we read into The Night Field, the more we understand how essential the trees are to life in the Real. They even have their own sections of dialogue, like the chorus in a Greek tragedy. For Pyn-Poi and all the People who live beneath the Wall, the trees provide a network of living structures, communities and neighborhoods that connect the People.
I walked our tree-bridges all my life, flapping my sandals across the grown-together foot-smoothed bark. I never fear falling into the swirling water below because the great entwined arms of wood along each side—they shield walkers from the edge. The bridges were just a fact of life to me, those high swoops of living wood that weave clans of the People together across the many-fingered rivers at the base of the Wall, as customary as the ladders and platforms and thatches of our tree-houses—invisible because so well known. I never even thought to ask why the trees gave us the great gift of crossing rivers. I never thought to ask the why of any of it. I was very young and things were just … as they were. The Real was the Real. Who could imagine it being any other way?
But once the Stink arrives in the Real everything begins to unravel. The rains that once provided nourishment for the jungle begin emitting a stinking brown fog. The rivers and streams that flow from above the Wall, become foul smelling. Birdsong silences and insects disappear. Plants wither on the Wall and trees, even the forever trees, sicken. More and more, family and friends become sick and some die off.
It’s decided someone must climb the Wall and appeal to the Ancestors. Sook, who would usually be the one to make such a journey, has become infirm, perhaps because of the Stink. So it falls upon Pyn-Poi, now the Tree-woman of the Clan, to make the journey. Things are in such a desperate state that even Marak supports her daughter’s mission, realizing that life now hangs in the balance, not only for their family, but for all life in the Real.
The novel often shifts back and forth in time, advancing in Pyn-Poi’s present years at The Farm and then shifting back to her earlier climb up the Wall and her exploits upriver where she’s taken in at a brothel and mothered by the Madame. Back at the Farm, the women who work the tract with her, look after Pyn-Poi as best they can in this hostile environment. As the years pass, and as life on the Farm becomes harsher and more desperate and more people sicken and die, Pyn-Poi becomes respected and admired for her daring plan to introduce more environmentally sensitive methods of farming, such as crop diversification and rotation, that perhaps may ultimately save them from themselves.
When I was first assigned this novel to review, I was a bit reluctant. I hadn’t read many fantasy books, at least not since my teenage years. But only a few pages into William’s evocative novel, I was wholly absorbed in Pyn-Poi’s rich, transporting and ultimately harrowing world. As with all the good books that have made an impression on me, I’d find myself contemplating images and scenes at odd times during the day. I still do.