Under the Harrow

A review of Under the Harrow by Mark Dunn. Dunn also wrote Ella Minnow Pea, one of my favorite books of all time. Evidently Dunn's publisher is barely solvent. I am not even sure if the hard cover version of this book is available. I read the Kindle edition. I supposed this also explains why the book has had no publicity

Dunn's books are all completely different, from Ella Minnow Pea, an epistolary novel where successive letters are dropped from use in the text, to Ibid, which consisted totally of footnotes from a fictional biography. You could say that his fiction tends towards the experimental.

Under the Harrow could be summed up as a Victorian, mystery, thriller, which is quite a combination. Set in the Dingley Dell in the early 2000's. All of the inhabitants of the Dell are descended from a group of orphans, who in the let eighteen hundreds were abandoned by all the adults. For over 100 years they have lived cut off from the outside world. A few, select residents do have contact with the outside world for purposes of trade, but other than this—for reason that the residents can only speculate on—there have been no outside influences on the residents of the Dell for over 100 years.

When abandoned the orphans were left with the Ninth Edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, and a complete set of Charles Dickens' novels. Thus everyone chooses a name from Dickens. They also have an atlas, but they are not exactly clear where the Dell is located, other than that it is in a mid-latitude coal region. Some think they are in Australia, others England, and others Pennsylvania.

There are attempts by some to escape to the outside world, but those who try this either never return, or, if they do return, they must be locked up in an asylum.

After a century of living stuck in the late Victorian age, the novel picks up as the entire community is about to come to a cataclysmic end. In the novel, these events are recounted by Frederick Trimmers several years after the demise of the Dell. As events in the Dell begin to careen out of control, Trimmers becomes involved with a small group of residents who—disguised as a poetry society—are determine to figure out what is happening to their society.

The story has a large number of characters, from a few who attempt to escape the Dell, to their relatives who have been left behind, and are determined to discover what has happened to the attempted escapees. As a couple characters leave the Dell for the outside, the narrative also follows their interaction with the outside world, where the Dickens characters meet the modern world. Given the need to establish all of these characters, the novel starts out fairly slow. But as the reader becomes familiar with the characters the pace picks up until is ends in a mighty crescendo.

In the vein of Dickens, the novel deals with the relationships of different social classes. Even though everyone is descended from the same group of orphans, the society has become very stratified, from the members of the Petit-Parliament down to the outcast apricot eaters, who barely make out an existence on the edge. There is also the relationship of the few elite, who have limited interaction with the outside world, and may in fact know what is about to happen, with the rest of the society, who are totally in the dark about the outside world and the coming events. Added to this are numerous family conflicts.

As in many situations, the main internal conflict is should I stay or should I go. In this book this conflict becomes very literal.

I have not read Dickens for quite a few years, so I cannot say how closely Dunn's writing style follows Dickens, although the book is clearly meant as a homage to him. At the same time given that the novel deals with an old world inside the current world, it definitely has a post-Dickensian, if not post-modern, structure.

I tend to like shorter fiction, so I cannot say that I liked this book as much as Ella Minnow Pea. That being said, it is very original, a whole raft of characters are portrayed very comprehensibly, and once the pace gets moving it becomes very gripping.

One final point, in addition to the clear homage to Dickens, one of the characters in the world outside the Dell has a striking resemblance to Senator Arlen Specter. So even though Specter is about to lose his Senate seat, maybe his consolation prize can be that he has gained a place in literature.