Marshlands
Matthew Olshan, 2014
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
176 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780374199395
Summary
After years alone in a cell, an aging prisoner is released without explanation, expelled into a great city now utterly unfamiliar to him.
Broken by years of brutality at the hands of the prison guards, he scrounges for scraps, sleeping wild, until a museum curator rescues him from an assault. The museum has just opened its most controversial exhibit: a perfect replica of the marshes, an expansive wilderness still wracked by conflict. There the man had spent years as a doctor among the hated and feared marshmen, who have been colonized but never conquered.
Then Marshland reveals one of its many surprises: it is written in reverse. The novel leaps backward once, twice, returning to the marshes and unraveling time to reveal the doctor’s ambiguous relationship to the austerely beautiful land and its people. As the pieces of his past come together, a great crime and its consequences begin to take shape. The true nature of the crime and who committed it will be saved for the breathtaking ending—or, rather, for the beginning.
In the tradition of Wilfred Thesiger’s The Marsh Arabs and J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians, Marshlands explores a culture virtually snuffed out under Saddam Hussein, and how we cement our identities by pointing at someone to call “other.” Elegant, brief, and searing, Matthew Olshan’s Marshlands shivers with the life of a fragile, lost world. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
Matthew Olshan is the author of several books for young readers, including Finn, The Flown Sky, and The Mighty Lalouche. Marshlands is his first novel for adults. He studied at Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and Oxford universties, and currently lives in Baltimore, Maryland. (Adapted from the publisher and author's website.)
Book Reviews
The first literary novel from Olshan, the author of several books for young readers (including The Flown Sky), covers a contentious 30-year period (leading up to the present day) in the Iraqi marshes. This broad scope is compressed into fewer than 200 pages, beginning when an unnamed prisoner is released without explanation from a long sentence. He finds himself wandering until he’s taken in by the curator of a museum—which has recently opened a large-scale replica of the marshes. The encounter provides the springboard for the story, which skips around chronologically: first, the reader sees the crime in the marshes that put the man in prison; then, in a section that jumps even further back in time, the reader sees how the man’s connection to the marshlands was first forged. The man, it turns out, used to be a doctor who treated residents of the marshes, and it’s largely because of his devotion to them that he finds trouble from the government, which is trying to seize their land. Written sparsely and almost mechanically, the narrative is particularly attuned to the region’s customs and culture, and what happens when they are disturbed. Despite the novel’s ability to capture its place and time, its characters and story (including the revelations) never really take off. (Feb.)
Publishers Weekly
Whether recrafting Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn into a modernized suburban tale in Finn or dreaming up a French postman-turned-boxer in the children's picture book The Mighty LaLouche, Olshan has a penchant for whimsy. This novel contains traces of the fantastical but is set within the harsh reality of an entire civilization on the brink of extinction: the Iraqi marshlands. Written in reverse chronological order, the story opens with an unnamed prisoner with no memory of being released back into society. Struggling to survive on the streets, the prisoner is rescued by a museum administrator who is also curating an exhibit on the vanishing marshlands culture. However, this encounter is no chance occurrence. Through the museum administrator, the prisoner uncovers his own identity, the reason he was in prison, and the role he played in the demise of the marshlands. VERDICT Olshan has written a mystery within a broader genre of postcolonial literature, sans historicity. Readers who appreciate the work of Amitav Ghosh (The Glass Palace) and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Purple Hibiscus) will find similar themes running through this enjoyable debut.—Joshua Finnell, Denison Univ. Lib., Granville, OH
Library Journal
(Starred review.) Readers familiar with Sir Wilfred Thesiger’s classic travel narrative The Marsh Arabs (1964) will eventually recognize the protagonist of Olshan’s novel as a fictionalized modern version of Thesiger, the military doctor and adventurer who sloughed off his Britishness in favor of a tribal life amid the Arabs of northern Iraq, whose trust he patiently earned through his skill in performing circumcisions. The connection is not immediately obvious. When we first meet Gus, as he is called here, he is a broken and disfigured man, all but unrecognizable after many years in (presumably American) captivity following the occupation of his adopted homeland and the draining of the marshes that housed his people. As the story unfolds in reverse, we come to understand the circumstances that led to his imprisonment, and his complicated relationship with the violent marshmen to whom he has devoted his life. Although it is easy and appropriate to take this novel as stark commentary on U.S. involvement in Iraq, its most powerful moments explore a much deeper and more abstract ambivalence about tribalism and its allure. —Brendan Driscoll
An eerie, dreamlike atmosphere pervades this novel of struggle and oppression. Olshan divides the novel into three parts and moves backward chronologically, so the second part is set 21 years before the first and the third, 11 years before the second. This narrative strategy makes events and characters somewhat clearer the more readers progress into the story, though the ambience remains decidedly murky. At the center is Gus, a physician who, at the beginning of the novel, has been released from prison, a broken man after years in his cell. He wanders aimlessly to a park and to a mall in a nameless city and then is picked up by a museum worker who takes him home, sees that he gets medical care and provides a change of clothes. Shortly thereafter, he finds himself at a clinic treating "marshmen," social pariahs who inhabit all three sections of the novel. The role of the marshmen is essentially to serve as "the other," objects of hatred persecuted by the military establishment. The museum worker who takes Gus in turns out to be Thali, daughter of the Magheed, a local potentate who had befriended Gus earlier. Part two shifts to Gus' point of view, and readers learn there of his relationship to Betty, a "tent girl" who, for a while, stayed with Gus while he was working as a surgeon at a field hospital. Readers also meet the arrogant and ruthless Gen. Curtis, who's determined to wipe up the marshmen's habitat by creating levees and hence changing the prevailing ecosystem. In the final section, readers meet the earlier versions of both Gus and Curtis, now merely a major, and also get acquainted with the early stages of the relationship among Gus, Thali and her father, the Magheed. Strange, otherworldly and somewhat sinister.
Kirkus Reviews
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