Jordan Tannahill almost lost me with the ecstasy-inducing teeter totter in the woods, but there's so much to admire about this unique, irreligious meditation on the meaning of human existence and the importance of gay community that I overcame my strong aversion to the supernatural.
The poetic metaphors in The Living Realm come fast and furious from this short novel's get go. Three friends are sunbathing on the Teufelssee, a lake in the Grunewald, "the forest that lay at the edge of Berlin like its shadow." Our unnamed narrator, an archaeologist who trained at Cambridge, moved to Berlin in 1991, at the height of the AIDS pandemic. Now, during a summer marked by Europe's worst drought in centuries, climate change has exposed history's past traumas, too.
As the Earth baked like a hot stone, the lake remained, even as the continent’s mightiest rivers ran dry and yielded their secrets . . . Scattered across the riverbed of the Danube lay the remains of Nazi battleships, like corpses resting in the positions in which they fell.
The narrator has begun experiencing the psychological equivalent of this stripping away through encounters with people from his past, most of whom lost their lives to AIDS. Although Tannahill is three decades older than his narrator, he nails the prevailing mood among gay men before the development of protease inhibitors in this description of his HIV-positive boyfriend, the first person he spots in the Grunewald and with whom he eventually ends up communing on the aforementioned teeter totter.
Everything about Lukas felt present tense, he had always lived as if no distant future existed, at least not for him, and this was how I loved him, as a deeply burning present. It was too painful to allow ourselves the fantasy of future projection, to imagine what it might have been like to grow old together, because we both knew, without having to say it, that we had been robbed.
Yet the narrator's memories aren't all tragic, and Tannahill employs them to reinforce his primary theme.
We watched the snow blow out from the sides of the train like wings as we crossed over the highest trestle on the continent, soaring above the turquoise ribbon of the Mala Rijeka, below us a winterscape of medieval villages dotting a valley like a Bruegel painting, and as we did, Lukas muttered to himself that even if humans lived another million years, they would never create anything so beautiful as Europe. I thought of all the old regimes, old empires, old faiths layered on top of one another like geological strata as we passed through forests that, within a matter of months, would echo with gunfire, before we plunged through another tunnel, and in the darkness I found my own face suddenly staring back at itself in the window.
Now retired, the narrator also experiences survivor's guilt when he sees Sebastian, another lover who also seroconverts.
Why had I not boarded that train with Sebastian? Why hadn’t I found a way to write or call him? Why had I never visited him in Regensburg? There was only one simple truth, now abundantly clear—I had been a coward. Too spineless, too terrified of sickness and death to be even proximate to it, I had somehow convinced myself I had no further obligation to Sebastian, our passions having already cooled the week of his departure at the first appearance of conflict, a passing dalliance from which I had been lucky to emerge unscathed. I let myself imagine that Sebastian had eventually returned to Berlin, and was living contentedly with new lovers, perhaps a steady partner, and that the decision to let our contact lapse had been a silent and gently mutual one. I could see now, all too clearly, that it had been a heartless one, made unilaterally without a shred of compassion or grace.
The narrator's recent intervention to rescue his elderly landlady from a nasty fall suggests that his retrospective self-assessment may be a little too harsh; it also gives Tannahill an opportunity to connect her world with his when the landlady (with whom he's never before had a real conversation) explains why the Grunewald is such a good place for sledding during the winter months: it rests atop the smashed bricks that she and other Trümmerfrauen removed after the Allies bombed Berlin to smithereens at the end of World War II.
She thought to herself: Is this how we are to live now? Like vultures, on the corpse of our own city?
Birgit, a fellow archaeologist, and particularly Gabor, a political refugee from Viktor Orban's Hungary, fear their friend has lost his mind when he casually mentions his pursuits of Lukas and Sebastian, as if they were corporeal. Birgit diagnoses him with delayed onset of PTSD while Gabor, in the flush of a new relationship, stops speaking to him altogether until the narrator receives an actual medical evaluation. After unexploded military ordnance threatens Teufelssee, the friend group re-forms and briefly increases by one.
The four of us spent the next several hours sitting together like a troop of saggy-titted gorillas, plucking from one another’s heads jokes and stories and half-recalled gossip, encountering friends, laughing at the antics of strangers, and at times sitting in silence, reading and reapplying sunscreen to each other’s backs.
Tannahill's ghost story soon morphs into something entirely different with the help of Elsa, a wild boar the friends have misguidedly rescued from euthanasia after she goes viral. The narrator fully embraces the pagan and finds peace in the circle of life. The ending of The Living Realm reminded me of a day decades ago when I drove my motorcycle to Croton-on-Hudson through peak autumn foliage--something I'd never really experienced before--and explicitly identified the divinity of nature in my mind for the first time.
The Living Realm also proves that the intense thrill I felt upon seeing Prince Faggot last year wasn't a fluke; Tannahill has an uncanny ability to precisely imagine scenarios that fall well outside of his personal experience (the narrator and Brigit, a dyke who conducts fisting seminars (!), listen to the Au Pairs, a rather obscure British band that contemptuously explored contemporary sexual politics) and describe some that don't with an understanding that I found to be instantly meshed with my own sensibility given that I explored a similar connection at more prosaic length in Homosaic, my memoir:
Gabor had once said to me that he believed cruising was the arena in which we best applied our tens of thousands of years of evolution as hunter-gatherers. I think a part of me was drawn to cruising for very much the same reasons other men loved to fish, less so for the catch itself than for the discrete rewards of patience, for the many long minutes of waiting spent in stillness, feeling time dissolve into place. It was about the careful observation of a landscape and the gradual accumulation, over many years, of a knowledge of that landscape; to know that in a certain grove, at a certain hour, on certain days of the year, men would congregate, or that if a man disappeared down a particular path, what the chances were that he would reappear in one or another clearing. One came to learn the intricate variations of eye contact, sustained and averted, how to distinguish an accidental brushing-past versus intentional contact, what was an invitation, and what was a rejection, how many times men would do a full tour of the paths before they decided to settle for who was there, and how likely they were to settle for you.
I can't wait to see what Tannahill does next.
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