A smoothly, deliciously prosey story that deftly captures the interior life of its characters, taking no prisoners with its confrontation of a bigotry that hurts its believer even as she harms those around her.
Barbados in the 1840s. A rich estate. A black man working as a groundskeeper. A cursed woman hiding in the nearby wilderness. The loathing she holds in her heart, for herself and for the world that put her in this situation. The lingering threads of the choices that left her cursed in the first place. This is Tanglewood's story. At its heart, though, this is a story of white resentment against their black neighbours, and the horrible alchemy of oppression that makes success a zero-sum game, turning their own hardship into fuel for a bigotry that cannot be reasoned with.
The story follows Aoife, born to a white Irish indentured family, cursed, living alone in the wilderness, trapped in her own misery and her own thoughts, forever looping back and back on her suffering. We are deeply embedded within her POV, within her way of thinking, and this, Abbott has managed to capture beautifully. It is a novella with a crystalline sharpness in its lens of human despair - the interiority of the characters, and Aoife particularly, comes across so emotively on every page. But what Abbott does best is in her abstraction of that. She is so good at turning incredibly vivid and visceral introspection into metaphorical language, giving a potent and immediately graspable insight into the mind of a character. She makes the intangible, illegible insides of someone else's mind comprehensible, while maintaining their individuality, their voice. For example:
It was as if the forest of my humanity had been slashed and burnt, so that the fields of my penitence could be cultivated.
and
Like the earth around my childhood home, the soil of me was poor, not good for growing much else but coarse grass and hard lessons.
Aoife's despair, her misery, is so well crafted on the page, the sentence-level, word-by-word care is evident in every sentence. But that is not her only angle, and nor is she the only character. Because this is also a story of a growing infatuation, and again, this is where Abbott's prose shines - again bringing that deftness of craft across in really giving us the emotional sense, the heady rush of a growing emotional connection to someone, that feeling of falling head over heels, that obsession as Aoife experiences it.
Because we also follow John Jack, the groundskeeper at Tanglewood Manor, a black man, born a slave but now living free and working for pay, who finds himself travelling to the gully where Aoife lives, returning again and again, becoming entranced, despite the strangeness of her curse and herself, despite not knowing what and who led her to be here, as she is. We see this place and its beauty through his eyes too, and while what they see is nearly the same, it is the way they see it, the way their minds process and feel, and our insight into it that colours the story, and slowly draws us in to the crux of the matter, casting back into the years to Aoife's cursing... while also being heavily grounded in the now, and their growing feelings for each other.
Despite the page time for it being incredibly short, Tanglewood has some incredibly well-written... I don't know what to call it. It's not smut. Is it romance? Not really. It's certainly not erotica. Let's just say... intimacy. Whatever it is, in the same way as she has written the rest of the story, Abbott fully embeds us into the emotional perspectives of her characters as they grow closer, and finally come to the... ahem... climax of their affections. And by narrating it through the lens of that emotion, again with that evocative, abstracting prose, just a few lines of sexual encounter are rendered breathless and gut-wrenchingly real, and somehow far more charged than any amount of physical mechanics would have been in the same page space. And it's precisely because she puts us in those characters' headspace, lets us feel their wanting, and words it in such a way that it clicks into a familiar alignment if we are someone who has ever wanted in that way. It's absolutely deliciously done.
But, despite the good, there is also the bad. And it wouldn't be a gothic story without a great deal of the bad, even if we weren't dealing with curses. The latter half of the book, once we've met and become grounded in these two characters is where we really start to dig into the truth of what happened to Aoife, and where the themes that have been seeded throughout the early part begin to bloom. And it is here that we really see the benefit of that embedding into character headspace and that emotional resonance - because Abbott is really digging into the racism of the white working class, how their own oppression becomes a nearly unstoppable fuel in the fire of anti-blackness. We have seen the life that the white Irish in this place live, through Aoife's memories. We know their lot is hard. We sympathise with them. There is no part of the story that does not acknowledge that hardship. But while doing so, it bluntly lays out how they in turn hate and harm the black people around them as if it is the natural result of their predicament, and how insidious, how unshiftable and how self-justifying that perspective is.
By the time we reach the critical moments, where all the themes are confronted and the resolution plays out, the writing is very much on the wall. It is not an unsubtle story, but it is a blunt one. That's a hard needle to thread, but Abbott does it incredibly well, delivering an ending that, once read, feels like the only natural outcome to the story, a terrible, gothic inevitability, even if you maybe thought earlier things might lead elsewhere. What needs to be confronted is confronted, with nuance and thoughtfulness, but without sparing the sharpness it needs. The reader must sit with it, and see things for what they are, in this 1840s world of wealth, privilege and oppression, of narrow worldviews and bitter consequences for those in positions unable to fight back, and the nastiness of where the lens of blame turns, when it cannot confront its true architect.
This is a very slim novella - only 95 pages - but it packs a huge quantity in, without ever feeling like it skimps or rushes. It leads us emotions first through a complex tangle of love and betrayal and oppression and bigotry, and delivers the ending that story absolutely needed to hit home the conclusion the whole narrative has been building too. It is a sad, inevitable, truly gothic story, and it is incredibly well done.
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The Math
Highlights: beautiful prose, amazing immersion in character perspectives and emotions, precision wielding of both bluntness and subtlety
Nerd Coefficient: 9/10
Reference: Abbott, Knicky L., Tanglewood, [Luna, 2024]
POSTED BY: Roseanna Pendlebury, the humble servant of a very loud cat. @chloroformtea.bsky.social
