O’breht’s newest book The Morningside is described as dystopian, and it feels like a world that could be just a decade or two away. In this near future where food is scarce and rising water levels have consumed city blocks, people search for signs and omens to signal everything will go back to normal – star falls, football-sized goldfish in a sewer drain, a trapped whale – these things people watch and hope.
Tèa O’breht is an author who has never let me down. What I love about all three of her books is the deft and subtle way she weaves myth and folk tales into her novels. And yet each is different – Inland is like an epic gothic ghost story with camels set in the Wild West. The Tiger’s Wife takes place in an unnamed country in the Balkans and uses magical realism to explore death, the otherside, deathlessness (with The Deathless Man as a godfather death), storytelling and the unknowability of the past, and of course, there is a tiger. Pocket Bookclub read that one too, and talked about it a lot on the night.
The book was born in the womb of the COVID lockdowns. In an interview, O’breht says she suffers from OCD and anxiety about germs but surprised herself by how prepared she was when facing the pandemic. When she explored why, she realised she had been ‘raised by… by people who had suffered a society ending event, you know, not ending, but a society altering event. They were born, and they lived, and they were culturally of a nation in which they believed, which ceased to exist.’
The sense of displacement when ‘home is gone’ – belonging to a place that no longer exists is central to The Morningside. Sylvia is eleven when she arrives at the crumbling, once luxurious, high-rise on an island city which may or may not be Manhattan. She has spent her life moving from place to place with her mother, being told that if anyone asks where she is from, she should name the last place they have been. Now, part of the Repopulation Program, they join Sylvia’s Aunt Ena, the building’s superintendent.
Sylvia’s mother won’t talk about the past, it is a forbidden topic. But Sylvia’s Aunty Ena will readily reminisce and has the objects and photos to prove her stories are true, though myth and the family stories are enticingly, unbelievably entwined.
“This was part of Ena’s magic. Familiarities you had come to take for granted were transformed by the act of her storytelling. Her version of things became the only one. She could change the reality of something you thought you’d known all your life.” ― Téa Obreht, The Morningside
Throughout the book, there is the question of what to believe, but more than that, the way the belief gives us hope.
“Plans required belief. You had to believe that you could lay out steps toward an outcome of your choosing. My mother knew better than that. The pronouncement of intent, the hubris of self-determination—these did not fit her notion of the universe.”
― Téa Obreht, The Morningside
Sylvia becomes obsessed with mysterious penthouse-dwelling artist Bezi Duras, also from “Back Home” whose dogs, according to Ena, are not dogs at all, and along with her friend Mila they set out to find out the truth. But where Mila lacks caution and fear to the point of recklessness, Sylvie has Ena’s caution filling her with dread.
“There’s a world underneath the world. You can’t ask and ask and ask to see it. Otherwise, these glimpses of it, they turn bad.” ― Téa Obreht, The Morningside
I was not as enthralled by The Morningside as I was by O’breht’s previous books, but the parts I liked most were when folklore took centre stage, in particular, the night Sylvia and Mila ventured too far from home. I also enjoyed the Vilé – which according to Slavic folklore are nymphs or fairies, protectors of woodland and waters who like all good fairies are ambivalent about humankind and may kill you, enchant you, or help you. I can’t find too much about them in my breezy Google search.
I feel we are on the precipice of the future imagined in The Morningside. Unlike a comet crashing to earth and destroying dinosaurs or humankind, an incremental decay of institutions and society in the face of changes to our climate and war seems more likely. Meanwhile, these characters are tied up in the past, but further and further back there are the Vilé – protectors of the environment, certainly in the way Aunt Ena tells it. The wisdom of folklore is still with us if we listen and heed.
“As the world breaks, the Vilé move on. There must be hundreds of them drifting along like the rest of us,” says Ena.― Téa Obreht, The Morningside
Kathryn Gossow has been writing and publishing short and flash fiction in a variety of genres since 2006. Her debut novel Cassandra was a finalist in the Aurealis Awards for Best Fantasy Novel in 2017. Her second novel, The Dark Poet is a collection of short stories on the dangers of charisma. Her third novel, Taking Baby for a Walk a little thriller in a little country town was published in 2021. Kathryn is also one of the editors of South of the Sun: Australian Fairy Tales for the 21st Century. Her books are available (almost) everywhere
