so it's time for the next entry in an erratic series of reactions that I have to compelling media, and the troubling questions that they compel outta me when I am done consuming them. This past week, I marathonned through the last third of Karen Russell's Swamplandia!, a book as creepy as it is beautiful as it is funny as it is traumatic. A lot could be said about its sense of spirituality, and how its main character is actually the lady who dies within the first ten pages and almost literally haunts the rest of the proceedings, but the little bit that has got me troubled so much is a little issue that lies tangential to Hilola Bigtree's ghost, albeit one entombed within the actual literature of the novel: the incredibly realistic magical realism of Ava Bigtree's narration.
(hey yo so watch out for spoilers, and also a trigger warning about rape, in case anyone ever decides to hit the "random" button on google and finds themselves reading this while also simultaneously being in the middle of Swamplandia!, oh boy what are the odds of that, anyway just sayin')
to start off, I gotta say that Karen Russell is a genius of plot structure, narration, and tone. she uses those three elements in perfect tandem like a milky way bar uses caramel, nougat, and milk chocolate. for the better part of the first half of the novel, we are only experiencing the world of Swamplandia! through Ava's eyes, rich and mystical, exotic and strewn with peculiar metaphors. we are shown a swamp that is fertile with beauty and imagination, somehow so intensely swamplike in its description that it could not be less of a swamp at all. dismalness and dampness, in the eyes of Ava, is its own kind of fantastic beauty. naturally, what follows in these eyes, is a similar perspective shift on the plot and character work that goes around within this setting. when the park bankrupts, it comes across less pathetic than ominous; if we are not convinced that osceola is dating ghosts, we are at least amused and compelled by the elaborate fantasies and pantomimes. By the time Kiwi branches off into his own story on the mainland (and begins the third-person narration grounded much more deeply in barebones reality - the Noahs' Ark style artifice of the World of Darkness is universes away from Swamplandia!'s surreal digs), Russell sets us up to believe that, to some extent, the Ten Thousand Islands are a place possessed by a magicality somewhere to the left of typical offbeatness. the tale of Louis Thanksgiving convinces Osceola, it informs Ava's narration, and it convinces us of otherworldly endeavors.
which leaves us hapless fools when Ava, with her magic eyes, is left alone with this narrative heft. when the Bird Man shows up.
i haven't been crushed by any book I've read in the same way that I was by Swamplandia!'s final act. when everything comes crashing down. when I realized that the magical realism I thought about the world was, in fact, only the most realistic portrayal of a young outsider's perspective ever put to paper. and god fucking DAMN it for being that good.
nobody can write the mind of a smart child like Karen Russell. Ava's narrative gymnastics (and they are always vivid and impressive) avoid the pitfalls of typical "smart kid" precociousness by adhering strictly to the character's nature at all times. she is vulnerable and headstrong, observant and never precious. she absorbs the magicalness of her world through a lens that always seems somewhat skeptical. she is someone who WANTS to believe in the fantastic changes to reality, whose expectations fall far short, whose vision is cursed by reality, return-to-sender letters addressed to gator wrestling competitions, and ragged jackets covered with buzzard feathers. carrying the Red Seth around with her (a wonderful symbol for menstruation and innocence), interpreting the swamp as her own surreal heaven of sorts, she is the perfect voice of a curious preteen on the cusp on adolescence.
which, going back to the main point, just makes everything hurt so, so, so much more when we realize how so, so, SO wrong she had been about everything. how the only true magic and ghosts in the novel are those that can be cured with pills, or felt as shots of adrenaline and muscle memory in the gator pits. she slogs through the swamp and survives, but her magical hope throughout the novel keeps us from even seeing the swamp for what it really is.
when the Bird Man first shows up, we have no Chief or Kiwi to serve as a voice of reason. OF COURSE don't trust this drifting man who shows up out of nowhere with paper-thin stories and correct, mystical answers to every question Ava asks. OF COURSE don't go with him, alone, onto a boat in the middle of nowhere. OF COURSE he is just covering his own predatory ass when he insists that you don't involve the police, how he is a supernatural man who is solving a supernatural problem, how the authorities are not in his jurisdiction. OF COURSE the Bird Man is fucking bad news. But Karen Russell cannot let us know this until it is too late. She isolates the narrative within Ava's lens and, in doing so, strands us within the magical realm that we ought to know is false. By the time The Bird Man arrives, the Dredgeman's Revelation taught us practically to expect him. This is a magical book, of course.
Except it isn't.
Karen Russell executed the world's greatest rug-pulling, get us to believe the Devil doesn't exist while he breathes down our neck the entire time. I had in my mind the inkling that the Bird Man was a Bad Dude, but she keeps us from reaching that conclusion for sure until it is already too late. Ava sees in him a fatherly attachment that she needed in those lonely times, a face to relate to in trauma. When events happen that cause double-takes, like him staring at her while she sleeps in Stiltsville, she even manages to somehow disarm us by returning to vulnerable character beats and the two's increasingly unsteady rapport. Hell, she even manages to fucking squeeze a tremendously misguided, oh so tragically believable "I love you" out of Ava. By that point there's enough menace laid on for us to scream at Ava "NO STOP IT NO NO NO SCREAM AND GET OUT OF THERE," but we just can't. like ava, we've become trapped. emotionally and physically trapped. not by the Bird Man, but by Karen Russell. the swamp of exaggerated theatrics and otherworldly fancy is the grim hood of horror stories, a bloody bayou.
and, stuck behind Ava's too-hopeful-for-hope eyes, we can't escape.
Russell ends the novel on as happy a note as can be. but, she reminds us, the Bird Man is still out there, and though Ava is safe now, she is still a survivor of a great tragedy, and there are no easy answers or happy endings to that. Ossie gets her happy-ish ending on the same scale, too. but, as the ever-vivid narration reminds us, the ambivalent endgame ultimately points towards hope. the mainland can be just as magical a place as the Islands if you carry that magic with you, and there's always hope that the Red Seth survived as well.
now I've gone to just disjointed rambles (about three paragraphs ago, maybe) but those last 100 pages are still lurking in the back of my head. Russell proves horror and beauty as two sides of the same coin via the expert way she imperceptibly shifts the tone between the two at the end. I did not expect Swamplandia! to become so harrowing because it had already tricked me into its surreal security one hundred pages prior. the danger always exists, and we need friends and family to help us recognize and confront it before it can swallow us whole. even if Ava's only family at the time is the ghost of her dead mother.
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