The Magic Kingdom: A novel - Hardcover

Banks, Russell

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593535154 ISBN 13: 9780593535158

Verlag: Knopf, 2022

Inhaltsangabe

From one of America’s most beloved storytellers: a dazzling tapestry of love and faith, memory and imagination that questions what it means to look back and accept one’s place in history. In 1971, Harley Mann revisits his childhood, recounting his family's move to Florida’s swamplands—mere miles away from what would become Disney World—to join a community of Shakers.

“Eerily timely. Can what’s gone wrong in the past offer keys to the future? The Magic Kingdom confronts our longings for Paradise; also the inner serpents that are to be found in all such enchanted gardens.” —Margaret Atwood, author of The Testaments, via Twitter

Property speculator Harley Mann begins recording his life story onto a reel-to-reel machine, reflecting on his youth in the early twentieth century. He recounts that after his father’s sudden death, his family migrated down to Florida to join a Shaker colony. Led by Elder John, a generous man with a mysterious past, the colony devoted itself to labor, faith, and charity, rejecting all temptations that lay beyond the property. Though this way of life initially saved Harley and his family from complete ruin, when Harley began falling in love with Sadie Pratt, a consumptive patient living on the grounds, his loyalty to the Shakers and their conservative worldview grew strained and, ultimately, broke.

As Harley dictates his story across more than half a century—meditating on youth, Florida’s everchanging landscape, and the search for an American utopia—the truth about Sadie, Elder John, and the Shakers comes to light, clarifying the past and present alike. With an expert eye and stunning vision, Russell Banks delivers a wholly captivating portrait of a man navigating Americana and the passage of time.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

RUSSELL BANKS, twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, is one of America’s most prestigious fiction writers, a past president of the International Parliament of Writers, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His work has been translated into twenty languages and has received numerous prizes and awards. He died in 2023.

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REEL #1

This is Harley Mann talking. I don’t know why I said that. The words just fell out of my mouth. I guess I’m not accustomed to this mode of communication. I’m recording myself on a brand-­spanking-­new Grundig TK46 machine that I purchased yesterday after I drove up to Orlando from my home here in St. Cloud for the official opening of Walt Disney’s gigantic amusement park, which is what inspired me to finally tell everything I can remember of certain events that I experienced and witnessed in my childhood and youth in this region south of Orlando and west of Lake Okeechobee, this sprawling district of lakes and swamps and creeks and sawgrass savanna and pine and live oak woods and palmetto that once upon a time was the headwaters of the Everglades.

That’s my statement of intention. I’ll probably tell about a lot of other things, too. In any case, instead of writing it down, I’ve decided to talk the whole damn thing into a tape recorder, because I’m a talker, not a writer. Everyone says that about me, sometimes with admiration, sometimes not so much, although they agree that my letters and postcards and personal notes and even my business correspondence are very expressive and descriptive. Just not as interesting as my talk. Which is probably because when I speak I almost never know what I’ll say next, but when I write, since it almost always concerns business, I do.

There will be a batch of tapes when I’m done. Maybe whoever inherits my house and the rest of my personal property will someday transcribe them. I’ve got a last will and testament sworn and written, so I know who’ll end up with my money. But I have no idea who will end up with the tapes. I hope that whoever does, he or she will make a faithful transcription and donate it to the St. Cloud Veterans Memorial Public Library or one of the local historical societies, so that after I have departed this world for the other, the true story of the Shaker settlement called New Bethany and the people who lived there nearly a century ago will be known. It’s a scandalous story almost completely forgotten now, and when remembered at all is lathered in lies and error.

Also, having recently turned eighty-­one years of age, although still of more or less sound mind and body, my departure time is fast approaching. It’s why yesterday, after attending the official opening ceremonies of Disney’s amusement park, I got back into my Packard and drove down to the Montgomery Ward store in St. Cloud and marched in and purchased the recording machine and two dozen reels of blank tape. It’s why this morning, after I made and ate breakfast, I set it up on my front porch, and as if talking to a trusted friend who knows nothing of these events and remarkable personalities, I have begun talking into it. It’s early and the sun is still too low to bake away the morning dew, and nobody has walked by the house yet, but soon enough they will, and when they do they will likely think old Harley Mann is talking to himself in a steady stream and must have finally lost his marbles from all those years of living alone.

I suspect I’ll be out here on the porch for many days before my story gets told, as it’s a long and tangled tale, and the world today is so different from the world of my youth that I’ll have to swerve away from its main thrust often and at length to describe it properly, so that whoever eventually listens to it or reads a transcription—­assuming one gets made—­will understand why certain people back then, myself especially, behaved as we did, both badly and, on a few occasions, well.

Human nature doesn’t change, but contexts and circumstances do, so let me set the context and describe the circumstances. It’s been close to seventy years since my family settled among the radical Ruskinites at their utopian colony called Waycross, and we found ourselves living in communitarian squalor alongside White swampers and Blacks in the marshes and piney forests of southeast Georgia. This was where my family began its long pilgrimage from light to darkness to light again, as it seemed to my childish eyes, and then in later years to still deeper darkness that I thought would never end. And then it did end, leaving me alone here in St. Cloud for most of a lifetime, ending up on the front porch of this old clapboard shotgun house talking to an electric–powered plastic box about a world that existed before the common use of electricity or the commercial use of plastic.

I could begin there, with our arrival at the Georgia commune in 1901. Or even earlier, with our family’s life in the original Ruskinite colony of Graylag up north, outside Indianapolis, where I was born. But it’s not my story that I need to tell, it’s the New Bethany Shakers’, so I’ll begin instead in 1902, around the time when we first met the Shakers, when my twin brother, Pence, and I were twelve-­year-­old boys and we Manns were living like slaves on Rosewell Plantation, sixty miles south of Waycross, over by Valdosta. Maybe later on, if I see the need, I’ll return to Waycross, and tell how my parents got all the way to the Okefenokee Swamp from their native Indianapolis and the Graylag colony and so on, how they went from being American followers of John Ruskin’s anticapitalist teachings to founding communitarians to schismatic Ruskinites—­an interesting account in its own right, but a whole other story for a whole other occasion. For now, I’ll just talk about how we got over from Waycross to the Rosewell Plantation, which is where we eventually connected with the Shakers.

We were four children, me and my twin brother, Pence, and our brothers, Royal and Raymond, who were two years younger than me and Pence. They were also twins, a coincidence that in the eyes of the women in both the Graylag and Waycross colonies made Mother the object of an ambivalent mix of envy and pity. With two sets of twins, she could be said to have got her childbearing done in half the time of most women, but the work of raising a single baby from infancy to childhood had been doubled twice. This was before our sister, Rachel, was born. When we buried Father and set out from Waycross for Rosewell, we boys had only just learned that Mother was newly pregnant and that Rachel, the last of Mother’s children, would be born fatherless at Rosewell.

It may go without saying that we and all our fellow communards were Northern White people. Nonetheless, we had associated plenty with Blacks before we got to Rosewell Plantation. Out of habit I call them Blacks. I suppose it would be preferable to call them African-­Americans, along the line of Italo-­Americans, but that’s probably got too many syllables to catch on.

Mostly, the Blacks we knew at the Waycross colony were workers and drifters and peddlers and small farmers, some of them ex-­slaves, whose paths often brought them into proximity with us White Northern communards. But until Father died and the rest of the family decamped for what Mother believed would be a refuge at Rosewell Plantation, we had never actually lived among Blacks, or for that matter among Southern Whites, either. We children simply thought of ourselves as Yankees and spoke our English with our parents’ Northern, Indiana accents. I still do, I’m told. It’s hard to erase an accent acquired in childhood, and from birth we had lived solely among White Northerners and even a few from Canada, England, and Scotland, people who were well educated and socialist to the bone and more or less high-­minded, like the Shakers we later came to live with.

At Waycross we resided in one of the colony’s...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Knopf
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2022
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593535154
• ISBN 13: 9780593535158
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 352
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Friedensallee 273; Hamburg; 22763; Deutschland