One house in the western Massachusetts woods, told across four centuries by everyone who passed through it. Two lovers fleeing a Puritan colony. An apple-obsessed English soldier. Twin spinster sisters. A landscape painter, a schizophrenic son, a true crime writer, a beetle, a catamount, and the trees themselves. Mason writes each section in the form of its era — letters, ballads, a case report, a nature almanac — and the ghosts accumulate without ever taking over. I was dubious at times, but when I got the full measure, I realized it’s a masterpiece. The structure is nothing like The Cloud Atlas, but they certainly share some DNA.
Here, he said.
Songbirds flitted through the burn. They stripped their last rags, swam, and slept. It was all so clear, so pure. From his little bag, he withdrew a pouch containing seeds of squash and corn and fragments of potato. Began to pace across the hillside, the chicken following at his feet. At the brook, he found a wide, flat stone, pried it from the earth, and carried it back into the clearing, where he laid it gently in the soil. Here.
Chapter 1, page 11
Out here, no one tears down anyway—one just adds upon, agglutinates, house to house, shed to shed, like some monstrous German noun.
Letters to E.N., page 133
To such evidence, she added more: surveyors’ notes on witness trees, botanical collections, pollen cores she drew from lake beds. Sometimes, giving tours to schoolchildren visiting the museum linked to the laboratory, she said her work was time travel. Witness trees, she’d tell them. An old term of trade for trees that marked invisible boundaries. Now also used for those that were present at important moments in our history. In other words: the ones that witnessed us.
Chapter 12, page 316