Hospitality and liminality in the time of the Anthropocene: Jenn Ashworth’s Fell

ABSTRACT

Jenn Ashworth’s Fell (2016) is written as a response to the legend of Baucis and Philemon, an elderly couple who take in a mysterious stranger. Ashworth’s novel shifts between 1963, when Netty and Jack take in a lodger who appears to have messianic powers over life and death, and the present day when their daughter, Annette, is attempting to come to terms with the legacy of those events. Both time periods are seen from the perspective of Netty and Jack who haunt their decaying home in Grange-upon-Sands located near to Morecambe Bay. Ashworth’s novel is no simple rewrite but uses the legend as a platform for analysing themes of borders, boundaries, power, and control as well as the motifs of time, history, geography, and alienation. This article argues that, although the novel makes no explicit reference to the Anthropocene (the geological period proposed to describe man-induced phenomena such as climate change), its meditation upon the idea of hospitality and the navigation of liminal borders reflect upon the extent to which anthropogenic climate change entails new relationships between humans and the non-human world. To that end, the article pays particular attention to the shifting and dangerous sands of Morecambe Bay itself.

KEYWORDS:

• Hospitality
• liminality
• Anthropocene
• hauntology
• Jenn Ashworth
• Morecambe Bay

Interviewed by Stephanie Cross in July 2016, Jenn Ashworth commented that she wanted the point of view of her fourth novel, Fell, to be as deliquescent as the terrain it describes: “that sense of there being no boundaries, no borders; a very shifting, quite dangerous, landscape” (Cross 2016). The intimacy between form and content in Ashworth’s novel evokes Jacques Derrida’s description of his neologism “limitrophy:” “what abuts onto limits but also what feeds, is fed, is cared for, raised, and trained, what is cultivated on the edges of a limit” (Derrida 2008, 29). Although Derrida is principally concerned here with the relationship between human and non-human animals, his concept has resonance for other kinds of relation between geographical and psychological borders and their peripheries; of how one sustains and even nurtures the other. This nurturing aspect is relevant not only for the theme of hospitality to be found elsewhere in Derrida’s work but also in Ashworth’s novel, where the latter rewrites the legend of Baucis and Philomen. However, whilst Ashworth is preoccupied with themes of liminality and hospitality, these tropes gain extra significance by being set against the encroaching reality of the Anthropocene. Although the novel never directly refers to climate change – half of it is set in 1963, barely at the start of the modern ecological movement – its descriptions of how Morecambe Bay has altered in the intervening years nonetheless alludes to man-made effects. As Mark Bould has recently argued: “what happens when we stop assuming that the text is not about the anthropogenic biosphere crises engulfing us? What if all the stories we tell are stories about the Anthropocene?” (Bould 2021, 17). Or as Timothy Clark puts the question, raising impossible anxieties around the control of borders, “As a bewildering and often destructive contamination of human aims and natural causality, the Anthropocene manifests itself in innumerable possible hairline cracks in the familiar life-world … Something planetary is breaking through” (Clark 2015, 9). This article not only explores the “cracks” that underwrite Ashworth’s novel – between character and landscape, time and memory, familiars and strangers, the living and the dead – but also the viable alternatives that emerge at their edges.

Writing Fell

Fell itself marks a transition point in Ashworth’s literary career. Whereas her earlier novels such as A Kind of Intimacy (2009) and Cold Light (2011) had mixed comedy with tragedy, laughter with violence, Fell is a more melancholic work, a haunted house tale in the tradition of an acknowledged influence, Shirley Jackson. As Ashworth remarks in her conversation with Marcus Wyatt, “I’ve always had a taste for the weird and scary” (Wyatt 2016), a flavour enhanced by Ashworth’s co-founding of the Curious Tales Publishing Collective in 2013 and her admiration for The Loney (2014) by fellow Lancastrian author, Andrew Michael Hurley, also set in and around Morecambe Bay. Ashworth’s second phase has been consolidated in more recent years by her memoir of trauma and illness, Notes Made While Falling (2019), her re-visioning of the Gothic romance in Ghosted (2021), and her contributions to various Weird and horror anthologies, most notably This Dreaming Isle (2018) edited by Dan Coxon. She has also remained committed to locality and to peripheries, for instance, in her novella “After the Funeral, the Crawl” (Hometown Tales [2018]) and the edited anthology, Seaside Special: Postcards from the Edge (2018). As Ashworth acknowledges, her preoccupations with the uncanny and the borderland of North-West England share affinities with the “lost futures” explored by the neo-Marxist philosopher, Mark Fisher (Jackson 2018).

At first glance, however, these political overtones appear to be absent from Fell which, as in the supernatural tales of Shirley Jackson, mixes the strange with the domestic. The novel occupies two time periods – the present day, when Annette Clifford has resumed ownership of her parents’ crumbling house in Grange-over-Sands, and the summer of 1963 when Annette’s father, Jack, is persuaded into taking in a mysterious lodger, Tim Richardson, who might just be able to cure Jack’s wife, Netty, who is dying from cancer. Richardson, it seems, has an almost messianic ability to restore life to the dead and sight to the afflicted:

For a brief moment - two or three seconds at the most – Tim’s fingers are pressing into his right cheek, his thumb into his left. He can smell the salt water on the boy’s skin, feel the coolness of his palm against his nose. The heat and light and the pain in his head subside and a vibration starts in his chest, a little thrum downwards, across his belly and upper thighs. Tim takes his hand away.

“Will that do you?” he grins.

Jack blinks, takes a step backwards and then sits down on a ledge, heavily. … Tim squats in front of him but Jack finds himself blushing and quite unable to speak. His vision – can that be right? – is just a notch or two clearer (Ashworth 2017, 30).

It is this encounter that gives Jack the idea of offering Richardson a room in lieu for applying his healing powers to Netty. Yet at the same time, the ambiguous source of Richardson’s abilities, his mysterious intentions and sexual presence disturb and threaten Jack’s position within the household. Annette, observing the same scene as a child, remembers it differently: “he’d hit her father, right there at the pool. … He hit her dad then came to live with them, and she was told to treat him like a cousin” (18). The violent usurping of the father’s role, as Annette recalls it, and the insertion of Richardson into the family is no less truthful than the bargain struck by Jack and Richardson, in which Netty is the pawn of their exchange.

Fell, then, is a political novel insofar as it focuses upon power relations within the family, the extent to which they are exposed by the arrival of an outsider, and the subaltern role played by subjects such as the juvenile Annette within their hierarchical structure. As such, Ashworth’s sharp eye for social behaviour and her reconstruction of period details – Jack, for instance, avidly follows the unfolding events of the Great Train Robbery and fantasises what “he would do with a great whack of cash like that” (22) – invokes comparisons with other texts from the early 1960s. These include plays such as Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey (1958; filmed 1961), Harold Pinter’s The Caretaker (1960; filmed 1963) and Joe Orton’s Entertaining Mr Sloane (1964), as well as the first of Pinter’s collaborations with the film director Joseph Losey, The Servant (1963). Although Delaney’s play might be the most pertinent, because of its Salford setting (opened-out in the film version to include a seaside trip to Blackpool), they all focus upon a small cast of characters within an enclosed domestic space in which the shifting power structures, embedded in terms of gender, sexuality, age, class and status, are foregrounded. Appearing just before the first wave of Beatlemania was about to break, and with it the decade’s most resounding image of youth culture, these texts all feature the social elements that would most be at stake in the coming years – family values, sexual politics, class difference, intergenerational conflict. Fell, too, features the same themes but dramatises them differently from Ashworth’s predecessors. Firstly, the historical setting is explicitly foregrounded by the intercutting between Annette’s juvenile and adult selves, and her present-day slide into depression and (potentially) suicide. Secondly, the storylines in both the 1960s and the 2010s are estranged by not only Ashworth’s use of free indirect discourse but also by her device of using the ghosts of Jack and Netty as a plural, omniscient narrator and time-travelling witness. This storytelling frame serves to counterpoint the ambiguity and unreliability of Richardson’s miraculous power.

As Ashworth acknowledges, the decision to use Jack and Netty in this way – the product only of earlier drafts in which more conventional uses of first- and third-person narration proved either too narrow or too broad – poses a series of questions about the limits of their narratival agency. Ashworth recalls being pressed by her beta readers as to whether the narrators could “act on the scenes they describe, or only witness them?” Do they offer “a straight recounting of what happened” or a version “distorted by time and emotion and motivated by a particular intention?” (Ashworth 2016). To some extent, these questions address the traditional uses of the ghost within supernatural fiction, whether it is visible or invisible, an unmourned victim or a disruptive poltergeist, a cautionary warning or a redemptive messenger (Ashworth 2021, 177–181). Reflecting upon her response to these questions, Ashworth notes that Jack and Netty are “strangely incurious about the strange way they see the world now, knowing more now than they did when … their point of view was confined to their physical bodies and their placement in the material world” (182). As Ashworth notes also, the immateriality of their perspective demonstrates the “slippery, unstable and porous” boundaries in the novel (Ashworth 2016), as well as complementing the motif of transformation that runs throughout from physical geography to human anatomy, social relations to metaphysical essence. In what is a neat paradox, neat insofar as it sutures the text into a viable whole, the disembodiment of Jack and Netty is embedded within the novel’s structure, generating and enabling the unstable limits between bodies, landscape and memory that Ashworth explores. Ashworth reverses one of the tropes of the ghost story: Jack and Netty “don’t return with knowledge to share with the living, but to receive it from the world as it is today, and their own misunderstood pasts” (Ashworth 2021, 182). Their confusion conveys what Ashworth terms “an intensely, universally human [sic] experience:” the feeling of loving “someone who is hurting” (in this instance, their daughter Annette) and “the second-hand suffering of helplessness in the face of someone else’s pain” (182–183). As Ashworth continues, reflecting upon one of the novels that helped her to realise her narrative structure, Jon McGregor’s Even the Dogs (2010), between “what hurts and what heals, what is broken, and what remains inviolable – there is that indeterminate space of the ghostly” (189).

Morecambe Bay: history and geography

McGregor’s novel not only reminded Ashworth that the subjective experience of time is neither linear nor chronological but that, from the reader’s point of view, there also needed to be “a strong and constant thread” that could act as a foothold (Ashworth 2016). This is supplied by the house, which Ashworth argues acts as a “screen” on to “which the present action of the novel and the re-enactments of the past [are] projected” (Ashworth 2016), and by the role of place – the beach, cliffs and coastal towns of Morecambe Bay. For the cultural critic Michael Bracewell, in his collaboration with the photographer Linder Sterling, Morecambe represents a characteristically English take on the modern-day ruin:

No modern appraisal of Morecambe can begin without considering the current role allotted within the cultural psyche to the seaside towns of England. More than any other landscape, the seaside resort has become allegorical. The allegory is of “endings” … Sunsets, season’s end, work’s end, life’s end. (Bracewell and Linder 2003, 42)

Bracewell continues by arguing that “the seaside town now represents the lingering fade-out of an archaic way of life” and has “thus become representative of ‘otherness’ … an alternative to metropolitan or urban lifestyle … the deliquescence of a Mass Age glamour”. As a consequence, English popular culture “becomes concentrated” within these faded zones of mass entertainment, partially as “caricature”, partially as “requiem” (42). A pertinent example for Bracewell’s thesis is offered by the Britpop group Blur who, at the height of their fame, decided to tour a series of British coastal towns in September 1995. These venues were neither on the usual music circuit nor close to the fashionable London locale of Camden Town with which Blur were associated. On the eve of the tour, lead singer and songwriter Damon Albarn explained that “They fascinate me, all those dead seaside towns … They’re half-places” (Cavanagh and Maconie 1995, 36). Whereas Albarn, as if in anticipation of Bracewell, expresses an elegiac, hauntological attachment to the faded coastal town, the reviewer in New Musical Express writes of their Cleethorpes Pier gig with metropolitan disdain: “this far-flung and fish-stinking suburb of Grimsby … cunningly masquerades as a seaside resort” (Mulvey 1995, 35). Such abject dismissal contrasts with Blur’s (perhaps only partially) ironic declaration of cultural identity from the periphery rather than the heartland. Besides Cleethorpes, Blur also played at locations such as Eastbourne, Clacton, Great Yarmouth and, almost inevitably, Morecambe.

However, while the hauntological preoccupation with lost futures to be found in the work of cultural critics such as Bracewell and Fisher offsets an official or hegemonic version of national history, it can also – as Bracewell indicates – manifest as one of two responses: irony or melancholy. Neither, arguably, circumvents what Fredric Jameson once described as the “crisis of historicity” (Jameson 1993, 77), that anachronistic mixing of historical times, styles and periods due to the homogenising effects of late capitalism and mass consumerism. Instead, whether the would-be hauntologist views the lost future ironically or with melancholy, they nonetheless participate in and are symptomatic of the crisis that Jameson describes. As such, they appear to be enrapt – as Kathleen Jamie has written, in another context, of the new nature writing of Robert Macfarlane (Jamie 2008) – by the very object of their melancholic desire. Furthermore, as Jamie argues, this state of enrapture often transpires from the hauntologist being an outsider in the terrain that they describe. Like earlier Romantic travellers, they seek to find in their object an alternative or a compensation for the spiritual emptiness they find closer to home, in the objects that they are familiar with, such as the metropolitan heartland. Although hauntology, in its popularised cultural forms, can gesture towards the historical relationships and power imbalances between the periphery and the centre, it also runs the risk of reifying the very set of relations that it seeks to describe.

By contrast, Ashworth was at pains to research the time period and geographical area since Fell was her first attempt at a historical novel. Born in Preston in 1982, Ashworth visited Grange-over-Sands on days out as a child (Wyatt 2016), but she was also acutely aware of writing about somewhere “I’ve never lived and in a time I don’t remember” (Slater 2016). Ashworth’s humility – her awareness of her own limits as an imaginative writer – nonetheless opens her writing up not only to the practicalities of research but also to her commitment to what is unknown, what lies at the threshold of her own understanding. This unfamiliarity has made edgelands and sandscapes, such as Morecambe, into an object of literary and cultural interest in recent years. The volatility of the Bay, though, was brought into sharp relief by the migrant disaster in February 2004 when at least twenty-one Chinese immigrant workers were killed by the fast, incoming tides whilst picking cockles on the beach. This event, commemorated subsequently in songs, artworks and films, not only highlighted the untrustworthy conditions of the Bay but also the realities of modern-day slavery and human trafficking. It served as a powerful reminder of the connection to human migration that this apparent periphery has had, both internally as a holiday destination and externally as a fishing port. It is a history that Ashworth also plays upon in the setting of Fell.

Grange-over-Sands, where the Cliffords have their home, lies on the north side of Morecambe Bay. Originally a fishing village, it became a seaside resort following the arrival of the Ulverston and Lancaster Railway in 1857. The clean air and fresh spring water were thought to benefit tuberculosis sufferers, and in 1891, a sanatorium was opened at Meathop, north-east of the town. (Netty’s father is a farmer from Meathop.) As Ashworth notes, the TB hospitals were converted into convalescent homes for soldiers during World War One (Cross 2016), while by 1932, the art-deco Grange Lido – where Jack first encounters Richardson – had opened, further promoting the town as a health spa or “Naples of the North” (Ashworth 2017, 38). On the one hand, then, Grange-over-Sands was associated with healing and recuperation, a place of shelter already embodied in the Hampsfell Hospice, built in 1846 for the purpose of travellers, and overlooking the town from the summit of Hampsfield Fell. It is to there that Richardson flees, following his disastrous attempt to cure Netty, and where the joint narrators spy Richardson as he in turn spies upon a recovered memory of the young Jack and Netty, sealing their tryst and deciding to turn Jack’s inheritance into a guest house. The scene, however, also carries with it Biblical overtones. Richardson’s climb up the Fell, itself one of the Lakeland walks celebrated by the fellwalker Alfred Wainwright, evokes Christ’s despair in the wilderness and his temptation by Satan (King James Bible, 1996 Luke 4: 1-13). Having inserted himself into Jack and Netty’s “most private time … hungrily gobbling this most ordinary and untouchable thing” (Ashworth 2017, 221–222), Richardson experiences desolation and remorse: “He’s lost, and is just a vacancy now – other people’s thoughts and feelings and memories pouring into the gap where a man should be” (224). Reaching both the summit and the Hospice, Richardson observes all the surrounding territory – Cartmel, Humphrey Head, Howgill Fells, Bowland Fells, Clougha Pike, Walney and Piel – just as Christ was tempted with all the kingdoms in the world and decides to reject whatever future offer Jack and Netty might make him “to do the right thing by himself and these people” (230).

On the other hand, however, the area is also defined by its “obsession with death” (38). As The Guardian’s science correspondent David Ward notes, Morecambe Bay is the product of the last Ice Age “when retreating glaciers dumped soft sediments which formed expanses of sand which are now up to 80 m deep” (Ward 2004). As the sea level rose, so the area was flooded. The resulting Bay is “broad and shallow, with a tidal range of up to 10.5 m at spring tides and an ebbing tide that can retreat as far as 12 km” (Ward 2004). As a consequence, because of the shape of the Bay and its shallow depth, the ebb and flow of the tides can create strong currents with speeds of up to nine knots. With five rivers, including the River Kent, all ending in the Bay, the force and speed of the tidal current can be tremendous, creating sandbanks, muddy channels and deep holes that fill with quicksand. Not for nothing then that Richardson’s first impression of the Bay, culled from local tales, is of it being “a right bone yard, fully loaded with the wrecks of old vehicles and their lost drivers” (Ashworth 2017, 38).

However, as Christopher Donaldson notes in his short history of tourism to and across Morecambe, the Bay is also a paradox. Although its western arm “reaches some of the remoter outposts of England”, “in the midst of this waterway lies the centroid – the geometric centre point – of the UK” (Donaldson 2020, 164). Whilst in political and economic terms, Morecambe Bay is peripheral to the metropolitan heartland, in geometric terms, it is central to the UK’s land mass. Yet it is a centre which is also protean since the Bay’s sandscape “reshapes itself with the turning of every tide” and “is notoriously difficult to map” (164). Like one of Jorge Luis Borges’s labyrinthine mysteries, in which there is no centre, the Bay’s constant shifting threatens the unwary in which “a punctual death awaits” them (Borges 1970, 117). To be at Morecambe then, despite its historical associations of restorative health and seaside amusements, is not to be at peace but to be – quite literally – at bay: cornered, defensive, wary, endangered.

In a sequence that mirrors Richardson’s flight up Hampsfield Fell, Ashworth permits Eve, the tree surgeon approached by Annette to manage her parents’ garden, to walk the sands with her partner Maddy and her son Tom. Again, there is a Biblical overtone but this time to Moses parting the Red Sea as the guide leads his “followers across the rippled grey sand, barefoot … and armed with a staff as tall” as himself (Ashworth 2017, 173). Eve too is a mirror-image of Richardson. Both are outsiders to the family home; both are engaged to cleanse or purify what is wrong; their work is specialised and – as Annette’s almost suicidal attempt to cut the trees herself reveals – potentially dangerous; neither are fully trusted by their hosts. Yet both Eve and Richardson have the power to transform their lives for the good. Like Richardson, Eve is gay but whereas Richardson veils his sexuality, flirting with Netty, intimidating Jack and disavowing the times he has prostituted himself with other men, Eve self-declares her relationship with Maddy. The different expressions of their sexuality are to some extent historical: Richardson’s storyline takes place four years before the partial decriminalisation of male homosexuality (lesbianism never having been outlawed in the UK), six years before the Stonewall Riots in New York City, and nine years before the first Pride march in London. The silence that surrounds Richardson’s sexuality adds to his ambiguity; the limitations upon its expression seem to galvanise his mercurial personality and enhance his mysterious allure. Fifty years later, Eve has no such mystery attached to her. Her life is mundane and materialistic: juggling work and family commitments, “her own worries” are quite literally “closer to home” (78). By contrast, it is Annette’s “strangeness” that “flickers uncomfortably at the edge” of Eve’s “mind” (78). It is no coincidence then that, when Eve takes her Biblical journey, it is not only in the company of others but downwards, down to the Bay, down to the base and hence to the earthiness of the Bay: its “wobbling skin” and “dun-coloured surface” that “bend[s] and buckle[s]” (173). By contrast Richardson, absorbed in how he can master his power and transcend his lowly origins, turns his back to the Bay and climbs to the summit alone, still dreaming – as Roland Barthes writes of the mythical attraction of the Eiffel Tower – of how he “can feel … cut off from the world and yet the owner of the world” (Barthes 1975, 250). It is equally no surprise, then, that of the two it is the quotidian Eve who has the most transformative effect by re-engaging Annette with the social world.

Hospitality and transformation

The novel’s theme of transformation is openly declared by the epigram that comes from the tale of Philemon and Baucis in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (c. 8 C.E.). As Ashworth notes, though, the novel is not so much a rewriting as a pilfering of Ovid’s story: “I didn’t take Baucis and Philemon as a pattern for the book … theme was more useful to me than plot” (Slater 2016). In taking what she required from the tale, Ashworth nonetheless alludes to the larger themes of Ovid’s work: the inevitability of change; the helplessness of humans in the face of transformation; the uncertain consequences of individual actions. As Ashworth comments elsewhere: “Very often the moral of that myth is [taken to be] ‘You must be kind to visitors because you don’t know if they’re a god in disguise,’ but it seems to me that another interpretation is, ‘Be careful what you wish for’” (Cross 2016).

It is important therefore to briefly summarise the tale and how it is framed within Ovid’s epic poem. The legend is one of three stories related to Theseus, his companions and other guests who have been welcomed into the grotto of the river god, Acheloüs, due to nearby flooding. One of the guests however is Pirithoüs, “a young tearaway” (Ovid 2004, 8.613), who disbelieves the gods’ power for metamorphosis. He is corrected by the older Lelex who refers to a spot in “the Phrygian hills” (8.620) where there is an oak and a linden tree, “ringed by a low wall” (8.621), near to “a fen which used to be habitable land/but is now under water” (8.624–625). The landscape is evoked similarly in Ashworth’s novel – the fells, the Cliffords’ garden, the surrounding marshlands and the wayward movement of the River Kent. Jupiter and Mercury decide to go amongst the mortals disguised and are welcomed only by one family, the humble, elderly Baucis and Philomen, and their home roofed with “straw/and marsh reed” (8.630–631) that links the house to its setting. Neither husband nor wife is dominant: both are described as “giving and taking the orders” (8.636) which, in turn, mirrors the uneasy power balance between Jack and Netty.

Despite (or maybe because of) their poverty, Baucis and Philomen go out of their way for their guests, sitting them down, supplying cushions, cleaning their meagre table, warming the house, cooking and feeding them, and engaging them “in agreeable talk” (8.651). Whilst their preparations mirror how Jack and Netty make a fuss of their lodgers, until abruptly clearing them out to make way for Richardson, the behaviour of Baucis and Philomen is indebted to the Classical concept of xenia which Gabriel Herman defines as “a bond of solidarity manifesting itself in an exchange of goods and services between individuals originating from separate social units” (Herman 1987, 10). Herman continues however: “Transactions of ritualised friendship were supposed to be carried out in a non-mercantile spirit; from the point of view of the partners, they appeared not as an end in itself but as a means for creating a moral obligation” (10). This is true of how Baucis and Philomen behave towards their guests. Neither seeks anything in return. Instead, by how they act and what they do, they demonstrate how and why guests should be welcomed, even blaming themselves for “serving so poorly prepared a repast” and praying “fervently … for forgiveness” (8.682–683). For their diligence, duty and piety, the gods reveal themselves to Baucis and Philomen and preserve them from the vengeance that befalls their impious neighbours.

In her reworking of the legend, Ashworth creates analogies for individual details – a wobbly table, Richardson’s endless cups of coffee – but it is Baucis and Philomen’s climb up “the long steep slope” (8.693) that is most strongly alluded to. The gods reward them for their perseverance by transforming their home into a temple and, at their suggestion, permitting them to be the temple-keepers. However, to their request to be carried off at “the same hour” (8.708) so that neither has to look upon the other’s grave, they are transformed into the oak and linden trees. For Ashworth, this is a bittersweet ending for, while they have “worn old limbs” (8.715), the transformation occurs whilst Baucis and Philomen are in the middle of their duties, “casually standing” before the temple and “telling the sanctuary’s history” (8.713–714). Neither appears to be sick or infirm but instead accept their fate without question: “Farewell, my beloved!” they said in a single/breath” (8.717–718). However, in a text that so powerfully renders the need for storytelling, in the midst of the characters reciting a history just as Lelex is retelling a history with the purpose of both educating Pirithoüs and entertaining the river god’s other guests, to be cut off in mid-stream seems (at the very least) ironic. As Ashworth observes, although Baucis and Philomen are “granted a kind of immortality” that they can “experience together,” “it must be incredibly lonely all the same” (Slater 2016).

This sense of isolation is precisely what Ashworth dramatises when Jack and Netty are reawakened and find themselves incapable of altering either the past or the present. Although they are free to move in both time and space, and are therefore permitted an omniscience that they could never know in real life, they are also overwhelmed with knowledge that they can do nothing with: “How could we have known what he thought of us? What he wanted from us. We didn’t even understand all that we wanted from him” (Ashworth 2017, 91). Similarly, Annette is overwhelmed by the trees – an allusion to the fate of Baucis and Philomen and a metaphor for her own trauma – which have engulfed the garden that she is desperate to clear. The alienation experienced both by Jack and Netty and Annette is the obverse of what Baucis and Philomen experience in their tale. Albeit unwitting, they nonetheless serve in the presence of gods, and whereas in other tales by Ovid the divine revelation proves too much for the human mortal, their humility is equal to when Jupiter and Mercury reveal their true identities. As such, Baucis and Philomen embody an ideal of hospitality that, as Ashworth demonstrates, is untenable in the real world.

Similarly Derrida, when writing about hospitality, dwells upon its conditionality. On the one hand, the absolute hospitality as portrayed by Baucis and Philemon is in practical terms almost unthinkable: “a law without law” (Derrida 2000, 83) in which the host gives “the new arrival all of one’s home and oneself … without asking a name, or compensation, or the fulfilment of even the smallest condition” (77). The dystopian endpoint to such selfless hospitality is dramatised by the conclusion to Julio Cortázar’s “House Taken Over” (1946) where Irene and the narrator are finally forced out of their home by their mysterious guests: “I took Irene around the waist (I think she was crying) and that was how we went into the street. … I locked the front door up tight and tossed the key down the sewer” (Cortázar 1985, 16). On the other hand, even though it must accept the guest as an a priori, hospitality “needs the laws, it requires them” (Derrida 2000, 79). Thus, for Derrida, the moral law of hospitality is irreducibly split between the host’s imperative to welcome the guest, and their residual duty to the social laws that both enable and proscribe the transgressive ideals of hospitality. Or, put another way, the very act of opening oneself, one’s property (propre) to the Other delimits the spaces and degrees in which hospitality can function. To what extent the host can accommodate the stranger (xenos), what conditions they place upon their hospitality, reveals both its social limits and the wary protection of sovereignty: “This other becomes a hostile subject, and I risk becoming their hostage” (55). Whereas the legend of Baucis and Philemon describes the eternal reward of unfettered hospitality (or, in Ashworth’s reading, getting more than you bargain for), the classical, Biblical and modern-day examples that Derrida draws upon suggest “no hospitality without finitude … a certain injustice, and even a certain perjury, begins right away, from the very threshold of the right to hospitality” (55).

What Derrida describes as a violence that delimits hospitality is parsed by Ashworth as a fear of contamination. Drawing upon the terminology of Mary Douglas’s Purity and Danger (1966), in a conference paper first delivered in Morecambe in April 2017, Ashworth argues that “our ideas of what is wholesome and what is taboo are only ways of marking out boundaries between the things we want and the things we don’t want … the things we don’t mind being part of us and the things we do mind being part of us” (Ashworth 2020, 26). Ashworth concedes that these are “impossible” borders to manage (26), citing inoperable cancer and the kinship of family as instances where we must learn to host what we would otherwise reject. Similarly, having made his bargain with Richardson for the sake of Netty, Jack must learn to accept that the household (oikos) now revolves around the stranger (xenos) at the expense of his own sovereignty as the paterfamilias. It is a transformation he fights against, becoming suspicious of Richardson’s back story, sceptical of his mystical powers, and paranoid about his own declining virility and increasing age. Richardson, though, also wants to purify himself, to substitute his role as an apprentice butcher for the more aesthetic pleasures of a gentleman’s tailor. Having ingratiated himself into the Cliffords’ household at the expense of their other guests (and therefore a large part of their income), Richardson proceeds to transform their home into a workshop so he can perfect the shirts and suits with which he hopes to land a tailoring apprenticeship. The conflicting motivations of Jack and Richardson are played out over the body of Netty.

Netty’s terminal illness is both plot and backdrop to this domestic drama. Just as she and Jack host Richardson, so Netty’s body hosts the cancer that is slowly killing her. Whereas Richardson seeks to ease the cancer out of her body, to transmute it into something else, Jack dreams of repelling it altogether by physical force: “he wants to get into bed with her there and then, pull off that horrible, sweat-stained nightdress she’s wearing and push himself against her until there’s no space between them” (Ashworth 2017, 226). Netty is no passive receptacle, however, and Jack realises how little claim he has upon her following Richardson’s attempt to remove the cancer. In contrast to the haunted and hauntological spaces of the novel, this scene is its Weirdest and most “abcanny,” rather than uncanny, moment in that “its very unprecedentedness” “back-projects … radical unremembered alterity into history, to en-Weird ontology itself” (Miéville 2008, 113). Summoned by Netty, Richardson places his hands over her stomach but can feel none of “the usual stinging sensation … in his wrists and fingertips” (Ashworth 2017, 210). Netty vomits and then “retches again:”

She brings up more water – a great amniotic gush of it. It is seawater. It can’t be, but it is. The fishy, muddy smell of the bay is unmistakable … There is sand, too, wet and grey – Netty leans forward and spits between her knees and grains of it crunch between her molars. (212)

She continues to vomit, disgorging pebbles, shells and seaweed, “puking up the fucking ocean” (213). If Richardson is, in one sense, the contaminant that endangers the oikos, just as the cancer eats Netty “from the inside out” (227), so this horrific discharge of the bay’s content through the vessel of Netty’s body threatens Richardson’s own sense of purity: stepping “aside quickly” the flood of seawater, he “feels contaminated anyway” (213). Terrified by this profane, almost Eucharistic communion with a force greater than himself, Richardson flees, beginning his messianic trudge up Hampsfield Fell. He abandons Jack to clear up the mess and to wonder to himself if his wife “can start dissolving … her body eating itself, her stomach mysteriously discharging the contents of the bay onto her bedroom floor, then he doesn’t have her at all. Maybe never has” (227).

Anthropocene hospitalities

Although much of the novel’s critical reception has focused upon the relationship between Jack, Netty and Richardson, Ashworth counterbalances their tragic storyline with that of Annette and Eve. Having made her desperate attempt to saw the trees, Annette is discovered by Eve, “half lying in front of the house” (174), when Eve arrives early in the morning to drop off her estimate. Although Eve thinks to herself that “the rest of the day is right down the spout” (175), unlike Richardson’s reaction to Netty, she does not abandon Annette. Eve silently considers it to be “a bloody scandal” (175), when she carries the bloodied and starving Annette into the derelict house, but still “she is there” (176): Eve forfeits her time to care for a woman she barely knows, as the rules of hospitality dictate. But she does not act selflessly. Realising that Annette “had picked up on Eve’s uncertainty” about the job, and had attempted it herself, Eve thinks “there’s no point her blaming this on me” (177). Yet again, though, she keeps her thoughts to herself and, making a close inspection of Annette, washes and bandages her. Although she would rather be rid of Annette, upon realising that she has no friends or family and might have hypothermia, Eve decides to call her partner and take Annette home. Unlike Jack and Richardson, there is no bargain; albeit reluctant, Eve acts to help Annette with no obvious reward in sight other than the tree-felling job she has already agreed to undertake. If Jack and Netty present as a flawed version of Baucis and Philemon, it is Eve who offers a ritualised act of friendship or xenia.

In what, by now, is a customary move, Ashworth overlays Eve’s hospitality with a Biblical allusion – it is approaching Christmas when she and Maddy take Annette into their home. A converted junk room acts as a surrogate stable, in which Annette is reborn to the world, reassessing her memories of Mr Richardson and Jack’s second marriage to Candy, Netty’s would-be faith healer. To some extent, Annette becomes a mirror-image to Richardson, mimicking his mannerisms to defuse a row between Eve and Maddy and impress their son Tom. But the mirroring between the two households also serves to highlight their differences. Whereas the relationship between Jack and Richardson is ostensibly one of contest for control over Netty, with an underlying homoerotic tension between the two men, the relationship between Eve and Maddy is one of mutual love with their focus directed towards Tom minus any kind of powerplay concerning Annette. In other words, the social hierarchy that characterises the relationship between Jack, Netty and their daughter (repeatedly excluded by her parents), and which Richardson’s presence disrupts, is practically absent from that of Eve, Maddy and Tom. The patriarchal framing of the Cliffords’ household is supplanted by the matriarchy of Eve and Maddy – and it is arguably this which makes them ideal hosts for Annette. Whereas Richardson is persistently viewed with suspicion, Eve and Maddy (after their initial reluctance) go out of their way to include Annette: “Look at this lot. Disgusting amount of food. And just for the four of us” (237). Instead of Jack and Richardson’s “deal” (214), the image here is of breaking bread, of welcoming the xenos into the oikos, facilitated by the ritualised conduct of the Christmas dinner. Without needing to impose a hierarchy, Eve and Maddy incorporate Annette into their home whilst at the same time maintaining the social boundaries that ensure their sovereignty. Once the legal process of probate is set into motion, following Maddy’s discovery of Candy’s will, they know that their hospitality is temporary: they are enabling Annette to transition from a state of melancholy to one of self-possession. The narrative movement is progressive as opposed to the circularity of Jack, Netty and Richardson’s storyline, ensnared within the impossibility of removing Netty’s cancer, and ultimately extending into the figurative afterlife of Annette’s trauma and Jack and Netty’s existence as ghosts.

However, this transformation of the novel’s narrative schema is prefigured by the abcanny irruption of the sea and its contents from Netty’s stomach. Just as the less striated household of Eve and Maddy makes space for Annette, so the dissolution of Netty’s body permits the release of libidinal energies from the natural world into our own: the recognition of the extent to which the characters’ lives are interconnected with the constantly shifting, rhizomatic structures of the Bay. Netty’s disgorging of the sea foregrounds this: that the effects of climate and geography both pre- and post-date human affairs, whether that be Jack’s Faustian pact with Richardson or Richardson’s seemingly messianic powers. When Ashworth refers, on the one hand, to the helplessness of individuals to affect the plots of their lives, but on the other hand, to “the hidden and unheroic acts of kindness that do make a difference … to the way we experience the moments they are made of” (Slater 2016), she could just as easily be referring to the fact of the Anthropocene and to the viability of any emotional response towards it.

Although the novel seems at first glance to have little to do with climate change, it nonetheless describes – from the omniscient point of view of Jack and Netty who can move both forwards and backwards in time – the effects that the microclimate has upon the surrounding area: “in our time there was a beach here but now the salt marsh is encroaching on the foreshore and we gaze, without recognition, on a landscape transformed” (Ashworth 2017, 114). These effects are both physical and economic: “We’ll wonder where the water went, where the ice-cream kiosks disappeared to and where the amusements have gone” (114). And, like other aspects of climate change, the effects are so slow as to be almost imperceptible until it is too late: “the salt marsh covered the sands so slowly that the locals in sight of it every day didn’t notice the shift at first” (114). Now what the tourist finds “is a beach transformed into grey, mud-streaked grass, the odd sheep skull, and silence” (115). But from this apocalyptic present, the narrative voice jumps forwards in time: “one day the wind will turn again and when it does the Kent will remember itself and advance on the marsh to drown the cordgrass … new channels will emerge overnight and turn the sea-washed turf into a treacherous maze of unmapped islands … the sea will return the sand to the town and the curlews and oystercatchers will come home” (115). This ultimately hopeful scenario, though, is entirely dependent upon a change in perspective: of thinking in terms of generations rather than a single human lifespan. In dwelling upon her memories, Annette grasps at this new-found temporal awareness when she decides to convert her inheritance into a guest-house because “the Kent is on the move again. … That salt marsh might be a beach, like it used to be … People will want somewhere to stay” (269). This simple gesture towards hospitality, as opposed to the miraculousness of Richardson’s alleged powers, betokens a hospitability towards the future in which we are all subject to environmental forces that surpass our control.

To conclude, Ashworth’s novel not only explores numerous limits – in terms of gender, sexuality, class, memory, time and geography – but also reveals how deeply they are embedded. As Derrida suggests, these limitations rub up against one another, points of friction that, as Ashworth shows, also serve to galvanise other kinds of future into being. As I have demonstrated, the dialectic that Ashworth posits between the powerlessness of individuals and their ability to supply moments of kindness, as in the ritualised conduct of hospitality, can be read as an affective response to the overwhelming fact of anthropogenic climate change. Since the Anthropocene contaminates all that we do, any attempt at purification is ultimately foolhardy – it is only by realising our deep interconnections with one another and the natural world that we can come to terms with a radically transformed ecology. Seemingly simple acts of friendship amount to more than grand gestures in this new world: an enlightened form of hospitality that acknowledges not only our affinities but also our debt to pre-modern forms of knowledge, such as those practised in Ancient Greece. At the same time, Ashworth proposes a new social contract where the striated power relations of patriarchy give way to more egalitarian, non-hierarchical, matriarchal formations. Such structures not only complement the rhizomatic patterns of the natural world, they also figure a hopefulness that accepts the change and possibility to be found at the edges between things.

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Timothy Jarvis for his assistance in writing this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Paul March-Russell

Paul March-Russell is currently working on a project on landscape and contemporary British women’s fiction. He has published related work on Sarah Hall, Daisy Johnson and Lucy Wood; his article on Zoe Gilbert’s Folk is forthcoming. He has also recently published, with Andrew M. Butler, Rendezvous with Arthur C. Clarke: Centenary Essays.