The Brooklyn Rail

Not long ago, I found myself near Edinburgh, in a church dating back to the twelfth century. Inside, it was so silent it buzzed, like the sound of all that time had been compressed into stone. I kept thinking of that church, cold and quiet, as I read Josephine Rowe’s Little World, a compact, sacred marvel of a book about a child “maybe-saint” in Australia. Rowe has a habit of dropping pronouns and articles, truncating sentences; it gives her writing a spare quality, something like grace. “People once believed that stones could grow,” Rowe writes, “and why not? Limestone was just life heaped up on life heaped up on life and then pressed down hard over millennia,” and Rowe’s writing, too, has a compressed, consecrated, chronostratigraphic sound.

The book follows the little body of this maybe-saint across oceans, from Panama to Nauru to Australia, and from one custodian to another. The people who find themselves in the saint’s path are not believers, exactly—but “still. Catholic or not. You don’t turn away a saint.” There is a sense of holy mystery to the story: doesn’t a maybe-saint seem holier, in some way, for all that maybe-ness?

Great violence was done to this little girl. When she was alive, which was not, really, so long ago, she was already familiar with sexual violence. She had a defense mechanism: she was “famous at crazy,” an act so good “she might have been an actress, might have got around the world that way. But it happened to her anyhow.” It is a cruel irony that her body, in death, is what the Church calls incorruptible. She does not live through it, but neither is it quite the end for her. Semi-conscious in her small coffin, she picks up swear words from sailors and holds onto hope that a story they tell, “of a great wave that had come once and would again,” will come true. “She could wait,” and indeed, not quite sentient, she spends her time waiting. “It was a curse in some parts of the world,” Rowe writes: “May the earth not eat you.”

But then, this is a book about the afterlives of things. When the book opens, the little saint has just come to Orrin Bird, a retired engineer, as a bequest from a former colleague and erstwhile lover. Orrin met this man on Nauru, where he went to work in the phosphate mining industry, which “made other, distant men rich, other land rich, and the land he stood on poor, snaggled, Martian.” This little book is full of disasters, personal and tectonic—the trespass of land and of bodies, the ravaging of the planet and the way it ravages in return, with floods and fires and pandemics and earthquakes. Orrin recalls the story his father used to tell about the eruption of Krakatoa; his father remembered “the persistent ring around the sun, and how folk then spoke of the End. But it wasn’t the End. So, there you have it, his father said: sometimes it looks like the End, but it isn’t. It was the End somewhere, put in Orrin’s mother.” As the literary critic Frank Kermode once wrote, in his book The Sense of an Ending, “no longer imminent, the End is immanent.” Little worlds are ending all the time.

The book’s second section follows Matti, a woman in her mid-thirties, on a road trip with a younger couple in the 1970s. They drive through Australia, skirting “the parched bed of what was once sea, now studded with opalized remnants of Cretaceous sea creatures stranded far inland—fossils corresponding to Indigenous lore of great tidal waves and floods, knowledge that was already ancient at the time of the Noah stories.” The End, that is, but not the end.

The younger girls are well-off, with wealthy parents waiting for them at home; Matti works cleaning the houses in which girls like them live. She got pregnant young and found herself at a home for girls like her; she fell in love with one of them. When she gave the child up for adoption and left the home, she lost that love and her baby all at once. She has made her peace with loss and longing; she grew up with parents who made their scars from war into a permanent penchant for scarcity. “She was raised with Hunger and it will never, never leave her,” Rowe writes. “Even so. Even so, she still feels chosen by moments of Grace—being filled or enfolded or directed by it. She wonders to whom or what the Grace belongs. Hunger, she sometimes believes.”

The drive takes them to Orrin’s abandoned little house, where Matti finds “a slim leather-bound collection of poems, Yeats, heavily underlined.” She pockets it. Kermode wrote that Yeats is “certainly an apocalyptic poet, but he does not take it literally … All the same, like us, he believed [apocalyptic fictions] in some fashion.” Shortly after, Matti finds the “girl in a box,” still semi-conscious, still incorruptible in that empty house, and she burns the pages of poems. As the smoke rises, Rowe quotes from “The Song of Wandering Aengus”:

But something rustled on the floor
And someone called me by my name.

Matti—a nickname her companions gave her, short for Mathilde—seems to recognize herself in the girl. There is something they share. Matti is the kind of woman “who allows herself to be renamed,” and the saint, too, has lost her own name, taking on the names given to her. Matti has the sense that “it is for her alone to right something. And also that it is far too late for right.” She steals off with the saint, driving down the coast to the sea, where she gives the girl up to the water, to the wave.

Matti believes that this ecstatic moment, offering the girl up to the ocean, to a final rest, is the beginning of the end for her. She has a sense that it is the start of her last act; she believes she will live to only fifty-four. But she is, Rowe writes, merely “young enough to think herself old, oblivious to just how much life there will be left to make use of, to invent meaning and purpose for.” It is not quite the End for her.

The book’s third section is set during the pandemic, in a tiny Australian town. The section’s narrator, a young woman whose girlfriend just left her to spend the sickness elsewhere, explains that the town is made up of “flat-earthers, doomsday prophets, climate migrants. All moved by some tidy compulsion to see out the end of the world from the end of the world.” She is especially compelled by one resident, an older woman called Tilde, who speaks in fragments of Yeats and claims to have once driven a child-saint to the sea. Tilde, in this last act, is in the ICU and the climate change-induced threat of fires hangs in the air. As Orrin’s parents put it, sometimes it looks like the End, but it isn’t—and yet it is the End for many. The book closes on a question: if the world is ending all the time, “are we in the Before or the After?”