Under the Harrow by Mark DunnMacAdam/Cage, 2010

I read and really liked Ella Minnow Pea back in 2004 (I am a sucker for epistolary novels and also for wordplay) but I hadn’t sought out or heard about anything else by Mark Dunn until I saw Jenny’s post about Under the Harrow back in June. The promise of another quirkily charming book by Mark Dunn was very exciting, and I’m glad to say that, though I initially had a hard time getting into this book, by the end I was pretty won over.

Under the Harrow is the story of a place called Dingley Dell, which seems a lot like Dickensian England, except that the events of the story take place in 2003, in a valley whose precise location isn’t known to its residents. (They’ve figured out their latitude from the angle of the sun, but don’t know their longitude, though some guess that they’re probably in Ohio or Pennsylvania.) At the start of the book, eleven-year-old Newman Trimmers, nephew of the book’s narrator, runs away “to see the world” (13). Which is a problem, because no one who isn’t foolish leaves Dingley Dell: few of those who leave for “the Outland” ever return, and those who do make it back are invariably hospitalized for madness—some infection from the world beyond the valley apparently afflicts the brains of those Dinglians who venture forth into it. The valley, meanwhile, has quite an odd history: an orphanage was founded there in 1882; in 1890, all the adults of the valley left, leaving behind a letter explaining that there was a terrible pandemic, that one of them was infected and the rest exposed, and that they had to leave for the safety of the children. Who, incidentally, have a broad enough age-range and have been taught enough trades and vocational skills that they manage to survive. The children and their descendants build a society around the trades they’ve been taught and around the small library that’s been left with them (the ninth edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica, the Bible, a dictionary, an atlas, and the works of Charles Dickens). At some point they begin to trade with some Outlanders who have, apparently, survived the pandemic, but actual contact with the outside world beyond business exchange never happens, and the society of the valley continues along more or less Dickensianly for decades… until Newman’s flight to the Outland, along with the mysterious death of the wife of a rich villager, starts a string of questions and events into motion.

The story is framed as Newman’s uncle’s writing of the tale after the fact (he’s a writer by trade, and, indeed, a journalist, so it makes sense that he would have interviewed everyone involved to get the whole picture), and many of the chapters that center around Dingley Dell and its denizens aim to capture the speech and style of the valley world. This means that the narrative is often funny/ridiculous, so ridiculous that I nearly abandoned the book entirely: it’s just so over the top, and until the point at which we start to hear more about where Newman went and what he saw after he left the valley, I wasn’t really engaged with the story. Passages like the below were amusing, but didn’t seem amusing enough to carry the rest of a 500+-page-book. Luckily, the story gets exciting, so the jokes didn’t have to carry the book:

Malvina Potterson continued to bubble and babble as she led me inside and into the fat armchair that her husband had occupied up to the very moment of his death and then a few inconvenient hours thereafter. Betty followed along, her head bobbing, one hand brushing aside a nettlesome fly that had entered the domicile expressly to torment all of her facial projections as it sought a potential landing place, and in the end achieved a small measure of victory in the annals of insectival annoyance by prompting the beleaguered young woman to swat herself hard upon the nose. (30)


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