Orphans on Granite Tides

Orphans on Granite Tides by Adam S. Cantwell
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I am sorely tempted to leave you with the one-word analysis of "sublime," but I can't trust that it would cut deeply enough to make an impression unless one spent a very long stretch of meditative time contemplating, studying, cognitively and emotionally meandering around and in and through what that word means. And, yet, this is the only word that (when fully realized) encompasses my feelings as a reader upon "finishing" the work. "Finishing" belied by quotation marks, because the work lingers in the psyche after the words have ceased. The journey is dreamlike, the ending an existential happening, an event that one must participate in from beginning to end to truly understand.

Rather than describe the oneiric plot, the mystery, discovery, and stark, unforgiving realizations, let me simply quote the philosophical crux of the novella, that on which all else hinges, or at least seems to hinge:

At night I lay sleepless and unspooled the secret knowledge I'd been bequeathed by the forest column. By steadfastly refusing to contemplate any reality other than what is; and then, by denying even that - the secret people create and maintain the world in all its terrible collision of potential and materiality and thought and essence, deed and intention and violence.

The secret people, and the others: the hiders and harvesters. The hiders hide but they do not shrink as the secret ones do. I thought on these potencies and felt like I lived on the surface of a soap bubble. I expected at every moment to be engulfed, that the coast would heave up under me, that forces would rend me in the full light of the day while, on the other side, my deserved demise would be noted only by secret ones who would never testify. But of course I was less than nothing to the world, and the world made its way without heeding my disasters . . .

While the story that elicits this response from the narrator and the story surrounding that story (realities within realities) may seem like a simple test of whether the reader believes in the canny or the uncanny interpretation of its contents, it is much more than that. I must admit that it took me a moment to see the folding within the unfolding, to understand that the existentialist questions posed by the work, which might appear to be boldly answered, are, in fact, not answered at all, but are themselves subsumed in an inward, curling spiral at the heart of the story (and the story within the story). When you think you understand the conflict, you will understand that you are, in fact, becoming a piece in it. Your seeming agency, like that of the characters in that of what I will call the "outer" narrative, may not be your agency at all. Your so-called "knowledge" may be utter ignorance. Who can tell?

Be careful. Do not mistake the end of the story as the end. Reflect back on what you have read, how the story within the story reflects the outer narrative and, indeed, the world at large. Then, you will begin to understand that the only word to describe Orphans on Granite Tides is, in the end (if there is such a thing), "sublime".

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