Chard and Beans
by Archie Cornish
Charco Press, 212pp, ISBN 9781913867928, £11.99
There’s a moment near the beginning of Federico Falco’s The Plains where the narrator, tired after a day of digging and planting his garden, has a rest. It’s January, near Zapiola in Buenos Aires province, on the pampas — the vast, flat grassland that spreads in a shallow half-moon from the coasts of Argentina and Uruguay into the South American continent. The narrator relishes the inactivity: ‘the pleasure of not doing anything, semidarkness at siesta hour, reclining to read on the floor, bare back against cold tiles’.
It was January for me, too, when I read this scene, in a draughty Victorian house in north London. I shivered involuntarily at the thought of lying against the tiles. We are much more tightly bound and conditioned by seasonal habits and rhythms than our big cities lead us to think. The heat might not fluctuate much in London, but even in New York, with its savage seasonal alternations, you can stay in your apartment and (kind of) control the temperature. If you grew up in the northern hemisphere, you’ll never fully come to terms with the notion of January as a midsummer month.
No metropolitan blocking out of the natural world and its rhythms is possible, as Falco’s narrator knows, in a small house on the plains. He recently broke up with his long-term partner, Ciro, with whom he built a home and a life in the capital. He’s left Buenos Aires to take a year-long pause in the pampas, sensing that Ciro’s decision has uprooted not just his domestic life but also his writing, and his entire identity. (The narrator is called Fede; it’s left to us to decide how autobiographical his narration is.) He plans to lose himself in the repetitive, therapeutic labour of planting a vegetable garden, and has sought out a flat place where nothing much happens. But while the backwater anonymity soothes his bruised heart, he’s also grateful for the solidity of the landscape.
Sparsity of feature is never allowed to stand, as it does in Noreen Masud’s recent A Flat Place, as a solipsistic metaphor for inner experience — or for a dreamed landscape of the mind, as in Gerald Murnane’s 1982 novel, also called The Plains, about the parts of inner Australia so remote (to their colonisers) that they seem semi-imaginary, and stimulate an infinite regress of further imaginings. On Falco’s pampas (subject of early books by celebrated Anglo-Argentine nature-writer W.H. Hudson, briefly mentioned), nature is reassuringly real, stubbornly unassimilable to metaphor: there’s work to be done.
This is Falco’s first novel published in English, after a translation of his short story collection Un Cementerio Perfecto appeared in 2021 as A Perfect Cemetery. Jennifer Croft, who won the International Booker Prize with Olga Tokarczuk for Flights (2017), is the translator of either book, published by Edinburgh’s Charco Press. Charco specialises in English translations of Latin American contemporary literature, thus rendering the Atlantic less of a gulf (charco in Spanish is a pond or puddle).
In ‘The Hares’, one of five stories in A Perfect Cemetery, an ageing man deserts his village for a cave in the hills above it. He’s done with civilisation, for the moment, and wants to live simply and autonomously. In the title story, which like ‘The Hares’ takes place in Falco’s native and hillier Córdoba province, a landscape architect arrives in a small town to bestow on it a long-awaited cemetery. Falco is interested in attempts by countryside dwellers to impose order on the vast landscape around them, as a way of making sense of their own lives. Fede’s project, the garden in the middle of the pampas, sits between, on the one hand, an effort to disappear like the King of the Hares into nature, and on the other the fastidious shaping of a lifeless, perfectly still cemetery. Fede wants to wrest something back from nature, in order to repair the terrible devastation at his core, but he wants nature’s own life to sweep him up too.
It's physically draining, and frequently seems thankless. The birds eat the chard and the ants eat the marigold. Kale thrives but the peas don’t come to much, for no discernible reason. Fede only half-knows what he’s doing, relying on his own rural upbringing, and in particular on the habit of solitary attentiveness into which he slipped on childhood visits to his grandparents. He builds tall frames of cane and wire for broad beans, but discovers when they sprout that he’s planted dwarf beans — he must have mixed up the packets, he realises – and feels self-conscious about the pointless frames ‘stuck into the ground like inverted Vs, like teepee poles’. His neighbours are supportive but standoffish, reserving judgment on whether he truly belongs among them. Unlike Spanish the English language, he notes wryly, affords its speakers the distinction of ‘solitude’ and ‘loneliness’: as if it’s that easy.
In the gaps — at night, during downpours, and in the wicked heat of noonday — Fede ponders the loss of Ciro. Resisting any analysis grander in scope than his kitchen garden, Fede’s musings come in short sections, fragments of thought that preserve a jotted-down quality even as they’re written up. But one of the novel’s longest paragraphs is an anatomy of the lost apartment in Buenos Aires, itemised in heartbreaking detail: ‘the drawer where we kept the lubricant, the condoms; our bed; the iPad on his side, resting on the floor’. In a place so thoroughly lived in, even portable objects have their habitual movements. Ciro outgrew the intensity of Fede’s attachment, feeling saturated by him like an over-watered plant; he loves Fede, but couldn’t take it any longer.
Memories of the relationship blend with recollections of family history: tranquil childhood scenes in the Córdoba countryside country around Cabrera, but also the story of Fede’s ancestors. The ‘first Juan’ in a line of Juans emigrated to Argentina from the Italian Alps; on disembarking the boat in Buenos Aires he sat down on some ‘canvas-wrapped bundles’, not knowing what to do. Fede’s grandparents spoke the Piedmontese of Juan’s homeland in Italy, though in the present generation it’s dwindled to just a handful of treasured words, left by Croft elegantly untranslated. In late May Fede goes home to visit his parents in Cabrera. A coming-out scene, devoid of malice but devastatingly impassive, takes place in the side-by-side enclosure of the car. Falco very skilfully shows the desolation of losing queer love in places where it is necessarily hard-won. Coming out, for a protagonist born in the Seventies in small-town Argentina, is a journey as fraught and requiring of fortitude as the immigrant’s lonely voyage from Piedmont to the southern hemisphere.
The second structuring arc emerges from the present setting of the pampas rather than biographical and ancestral trajectories. Fede’s preferred road into town passes a field in which a dense block of forest sits in an uncannily perfect rectangle, as if ‘cut out and deposited here, in the pampas, like a piece of cake’. There’s a gate, but for ages Fede sees no one entering or leaving; later, he spies smoke rising from the rectangle’s centre. Someone lives in there, in a state of retreat deeper and more permanent than Fede’s, but it’s a while before we find out who.
Deliberately devoid of overt drama, Falco’s narration does just enough to cultivate and sustain our curiosity. These two narrative threads — one retrospective, and one propulsive — bind the descriptions of digging and pruning, planting and transplanting, stretching over them like a trellis of slack running wire. The intricate concision of Falco’s stories is loosened by the expansiveness of the novel; meanwhile, the novel’s sweeping, social gaze is refined down to a small-scale and excluded vision of the classic short story.
Fede’s exile is not as complete or involuntary as that of Robinson Crusoe’s protagonist. But like Robinson, Fede records his labours, writing in order to find some externalised, empirical image of his inner situation – measuring himself in small triumphs and defeats, both against and in concert with nature. Robinson Crusoe is a difficult read. Shorn of the context of the novel’s rise, and Defoe’s clever marshalling of an early 18th-century fascination with truth-claims and potential hoaxes — it couldn’t be true, could it? — the first English novel is also one of the most boring in the canon. On Robinson goes, accounting for himself, seemingly forever. Falco’s touch, mercifully, is much lighter, and Croft renders his diaristic sentences in a spare but shrewd and sometimes musical style:
The sun sets at half past five. By six, it’s dark.
Sadness of winter in the countryside.
Long winter nights in the countryside.
Some sentences have a main verb; some are filled with nothing but nouns, things, the syntax content not to do anything but point to what is happening beyond the sentence, in the tangible world (‘all is solved by doing’, Fede tells himself). But that mournful repetition of ‘countryside’, offset by the slight variation in Croft’s use of the word ‘winter’, first as a noun and then as a pseudo-adjective, achieves an unobtrusive, poetic poise.
Still, the planting passages are easy to rush, the mind trampling over them or just brushing them aside. Trying to make myself slow down, I thought of Wendy Erskine’s admission in a recent interview, typically stylish and breezy, that when she reads fiction she will ‘often skip descriptions of flora and fauna’, as she ‘can’t be bothered a lot of the time with that’. Falco seems to anticipate this reaction: Fede, after all, is used to feeling split, having always existed between a rural world in which conversation is mostly about the weather, and a metropolitan one in which people talk of films and books. The diaristic style keeps the descriptions of planting brief, and the narrative threads stitch them together — but Falco doesn’t try too hard to grab our attention. We are welcome, the novel seems to say, to breeze over the chard and beans; we do so at our own risk.
Paying attention, learning to discriminate between species and types, knowing how and when to do things: these are key aspects of a literary genre much older than the novel, even in its early manifestations as a diaristic bookkeeping of the self. Between his pastoral Eclogues, about the longings of shepherds in an imagined idyll, and his epic Aeneid, Virgil wrote the Georgics, a collection of four long poems about how to cultivate the land: how and when to plant, how to recognise and prune trees, how to keep livestock and bees.
Early modern culture rediscovered the georgic, drawing on Virgil, as well as on the calendrical Works and Days of the ancient Greek poet Hesiod. Its heyday as a mode came in the 18th century, when long earnest poems in several languages on how to make the land profitable were published. Virgil’s vision was an explicitly political one — in the aftermath of a chaotic civil war, Rome would heal its disaffected citizens by providing them plots of land; they in turn would make the empire so rich and self-sufficient, from the land’s produce, that another war would seem too costly. It was easy, in 18th-century Europe, to attach this vision of cultivation for the sake of national prosperity to the burgeoning colonial projects in distant lands, including Argentina.
Colonial dispossession is too distant a memory to play any part in Fede’s family story, but the implication of georgic in the enterprise of European settler colonialism has tainted it, more than both the pastoral and — strangely — the epic. In recent years British literary critics, especially those who practice ‘ecocriticism’, have turned with renewed interest to the georgic; to sceptics, this might indicate a British tendency, lingering decades after the dissolution of a famously maritime empire, to confine imperialism to the distant discoveries of epic, to push it safely beyond the horizon and forget about the plantations.
But it also shows the surprising fruitfulness, for all its imperial entanglement, of georgic in the age of climate change. We know, by now, the risks of the pastoral idyll, the vision of nature as something purely to recharge in, with no life and certainly no inhabitants of its own. Georgic confronts us with a wholesale rejection of this pastoral separation of humans from nature; it exhorts us to get our hands dirty, to accept that our place is in the natural order.
Questions remain, of course. What if the plantation is small and temporary, designed only for subsistence and not for economic progress? Is gardening georgic, or does it tend back to pastoral? Nevertheless, The Plains confirms the georgic intuition that nature’s transformative magic comes more from engagement than from admiration. Fede’s commitment to his daily tasks — moving forward with new planting, while also maintaining and repairing what he already has — acknowledges the hard externality of nature, its indifference to his suffering, but also the power of involvement with that indifference to alleviate suffering.
At the novel’s close, after a meaningful journey to the centre of the rectangle, Fede prepares to head back to the city. He takes stock of his garden, but also of the things he has learnt along the way. Radishes, if they’re to flourish, must be planted in moonlight. There’s no moment of distilled epiphany about the loss of Ciro, about what happened and why: Falco is far too sophisticated to fob his readers off so cheaply. Fede just feels generally invigorated — more juice in the tank, ready to go on figuring it out. He realises that his garden has helped him not just in its capacity as a wholesome but essentially simple task. It’s also something he has made, akin to the apartment with Ciro. Both are painstaking, considered constructions whose value endures after their disassembly or winter decline. In Hannah Arendt’s terms, he realises that the garden has been work, as well as labour.
The only thing I didn’t immediately like about this moving and beautifully made novel was the element of autofiction, the way we are invited to conflate Fede with his author. No games of cat and mouse are played with the reader, in the manner of Roth or Nabokov, about the reliability of the narrator and his putative identity with the real author of the book. We sense that Falco, by contrast, has called his protagonist Fede simply to take invention, and all its potential deceptions, off the table.
The risk of this kind of autofiction is to set up a false dichotomy between imaginativeness and authenticity, as if an elaborately fictional scheme is necessarily a compromise on truth-telling, of an aesthetic as well as a factual kind. But the more I read, the more I saw the particular usefulness of the autofictional move. The possibility of Fede’s realness, his identity with Federico, accentuates the realness of the broad beans and marigolds: we’re left with a sense of nature as tangibly — and, in the context of the novel, transgressively — material.
The Plains becomes a work, then, not so much of overt climate fiction, constantly pointing out its own sensitivity to the climate crisis, as of nature fiction, suffused with intimate awareness of the natural world and the consoling power of its detailed vitality but also its stubborn indifference. The enduring sense of nature as real, unassimilable to metaphor, steers Falco’s novel away from the solipsistic traps of some contemporary nature writing: it’s all about Fede, but the landscape is not part of Fede.
Yet if The Plains succeeds from an ecocritical perspective, it also illustrates the structural challenges posed by the climate crisis to the contemporary novel. If nature is unassimilable to metaphor, it’s also — as Fede acknowledges and ponders — unassimilable to conventional narrative shapes. Like the crises afflicting it, nature is too open and expansive to be contained under the few acts of a plot’s arc.
One solution is to go big, as Richard Powers does in The Overstory, scaling up from a human temporal perspective to the slow, epochal duration of the life-cycle of trees. On the other hand, the climate-conscious novel might scale itself down, shrinking to a single isolated perspective before whom nature’s vast complexity appears as minutely observed detail — like Fede, in The Plains, or like the narrator of Charlotte Wood’s Stone Yard Devotional, who retreats in despair from her job in conservation to a convent in the Australian countryside. The latter option usually makes for better novels: I enjoyed The Plains much more than The Overstory, whose gigantic scale dwarfs the humanity of its characters, ultimately sapping interest in them.
In the hands of another owner, or described by a writer more explicitly focused on the climate crisis, a garden like Fede’s might start out conceived in activist terms, as a launchpad for a new way of living and working on the land. But it could easily slip to something more modest: a holdout, a refuge from which to weather the coming storm.
How could a novel as fine-grained as Falco’s scale itself up to the planetary magnitude of the climate crisis, without compromising on the delicacy of its psychological detail? In The Plains, Falco doesn’t attempt such a scaling-up, and so this is not his problem. But for us, who read novels and must try — even at the remove of the air-conditioned metropolis — to reckon with the climate crisis, it might be the problem.