He had told her his transgressions, and she had recorded them to the best of her ability. But it wasn’t safe or simple to take on the burdens of another person’s history, all those sins and vacancies. [loc. 710]
The unnamed protagonist of Scribe is a woman living alone in the house she once shared with her sister, a healer who was reputed to have miraculous powers. The woman makes a living writing letters, which are more therapeutic or confessional than they are simple communications. She lives precariously, allowing the Uninvited -- travellers, or maybe migrants -- to camp on her land, but reliant on the goodwill of local despot Billy Kingery. When a man calling himself Hendricks comes to ask her to write a letter, and to read it aloud at a certain crossroads, her precarious life begins to topple.
This is a short, poetic, unsettling novel. The nameless protagonist is a hard woman: she's had a hard life, and she gives up her secrets slowly, and perhaps only to herself. Hendricks only gradually reveals his own history, though he seems a decent sort of fellow as he kills and skins a wildcat, and promises to chop wood for her. The setting is sketched in lightly: it's a rural area, some time after a war (or a series of wars) that set brother against brother: after the wars, the plagues came, and the people who survived hold to 'the hard, forged links of memory'. A post-apocalyptic future, then, with echoes of the American Civil War: a rough, lawless country, where trickery and greed trump good intentions.
The prose is glorious: "He repeated his invocation, slowly, sonorously—with all the bitter syllables mortised into place. What a great mansion it is, she thought. What a stout and foolish mansion is the human heart." [loc. 229] I don't think I enjoyed it -- there was too much darkness at its heart, echoing back through generations -- but scraps of it have lodged and will remain with me. And it is, in the end, about how a person's history becomes a story, how it forms an arc.
It was all a writer could do: lay out the consequences of a person’s choices. [loc. 1684]
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