In photographs, the moving dust looks like a mountain range, or an avalanche. Black Sunday, April 14 1935, was a clear day on the central plains of the US. There had been years of drought: farming communities had tilled the soil beyond its capacity to renew itself. Mid-afternoon, the temperature dropped; birds chattered and the horizon turned black.
“The onrushing cloud, the darkness, and the thick, choking dirt, made this storm one of terror and the worst, while it lasted, ever known here,” runs an entry in the log of the national weather bureau. This was the end of what became known as the Dust Bowl era. In the wake of the Great Depression, from 1931 until the rains returned and farming practices improved, half a million people were left homeless by the dust; 2.5mn left Kansas, Colorado, Texas and Nebraska, never to return.
And yet, with the exception of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath appearing on school curricula, compared with other national disasters the Dust Bowl has fallen into a kind of memory hole. Christopher Nolan briefly revisited it in Interstellar: the interview clips of elderly survivors of his sci-fi peril are real people, taken from Ken Burns’ 2012 documentary The Dust Bowl.
Yet we are all familiar now with climate crisis, whether our homes are lost to floods in Jakarta or to fires in Los Angeles. Karen Russell’s second novel is a powerful attempt to pull this largely forgotten catastrophe back into the present. Her first, Swamplandia! — a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer — was set in the Florida Everglades, and like its successor weaves together a kind of rural American magic realism with passionate care for the natural world we’re so busy destroying.
The Antidote of the title is a young woman who has found her way to Uz, Nebraska. Named after the native land of suffering Job, the town may be fictional but it is perfectly representative, a community seemingly close-knit but riven by poverty, shame and even murder.
The Antidote is a magical repository of memory: townsfolk can tell her their secrets and know they’ll be stored safely away, either to be buried forever or retrieved in a better time. Evil doings are concealed; happy memories kept safe.
But the Antidote too has her secrets: she was once an inhabitant of the (very real) Milford Industrial Home for Unwed Mothers, where her baby boy was whisked away from her — stillborn, she was told, but her sixth sense tells her he is alive.
But on Black Sunday her magical powers disappear. Fortunately, Asphodel Oletsky — “Dell” — is there to lend a hand with her persuasive powers of fabrication. Dell is the niece of Harp Oletsky, a farmer whose crops are mysteriously spared the drought, sprouting verdantly when all around is parched; he takes in Dell when her mother is murdered by the spectre known as the “Lucky Rabbit’s Foot Killer” for the sinister token he leaves with his victims.
Dell and the Antidote — we discover her real name and history as the novel progresses — form a bond, and the lies they tell their clients when they ask the Antidote to retrieve stored memories resonate against other, more sinister falsehoods: the justifications for the way indigenous people were removed from these lands, or the true identity of Dell’s mother’s killer.
All the while, Cleo Allfrey moves among these Nebraskans: a Black woman, she is a photographer, part of the government’s Resettlement Administration’s project documenting rural poverty during the Depression — among their number in reality were Dorothea Lange, Gordon Parks and Walker Evans. More magic is to come: for Allfrey discovers her camera is taking what she calls “quantum photographs” that show the past or the future, but never the present day.
If it sounds like a lot, it is. There’s also a talking scarecrow and a chatty cat. All these strands align together at the end, when injustice is revealed and sorrow — to a certain extent — healed. And there is lyrical writing here: “The dust began to lift and curtain. The wind bansheed across the prairie with nothing to split its tall loony cry.”
But the novel is weighed down by its political messaging. “You could widen the lens and say: this land is blowing because we stole it from the people who knew how to care for it,” Harp Oletsky says. “Before we uprooted the prairie, we uprooted human beings.” This is absolutely, undeniably and shockingly true; and in the rapacious 21st-century United States, it needs saying. But too often Russell’s engaging characters feel too much like mouthpieces for their author’s opinions — and these opinions, indeed, can seem anachronistic in the setting of rural Nebraska in the 1930s. Russell’s novel loses some of its magic at the service of too-transparent aims.
The Antidote by Karen Russell Chatto & Windus £18.99/Knopf $30 432 pages
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