At first, the protagonist of Matthew Olshan’s novel Marshlands is defined by who and what he isn’t: He isn’t a doctor, though he once was. He isn’t able to write—not in his journal, nor on his cell walls (they have been repainted). He isn’t wearing his uniform, though the guards hand it to him upon his release from prison. He isn’t described. His crime isn’t detailed. He isn’t even named. So who is he?
That question grows in the reader’s mind as Marshland’s protagonist, suddenly released after 20 years in prison, wanders the “Capitol” in search of food and spare change. The city feels abstract, unknowable, and much is made of the protagonist’s alienation: a former doctor, he even wonders whether there is “such a thing as surgery anymore.” Eventually, he’s attacked during a protest outside the Natural Museum. Rescuing him is a museum worker named Thali, curator of a controversial exhibit documenting the customs of the “marshmen,” a tribal culture that has been more or less eradicated. The protagonist knows this culture well: for over a decade, he was part of the military force occupying the marshlands, where he worked as a physician.
Olshan’s trick in Marshlands is to tell the story backwards. In the first part, the protagonist attempts to find a place in modern society, the third-person narration polished with objectivity. In the second part, the protagonist takes over as narrator, outlining the course of events that landed him prison 21 years earlier. In the third and final part, Olshan moves back another 11 years, dealing with his main character’s earliest investments in the marshlands, back when he hoped to treat its inhabitants “only for bragging rights back home.”
The structure allows Olshan to move from the abstraction of the Capitol to the precision of the marshlands, full of rich detail. (Even the museum exhibit of the marshes in the novel’s first part is more vivid—with its “bellow of water buffalo” and “feeling of morning after a great windstorm”—than anything else in the Capitol.) Fiction that moves backwards in time—whether Harold Pinter’s Betrayal or Christopher Nolan’s Memento—often milks the structure for irony. Marshlands is no exception. The reader moves into the protagonist’s past, holding knowledge of what will become of him, while he blunders onward, oblivious to the future.
But here, I have a difficult time understanding the protagonist’s motivation—especially in the novel’s second part, when he becomes deeply involved in the plight of a grieving mother for reasons I found unconvincing. With its reverse chronological structure, Marshlands favors irony over characterization. I itch for a fourth section—something that returns to the present and connects all I have learned about the narrator’s past to his post-prison life.
However, the novel excels in its disturbing presentation of life under an occupying force. The soldiers commit numerous acts of violence, of course, slaughtering, beating, and torturing the men and women of the marshes. But Olshan has an eye for smaller indignities too, as when occupiers tear the headscarf from a laundress and taunt her with it; after all, the soldiers believe that marshwomen have “all the requisite parts to be useful on a Saturday night,” but “aren’t fully human.”
Marshlands is Olshan’s first novel for adults, and it is very grownup indeed, in both its content and tone. I don’t know what Olshan’s young adult fiction is like, but here, he aspires to high-minded, important literature. It’s chilly novel, sometimes lacking even the fire of outrage. Each sentence is stately and refined, and Olshan never loses his shit as a writer, which maybe material like this requires. I read Marshlands slowly, sometimes approving of its measured approach to madness, sometimes rankled by it. It depended on my mood. At one point, Olshan describes the nearby singing of a marshman: “the meaning of a monotonous song like this has a tendency to bend itself to one’s mood.” There, he comes very close to describing his own novel.
