Brad Kessler’s North is a novel about being rooted in a sense of place — and uprooted. It opens with a May blizzard forecast for northern Vermont. Christopher Gathreaux, the cloistered abbot of Blue Mountain Monastery, rushes to cover his precious Northern Spy saplings.
Out plowing the next morning, Teddy Fletcher, the monastery groundskeeper and a disabled veteran of the war on terror, discovers a car in the ditch. He brings the two passengers to the monastery’s guesthouse. One of them is Sahro Abdi Muse, a young Somali refugee. Her hopes of finding asylum in the U.S. recently reached a dead end when her case was assigned to “‘the two-percent judge’… out of the hundreds of cases he heard each month, he granted asylum to less than two percent.”
The year is 2017, and the national climate isn’t friendly to people like Sahro — “everyone’s plans [had been] thrown into doubt since talk of a Muslim Ban,” Kessler writes. Having removed her U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement ankle monitor, Sahro is officially a fugitive. Her companion, a volunteer transporting her to Canada, leaves her in the monks’ care after their accident.
What happens when the paths of a monk, a refugee and a war veteran converge? While Christopher has chosen a life of rootedness and seclusion, Sahro suffers from the trauma of repeatedly being uprooted. For his part, Teddy has returned to his roots after experiencing his own upheaval overseas.
Kessler knows something about being rooted. Besides a novelist, he’s a farmer and cheesemaker who chronicled his life as an urban transplant in rural Vermont in the 2010 memoir Goat Song: A Seasonal Life, a Short History of Herding, and the Art of Making Cheese. The ag experience shows in his descriptions of Christopher’s orchard husbandry. The author’s Sandgate homestead is called Northern Spy Farm, and North includes an affectionate tribute to that apple variety and the history of its oddball name.
The question at the heart of North is simple: Will Sahro’s hosts help her get to Canada? Or will they uphold the law of the land? The answer is never much in doubt. Christopher is a liberal Catholic who believes it’s his biblical duty to shelter pilgrims and migrants. His foil, the more conservative Brother Bruno, expresses opposition but soon vanishes from the story. As for Teddy, while Kessler keeps us in some suspense about whether he’ll help, he makes it clear the young man has a charitable heart.
Conflict is not North‘s strong suit, at least in its central narrative. The story of Sahro’s stay at the monastery feels like an instructive parable, its conclusion foregone. Its static quality evokes ekphrasis, the poetic description of a visual artwork — a gorgeous example of which Kessler includes in a flashback to Christopher’s earlier life as a New York artist.
What happens when the paths of a monk, a refugee and a war veteran converge?
The story comes alive, however, in the chapters devoted to the characters’ pasts. These occupy a sizable portion of North‘s pages, as Kessler traces the lengthy paths that brought Sahro and Christopher to their meeting place.
While the 2017 sections can read a bit stilted, the flashbacks abound in evocative and musical prose. The passages describing Christopher’s conversion experience in Rome, for instance, are almost Tolstoyan: “It was as if those days he saw too much around him and felt a quaking coming off everything and everyone he met, God seething on every surface, bubbling out of stones.”
Kessler excels at showing how faith roots itself organically in a person’s experience of the world. That’s true not just for Christopher but also for Sahro, a devout Muslim who finds an almost sacred power in stories. In ICE detention, learning English by reading Maya Angelou, “She went among the pages now like a butterfly finding pollen in each fold of the book, between the paragraphs, words sticking to her on her way in and out of each sentence.”
Besides passages like that one, Sahro’s flashback narrative lends North the nail-biting suspense that is absent from the main story. Her migrant journey — from Africa to the Middle East and up through South and Central America — is riveting and harrowing. Readers will root for her.
Sahro’s story shares a superficial plot point — a ride on the Mexican freight-train network colloquially known as La Bestia — with Jeanine Cummins’ best-selling American Dirt. That 2020 novel touched off a debate about who can and should tell immigrants’ stories. Many argued that white authors inevitably tend to misrepresent people from marginalized groups, speaking over the voices of the people on whose behalf they claim to speak.
In an afterword, Kessler addresses the issue directly. “In attempting to write this fiction, I was always painfully aware of trespass and the cycle of harm perpetuated by White writers pretending to speak for, or somehow represent, people of color,” he writes.
Also in that afterword, the author thanks friends and readers in the Somali community who lent their expertise to the book, with particular recognition for the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants in Colchester. Many Somali writers are included in the bibliography.
Despite its power as a depiction of a monk’s vocation and a refugee’s plight, North never quite clicks as a complete novel. The central narrative pales by comparison with the flashbacks. Teddy’s character remains a bit of a cipher, and the messages can feel heavy-handed. For instance, Christopher wonders about himself and Sahro: “Weren’t they part of the same system, no matter how separate each seemed on the surface?”
But that moral has urgency, however shopworn it may be. Sahro’s plight eventually forces Christopher to acknowledge that there’s no place on Earth where human beings can live in true seclusion from conflict and change. By opening with that blighting spring storm and explicitly tying it to the climate crisis, Kessler suggests we’ve reached a point in human history when we sorely need a reminder that we’re all in this together.
From North
In winter it would already be dark at the monastery during Compline, but in spring the sun lingered longer on the mountain and the office became the hour of sunsets and birdsong at the end of the day. Compline came from the Latin word for “complete,” and the office was a time for reflection and preparation for the coming night. In the Order’s tradition it was also a daily practice of preparing for death and eternity.
The monks sang the plainchant hymn “Now in the Fading Light of Day.” That evening they sang it straight, a capella, and not in folktale fashion as they did some nights, accompanied by Brother Luke on a classical guitar. When the fourth psalm began, Christopher tried to relax into the chant but found himself not ready; the chant was a train he couldn’t catch; it had already left the station. Chanting was not like singing; you couldn’t just leap into it. When you chanted, you followed the breath. When you sang, you followed the beat. One was contemplation in the moment; the other reflection on the future. You had to set yourself aside when you chanted, your ego and all your musical markers. You had to become a fish in a school and follow the drift and swell of the line. Legato was key — lightness. But Christopher was preoccupied with Sahro in the Guest House. And then another worry returned: his apples in the orchard — he hadn’t checked on them all day.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Northern Lights”
This article appears in Nov 3-9, 2021.
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