Fall is a time of nestling in and this fall has given me the gift of three different stories, all about survival in the sometimes very small worlds we call home: Louis Paxton’s film The Incomer, Geraldine Brooks’ novel Year of Wonders, and Jesse McKeown’s limited series Below on Netflix. They’re dramatically different—The Incomer focuses on two siblings who have grown up alone on a Scottish island and are now being asked to leave, Year of Wonders tells the story of an English town that closed itself off when it was infected with plague in the 17th century, and Below centers on a small Newfoundland town that’s being tormented by a giant squid—but there’s something to be gleaned from experiencing them together.
The Wrench of Relocation
The first obvious tie between The Incomer and Below is that both are stories of relocations from beloved homes. In The Incomer, Isla (yes, it was both amazing and weird to hear my name called over and over in this movie) and Sandy have been alone on their island since their father died when they were small. Now the council wants them moved off the island so it can be turned into a bird sanctuary, so Daniel (the brilliant Domhnall Gleeson) is sent to try and roust them. Below begins with a flashback of the Penney family towing their home across a bay because they have been relocated, and in the present, the remaining family members and their new community are faced with voting whether to accept a second relocation.
Both of these projects feature gorgeous, windswept terrain that looks inhospitable. They are also filled with characters whose quirks have not been worn away by the larger world. I don’t know what lesson to take from this except that most of them love their lives the way they are, hard as they might be.
Isla and Sandy, beautifully played by Gayle Rankin and Grant O’Rourke, are wrapped in a childlike dynamic that is both endearing and sad (though their creativity in making bird costumes is truly wonderful). We’re left to wonder exactly how they learned to subsist on bits of grain, fish, gulls, and whatever else they can scavenge from the island, but you get the sense they could live on there together forever.
In Below, Calvin Penney (played with a deep humanity by Josh Hartnett), was once a fisherman but now struggles to make do by fishing ice for the local distillery. He, too, loves his home and the people around him, and you can see how each member of the community (including Mackenzie Davis as a scientist from away but who is living there) is an important part of the whole of survival.
Community as Survival
Only one family relocates in Year of Wonders, the one with the most means, and as such they don’t take up much of the story. Instead, as with Below, there’s a complex web that arises where people take on new and varied roles in the community as their neighbors die off, because mines still need to be mined, births attended, and graves dug. I was truly captivated by the flexibility with which this was undertaken. They did receive some sustenance from the outside world, but were otherwise alone, and they rose to the challenge. Not that there weren’t awful moments and people who did regrettable things, but that’s what makes for a meaty story anyway. Brooks weaves tastes of the language of the era with careful attention to detail for a truly immersive experience.
In The Incomer, the community of Isla and Sandy is obviously more limited, but they’ve developed specific roles as well, and when Daniel comes, it’s interesting to see where and how they open to his presence (and how they don’t).
The Specter of the Beast
Each of these stories has its own looming darkness, whether the plague, a gigantic cephalopod, or a tyrannical member of the local bureaucracy (there’s also a mythical beast), and I enjoyed seeing how the characters played against these forces. Year of Wonders held a historical weight where characters grasp for human connections to fight the disease. Below is built as a thriller, so there’s more action to trying to understand and survive the squid, but the web of tender relationships is a big part of both. Probably my favorite of the three, The Incomer is filled with a dark and loving humor that plays well against the outrageous antics spurred by the antagonist. I might also love it most because my husband and I stole away one afternoon to watch it in one of the very few local showtimes offered, something we used to do when we were much younger than we are now.
In my own life we’re knuckling down for the winter, trying to harvest what needs to be harvested, finish the outside tasks that need to be done, and getting supplies in for the season. All of that makes it sound like we’re living on an island rather than in suburban Seattle, but I’ve seen this drive to prepare echo across several friend groups. Maybe it’s the election, maybe it’s the economy, but I hope whatever antagonist arises, we and our community will come together to fight the good fight. At least we’ll have stories to sustain us.
If you want to read Year of Wonders pick up a copy from Bookshop.org using that link and I’ll get a commission.
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