The River Has Roots – Amal El-Mohtar
The River Liss runs tumbling and shivering from secret sources in the strange land of Arcadia down past the two great willows known as the Professors into the town of Thistleford where sisters Esther and Ysabel Hawthorn live, the children of a family of basket weavers who sing their songs and walk as far as they dare, in equal parts enchanted by the stories of what lies upstream in Faerie beyond the standing stones and fearful of it.
A river by its nature always in motion, carrying change with it even as it changes itself, so does language change and adapt those who use it, things anchored by the right combination of words or perhaps transformed, the magic of Grammar, Esther particularly malleable and open to new ideas brought by Rin, a friend from upstream, the presence of whom is irksome to Samuel Pollard, a suitor both determined and quite unsuitable who pursues Esther’s hand and the lands she will inherit with little distinction between them.
Crafted and given life by Amal El-Mohtar, one of the creators of This is How You Lose the Time War, her first solo novel is The River Has Roots, a poetic and magical tale of love and longing in shapes which shift like the currents of the River Liss told in image and verse, beautifully told and moving both in its purity and its depth, inhabiting a space on the border of a land where the passage of time and the finality of death are flexible.
A simple tale beautifully told, told, a novella of a hundred pages illustrated by Kathleen Neeley, The River Has Roots is accompanied by a companion short story, separate yet thematically linked in its interest in the power of names and the shifting of memories, dislocated by pain and covered over, hidden but unable to heal until they are addressed and atoned for, John Hollowback and the Witch the tale of a woodworker who trades his labour in payment for the witch to cure him of his physical deformity.
With words and the puzzles of objects, an apple, a comb and a blank leatherbound book which rejects attempts to write in it, only accepting the absolute truth, he is wary of the witch despite his need of her skills yet the person who is deceived is himself, arriving with his mind clouded by lies and denials of his misdeeds, seeing only the ugliness in the old woman and what can be gained from her rather than what was done to her.
El-Mohtar captivated with words and language as much as with the strange places and characters as twisted back upon themselves as the trees which line the banks of her rivers which flow north to south until the world shifts back upon itself, like the songs which inform her writing the meanings can be abstract, less about the specifics of the moment than the impression left behind, lingering after the book is finished like morning mist above the Liss.
The River Has Roots is available now from Arcadia
