A spectral space

Jordan Tannahill’s slim new novel The Living Realm reads like a fever dream, taking place during a sizzling hot summer that will never end.

Europe is in the middle of an extreme drought, and Lake Teufelssee, a glacial lake on the fringes of Berlin, remains a solitary oasis, full to the top of its banks.

Teufelssee is a place where Berliners come to bathe, to relax and to cruise. An unnamed British archeologist who has relocated to the German city visits often, and begins to catch glimpses of his dead lovers while cruising Grunewald forest, which surrounds the magical lake. (The fact that the forest is at the edge of Berlin is no accident — this story is about finding community while living on the margins.)

While walking in the forest, the man spots a young, handsome gay man who is a dead ringer for his former lover, Lukas. There’s only one catch: Lukas died 30 years earlier. As the summer progresses, he experiences more visions of his dead lovers.

The man spends time swimming, cruising, debating politics and participating in a kind of alternative community. His two best friends, Gabor and Birgit, frequently join him. They become worried as he seems increasingly unmoored by his experiences in the forest.

At one point, the man returns to his towel and backpack, only to find everything he owns has been stolen. He is forced to walk back into Berlin in the buck, until he’s rescued by a stranger. This scene is both hilarious and harrowing.

Tannahill posits that time is a meaningless construct and that the bodies we have come in contact with will always haunt us, that those who love us reside within.

Relationships are ephemeral in Tannahill’s world, with even the least significant crossing of paths marking one for life. He explores the fragility of boundaries that separate the self from the other and the present from the eternal.

The rich tapestry of characters on the beach are often fully rendered in one short passage. Take the trio of gay Italian men in their 70s, described “as close to Teufelssee royalty as it came” who “hold their books, but never read them, instead alternating between fierce, rapid-fire arguments in Piedmontese, and silently glowering at the other visitors.”

A wild boar named Elsa presides over the forest. When Elsa is filmed snatching a tourist’s laptop bag, the video goes viral on TikTok and the pig becomes an international sensation. As the forest explodes with curious tourists, Elsa and her brood of boarlets are marked for culling, until the residents of the beach protest, restoring the natural order of the forest.

Tannahill makes a case that the act of spending time in nature, au naturel, is sacred. “There was something beyond joy and idle leisure, something closer to worship, in that kind of bearing witness, in observing the ways time played upon nature, and the bodies of others.”

The communion with nature is presented in ways that feel utterly original and poignant, as with this statement about the experience of walking in a forest: “(He) once told me that for every step I took in the forest there are roughly 300 miles of fungi beneath my foot.”

Tannahill is only 38. He’s already won awards for plays such as Late Company, and was shortlisted for the 2021 Giller Prize for his novel The Listeners. This is the Canadian-born, New York-based writer’s third novel.

If he weren’t so young, one would be tempted to call The Living Realm Tannahill’s masterpiece, but who knows what is next for this singularly virtuosic talent?

Every so often, art is so organic, so profound, so richly layered that it feels like a world one already knew in one’s bones. The Living Realm is such a book, suggesting that nothing we have ever loved truly leaves us.

Greg Klassen read part of this book on a beach, and would make that decision again.