THE LIVING REALM, by Jordan Tannahill
In the 2010s, I often met up with the literary critic and queer theorist Leo Bersani for dinner. Over a bottle of wine, Bersani, then in his 80s, and I, deep into my 30s, would delve into subjects dear to our hearts: gay sex, cinema and murder mysteries. Thus, when I received a DVD of Alain Guiraudie’s 2013 French film “Stranger by the Lake,” a murder thriller set amid the gay cruising grounds of a Provençal lake, I sent it to Bersani. He didn’t think much of it. In hindsight, I should have anticipated his aversion to linking gay sex with murder. Time and again in his essays, Bersani explored the un-possessive, ego-shedding possibilities of gay cruising and anonymous sex.
Bersani died in 2022 at the age of 90. While reading Jordan Tannahill’s slim but astonishing new novel, “The Living Realm,” I kept wishing I could send the book to him, convinced this one he would relish.
Tannahill’s story shares surface similarities with Guiraudie’s movie: Mysterious events unfold around a picturesque lake that happens to be a popular gay cruising spot. The watering hole in “The Living Realm” is Teufelsse, hidden in a forest on the edge of Berlin, “now a sanctuary for herons and cranes, and the nude bathers who visited throughout the summer, reclining on their blankets and towels.”
The novel’s unnamed British narrator has been frequenting these erotically charged shores ever since he moved to the German capital in the 1990s for an archaeology fellowship. Now retired, he spends his days “truffle hunting” for hookups when desire strikes.
On one jaunt, he spots a long-dead boyfriend standing in the woods, looking exactly as he did 30 years ago. This paranormal sighting is soon followed by the appearance of other deceased lovers. As these lakeside hauntings accumulate, the narrator examines his own romantic past as well as the cultural and geographical history of Teufelsse for answers. Is the lake a time portal? Are these lost loves trying to tell him something? Is he losing his mind?
“The Living Realm” is the author’s third novel, but that count doesn’t do justice to the Canadian-born writer’s résumé. Tannahill is a polymath provocateur who has worked in television, film and theater. He’s perhaps best known for his recent Off Broadway play, “Prince Faggot,” a speculative fiction about the first openly queer heir to the British throne.
Those expecting the novel to replicate that show’s raunchy titillation will instead find in “The Living Realm” a far more elegiac, meditative work. Tannahill writes as gorgeously about nature (“tongues of mist licked and flickered”) as he does about bodies (describing a lover, the narrator notes: “The piglet-pink of his eyelids. The near-invisible swirl of white-blond hairs on his ass. The hidden scar on his upper thigh”).
But if Teufelsse is a queer, Whitmanesque Eden, it is one beset with threats. The novel takes place during a summer of extreme drought; the boars who inhabit the forest are radioactive from Chernobyl; the nearby hill is built from the rubble of World War II; police officers and tourists continually encroach upon this precarious community. Catastrophe lurks in the corners of every page.
Ultimately, Tannahill isn’t interested in solving the mystery of the narrator’s phantom encounters. His subject is time, and the way, in the midst of memory, grief, desire and love, it loses its chronological hold and casts us adrift. In this extraordinary and sensitive novel, Tannahill puts Bersani’s ideas to the test, proving there’s a lot of brain fodder in bodies groping in the dark.
“I became a vessel for every man who had ever passed through these woods,” the narrator ruminates. “I wondered whether we might momentarily become one another, or new creatures altogether, immortal multi-limbed beings conjured by these arcane rites.”
THE LIVING REALM | By Jordan Tannahill | Farrar, Straus & Giroux | 147 pp. | $25
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