The Hardy Tree

by Iphgenia Baal

The degenerate area surrounding London's Kings Cross is the setting for the debut novella by young British writer Iphgenia Baal. Beginning in the nineteenth century and spanning the next 150 years we are lead through a potted history of the overbrimming St Pancras cemetery, long before the metropolis rode over its bones. Writer Thomas Hardy was also an architect, and was delegated the unenviable task by the Bishop of London of exhuming and dismantling the tombs to make way for this progress. Here he heads a cast composed of the living and the dead, set into turmoil as the modern world entrenches on sacred soil. A post-psychogeographic gothic tale of morality is backed up by a series of forged documents, maps and missives. Somewhere between the two, Baal creates a world where fact and fiction eerily blur; a sanctuary for the over-imaginative. The Hardy Tree is a book-guide-manual about trains and brains and cliques and freaks. It is a demonstration of how stories are made and an argument for chaos, anarchy and lawlessness. It is also a ghost story. With a happy ending.

64 pages, Hardcover

First published December 1, 2011

Reviews

[Lukerik · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very unusual book. As much a piece of visual art as a story. The art starts on the cover which is a mock-up of an old document, but the text on it is a flyer for a rave. There are a number of ‘forged’ documents throughout the text, but they don’t make an attempt to pass close inspection. Something else is going on. For example, Rev Arrowsmith’s letter, which is written in modern handwriting. It says on the back cover ‘A book with its roots in the past and its head nowhere in particular.’ Pretty accurate. Running throughout the book is a historical novella in which Thomas Hardy oversees the clearance of Old St Pancras’s graveyard, but there’s no concerted attempt to give it historical verisimilitude. There are all these juxtapositions between past and present / life and death where neither one is quite itself. So the graveyard, officially out of use, but the ground level having risen 12 foot because of all the illegal burials. I suppose the big visual image here is the Hardy Tree itself – something alive, but stacked round by death. I believe the author is afflicted by artistic vision.

At least, that’s my guess for what’s going on here. I didn’t understand everything the author said to me. I’m not a visual art kind of a guy and she expresses herself strangely. Worth a look if you want something uncompromising and unconventional.

[Literary Review The · Rating 5 out of 5]

Iphgenia Baal
The Hardy Tree: A Story About Gang Mentality

(London, England: Trolley Books, 2011)

The Hardy Tree is a dark and twisty collage of a novel, intertwining historical documents, narrative, photographs, poetry, and maps to convey the history of a St. Pancras church and burial ground in London. When the graveyard—riven with skeletons, overturned markers, and prostitutes—becomes part of the new railroad route, Thomas Hardy leads an extraordinary group of men in the disinterment and reburying of bodies. Although he suffers a sense of loss and sadness, and although
he is meticulously drawn, our real connection is not to him, but to St. Pancras—a place that is revered and then forgotten over and over again, the way space and place can be. It is striking that in each historical moment, what a building and its land represent seems fastened and true. It is this false sense of permanence that magnifies the passing of time, the movement of society, and what it means to be abandoned.

—Jena Salon
The Hardy Tree: A Story About Gang Mentality was reviewed in The Literary Review. "The Lives of Saints" Fall 2011