Charlinder's Walk

by Alyson Miers

  He had always surmised that it would be hundreds of years before they were able to go out and see the rest of the world. He had always assumed, at the very least, that it would be well outside of his lifetime before they were ready for that kind of travel. After less than forty years, the rest of the world was on its way. There was no going back.

  Acknowledgments

  In chronological order, I would like to thank...

  ...my brave and loyal friend Megan Farley, for reading the rough draft and holding me accountable to my writing goals,

  ...my discerning editor, Christina Baker Kline, for showing me the book's strengths and helping me deal with its flaws,

  ...my multitalented friend and illustrator, Venessa Kelley, for giving Charlinder a face.

  Here are the people who made sure I got it done, who made it better, and who made it ready. They helped me make it happen.

  Author's Notes

  Over five years ago, while stewing in the juices of culture shock, uncertainty, boredom, and the most dizzying summer heat of my life, I first began to write out an idea for a story about a sparsely populated future, starring a curious, determined young man named Charlinder. Perhaps because I am one of those writers who can never let it rest, I still want to talk about him after the book is finished. If you’re reading this, I assume it’s because you’ve already read Charlinder’s Walk through to the end. If you’ve skipped ahead after reading only half the book or less, then this is a good time to turn back, before I say something that gives away the plot. Here there be spoilers, and all that.

  Writing What I Know

  The idea of the post-Plague world occurred to me many years ago, as an inchoate, incoherent sort of plot; I could picture Eileen and company struggling to survive and trying to get on with their lives in the wake of the end of the world as they knew it. I never put it down on paper, though, and eventually I realized it was because the Plague survivors wouldn't make a story so much as a never-ending saga. There could be a beginning and a middle, but no real end.

  I began to think more clearly about this post-apocalyptic world at some point during the training for my Peace Corps assignment in Albania in 2006. Between language classes and practicum, I had no time for any sustained writing effort, but I could see a story emerge. There I knew what it was like to be immersed in a culture I didn't understand, surrounded by very loving, generous people speaking to me in a language I didn't know, and easily identifiable as a foreigner wherever I went, with or without ever opening my mouth. It was during this stage that I met Charlinder: a thoughtful, opinionated, mildly misfit 20-year-old charged with a one-room schoolhouse full of rambunctious children with apathetic parents. Once I knew how it felt to be so far out of my element, this character took shape with the understanding that the initial Plague survivors provided the context, while their descendants could have a story.

  After three months of training in a small Elbasan village called Kuqan, I headed out to my assignment in the city of Lushnje, where I taught English at the high school. While living with the second of what ended up being three host families, I could speak enough of the language to get things done, but also had almost no work to do and was suffering what was arguably the most vicious case of culture shock of my 25-year-old life. I spent my first week at site reading the copy of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell I'd received from my grandfather, and by the end of it, I had a better grip on my post-apocalyptic story. Between Susannah Clarke's novel and my deepening experience with Albania, I could see where Charlinder was going, because now I had Gentiola.

  After that first week, with a mostly unoccupied summer ahead of me and no more books to read, I began to write up plans for Charlinder's Walk. The working title was Char and Eileen, which I subsequently scrapped because the use of Eileen's name was misleading.

  The fun of writing a post-apocalyptic story was that I could build a new world from the ground up, but the challenge of building a world from the ground up was that I had to picture how people would live in such a primitive setting. In the first draft, there was a prologue that introduced the initial survivors and showed how much of the existing world was destroyed by the loss of life. It showed how Eileen barricaded herself in her house and eventually went back outside when she heard something tell her she'd be safe. Outside, she met Mark and José, followed shortly by Marissa and Ryan. Eileen and Mark were acquainted from having lived in the same town; Mark attended the same church as Eileen's parents, though he was more reactionary than most of the congregation.

  One of the ways--perhaps the most important way--that the survivors' world was turned upside-down was that their new, low-tech way of life demanded a vastly different skill set than the infrastructure-dependent, highly organized society in which they'd grown up. José was an extremely important member of the original survivor community because he was a skilled carpenter. Eileen was respected despite her abrasive personality because she could teach her fellow survivors skills such as using a spinning wheel, churning butter and making soap from wood ash and rendered fat. Certain life skills shown in the Paleola village, I can either perform or at least have seen up close. I've helped with cooking on a hearth, for example, and I knit with yarn that I spun. I don’t know how to shear a sheep but I have the general idea. As the village schoolteacher, Charlinder is responsible for keeping his students supplied with paper and ink for their lessons, and I think making paper is one of those activities like having sex: you shouldn't write it up close unless you've done it yourself at least once.

  In a later round of revisions, I aimed to reduce the length of the novel. After much consideration I didn't like the prologue; it was 5000 words of death, destruction and bleakness, and it didn't fit with the tone of the rest of the book. Eileen's place in the story was limited to journal entries, and Mark was only seen through Eileen's less-than-impartial eyes.

  Something that makes the Paleolans rather strange is that they run a farm but don't raise any animals for meat. Not that they're vegetarians; when they want meat, they catch it from the river or shoot it in the woods. They decided early on that they wouldn't raise meat animals, at least not at first, because it was a more efficient use of farmland to keep animals for live use. A century later, they still maintain the arrangement. They raise chickens for eggs, keep horses for pulling carts, and sheep for wool and milk. They grow flax for linen, and have fields of corn, wheat and soybeans as staples. There is no clear separation between work and personal life because everyone is at work all day long. Families live in small log cabins with dirt floors, but these are mainly bedrooms. Because they are accustomed to keeping animals only for live use, it never occurs to Roy to suggest to Charlinder that he could also slaughter the sheep if he runs out of food. In two years of travel, it never occurs to Charlinder that his animal could be used for meat until he is alone and starving in the mountains.

  Not Intended to Be a Factual Statement

  As the disclaimer up front says, I do not expect anyone reading this book to assume they will pick up any new, valuable knowledge of biology, anthropology or agriculture from my narrative, and on that note, I will go into specifics about where I intend accuracy and where I was strictly writing fiction.

  You may have noticed that special attention was paid to Charlinder's time spent in the last country before he reaches Italy, which he later finds out was Gentiola's homeland of Albania. The way the locals behave towards Charlinder is probably not an accurate representation of Albanian culture (thought it could arguably be accurate for what would remain in the post-Plague world), but it is a fair representation of how it feels to be an American living in Albania. When Charlinder first arrives in the country, he hears the locals referring to him as "Afrikan," which is not realistic; in real life they would more likely refer to someone who looks like him as "zezak," which means Negro, but I needed to use a word that my monolingual American POV character would understand.

  In some ways, Gentiola is a very recognizable Albanian, in other ways she is h
ighly atypical. A character as bizarre as Gentiola cannot be perfectly representative of any known culture, but she is typically Albanian in that she is extremely hospitable, curious, generous and delighted to meet a foreigner from further west. She is also an environmentalist fanatic, hostile to tradition, and not above going to bed with her houseguest, all of which have nothing to do with her home culture and everything to do with Gentiola being her damn crazy self. The character as I've written her was born in 1975, well within the reign of dictator Enver Hoxha, who kept his citizens under tight isolation from any foreign influences for decades. She would have graduated from secondary school just as the country was transitioning to democracy, and thus just as the country allowed citizens out and foreigners in. Her family life is fairly accurate for the country post-democracy: the oldest son emigrates and sends money home from abroad, the daughter goes to university, in her case she goes to university abroad, while the youngest son stays home and looks after the parents. The roadside collision is a too-common cause of death. She doesn't mention her native religion in the text, but she was probably born to a family of Muslim heritage, at a time when all religious observance was forbidden by law. She is not reliant on an established religion (she later found another, more obscure religion which meshed well with her delusions) but also extremely suspicious of any attempts to discourage religious expression and practice.

  The end-of-summer festival which the Yu'pik community holds during Charlinder's visit, also, is not based on any real-life customs that I'm aware of. It is a fictional celebration that I invented for a post-Plague community, as I thought it would make sense to have a bit of fun while there was still daylight and warmth.

  When Charlinder visits the Hyatts' mini-dictatorship in the western North American territory (this could be on either side of the current U.S./Canada border, in the vicinity of Montana and Alberta), the minority group show certain visible signs of inbreeding, which I wrote without any concern for biological accuracy. I selected these undesirable traits because they impair mobility and thus make an especially dangerous venture of leaving the community. Because the purpose of the storyline was metaphorical rather than a literal warning about the dangers of inbreeding, I was concerned less with biological realism and more with creating a situation without impairing the affected individuals' communication skills or intellectual capacities.

  There are some other bases I could, theoretically, try and cover before the book is closed, but I’ve already been working on Charlinder for over five years and attempting to pre-empt every potential question is the way madness lies. For more background information on the post-Plague world and its inhabitants, I have set up a website for this book: http://www.redsresources.com/charlinder/index.html, where any further questions will be addressed.

  Charlinder has finished his walk. Thank you for coming along.

  Table of Contents

  Charlinder's Walk

  Notice

  Part 1: Paleola

  Introduction

  Chapter One - Spinners' Square

  Chapter Two - Eileen and Mark

  Chapter Three - Families

  Chapter Four - Good Company

  Chapter Five - Children

  Chapter Six - Listen

  Chapter Seven - Walk

  Chapter Eight - Too Late

  Chapter Nine - Changed

  Chapter Ten - Approach

  Chapter Eleven - Compass

  Part 2: North America

  Chapter Twelve - Road

  Chapter Thirteen - Mississippi

  Chapter Fourteen - Susan and Eileen

  Chapter Fifteen - Hyatts

  Chapter Sixteen - Trapped

  Chapter Seventeen - Alaska

  Part 3: Eurasia

  Chapter Eighteen - Russia

  Chapter Nineteen - China

  Chapter Twenty - Monsoon

  Chapter Twenty-One - Subcontinent

  Chapter Twenty-Two - Afghanistan

  Chapter Twenty-Three - Adriatic

  Part 4: Gentiola

  Chapter Twenty-Four - Impossible

  Chapter Twenty-Five - Conversation

  Chapter Twenty-Six - Anima

  Chapter Twenty-Seven - Voices

  Chapter Twenty-Eight - Questions

  Chapter Twenty-Nine - Surprise

  Chapter Thirty - Aftershock

  Chapter Thirty-One - Herbs

  Part 5: Return

  Chapter Thirty-Two - Calais and Dover

  Chapter Thirty-Three - Britain

  Chapter Thirty-Four - Teach

  Chapter Thirty-Five - Knowledge

  Chapter Thirty-Six - Voyage

  Chapter Thirty-Seven - Home

  Chapter Thirty-Eight - Nevila

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Author's Notes