SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Anna North's new novel captures attention even before the first page. The dedication is, for the moss.
ANNA NORTH: (Reading) A colony of moss does not experience emotions like fondness or intimacy, but if it did, it might say this - we held her. We kept her safe under the surface in our bath of Earth for many times her lifespan. That we give her up now may seem to be purely random, an accident of excavation. In fact, the hour of her service is at hand.
SIMON: "Bog Queen" begins when a body is found in a British bog. An American forensic anthropologist, Agnes, is brought in to investigate. The bog body seems almost completely preserved, but its bones reveal that it - or she - is from the Iron Age, more than 2,000 years ago. What is the story of the woman in the bog?
"Bog Queen" is the latest novel from Anna North. She joins us from our studios in New York. Thanks so much for being with us.
NORTH: Thanks so much for having me.
SIMON: Why did you want to write a novel about peat bogs and, if I may, bog bodies?
NORTH: I actually find these bodies and the idea of them really beautiful. I first saw a bog body in the British Museum, and I just thought, how amazing. This is a real person who lived and breathed thousands of years ago, and I can still see him. And we can learn so much about him and his life from his body and from studying him. And his people buried him in this place where I think they knew that he would be preserved. And I can imagine them, you know, hoping that maybe we would understand them one day.
I visited the bog where he was found. I really learned so much from that landscape, which today is quite degraded from its former state, but it's still breathtaking to see. And there are spots of real biodiversity that could come back if protected properly. So I really got obsessed with bogs themselves and with the moss that creates the bogs and the way it can operate as a colony, not as a single organism. And I really wanted in this book to talk about the nonhuman world. I think that people tend to think that we always drive events on the Earth, but there are many other organisms here that have a huge impact on us, on our lives, and I really wanted to share that too.
SIMON: Agnes, the forensic anthropologist - what does she begin to feel for the dead woman?
NORTH: I think something that I loved about Agnes, as she sort of took shape in my mind, is her sense of care and responsibility toward the dead and her sense that our duty of care toward human beings doesn't necessarily stop when someone dies but continues towards their body. But the body that she's called to investigate at the bog in England is different and causes her to really expand her definition of what her responsibilities are and what she is sort of put into this world to care for.
SIMON: We learn that the woman of the Iron Age is a druid. What was her life like?
NORTH: So this was a really fun part of the book to research. I did a lot of research on life in Britain in the Iron Age. It was fascinating to me, you know, all that we don't know. Britons at that time didn't have written language, so there are a lot of questions that we have. There are some suggestions in the literature that druids, in addition to playing a religious role, might have been sort of political leaders. And so in my mind, I thought of this young woman who is very smart. She's very driven. She's almost like a wannabe cosmopolitan, and yet maybe she overestimates her own power a tiny bit in ways that come back to haunt her.
SIMON: The narrative voice goes back and forth between the two women, telling us of their two lives 2,000 years apart. Do we begin to recognize some common notes between the two?
NORTH: I think we do. Both of these women are really passionate about their work in different ways and in different definitions of the word work. They, in some ways, are very self-centered or self-absorbed, even, and they have to learn to look outside themselves. They're deeply curious and they're driven by their curiosity, I think especially in the case of the druid, who comes from a place that's quite small and really wants to see and be a part of the wider world. I think for Agnes, the anthropologist, studying the bog and the body really brings her in touch with the wider world in a way that she hasn't been previously.
SIMON: You have a character who asks later on - and her argument made me think - asks of Agnes, have you ever considered that maybe this body should've stayed buried? Do you think they wanted her to be poked and prodded by people who didn't know her or care about her?
NORTH: This is a question I think about a lot, and it's a question that has been asked about real-life bog bodies. So there have been, you know, protests and efforts to return these bodies to the soil or to have them sort of away from the prying eyes of the public in museums. And I do really understand those protests, even as I have been really moved by being able to see these remains. So I wanted to capture that, too, in the book - that sense of, one, this is a human. We can learn so much. Two, like, this is a human. Should we be doing this? What is the value of knowledge versus what is the value of respecting something or trying to respect something, trying to respect it in the way that it might have been respected in its time?
SIMON: Does excavation of the bog to analyze what might have happened to the woman, what kind of society she came from, collide with those who want to rewild the moss now?
NORTH: It does. And it's - one of the central tensions of the book is sort of reconciling what Agnes is doing with environmentalists who want to protect the bog. And bogs are actually - and peatlands in general - are one of the most important carbon sinks in the world. They store an enormous amount of carbon. And I'm actually working right now on a journalistic piece about this, looking at mining and other development that's disturbing bogs around the world. I've found that even, you know, pretty small amounts of activity, pretty small amounts of drilling can really damage a bog ecosystem. So looking back at my book, I do think both sides have a real claim here. Like, Agnes wants to find out what happened to this body, but I think the environmentalists are correct that even any excavation poses a risk to this landscape that's literally, like, standing between us and climate change.
SIMON: I mean, I don't want to give anything away. But at one point, the moss says, eventually, we triumph.
NORTH: I - you know, I think it can be a time of really deep despair if you are a human who cares about the Earth, if you're a human who cares about climate, even if you're a human who cares about other humans. And I think it is important and also cheering to remember that some of these organisms have been around a lot longer than us, and some of them will be around after we're gone. You know, sphagnum moss is thousands of years old. As I say in the book, a colony of moss does not speak. Yet if it could, I think it would tell us that some of our human dramas are not important to it at all.
SIMON: Anna North's new novel - "Bog Queen." Thank you so much for being with us.
NORTH: Thank you so much. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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