Peculiar as a family’s traditions may seem to an outsider, they run the risk of becoming rote—if still hallowed—to those who maintain them. In Kay Chronister’s The Bog Wife, the Haddlesley siblings live by a simple pact that rules their days: in exchange for their maintenance of the bog where they reside, it will produce a wife for their patriarch. But when the ritual that has apparently sustained them for generations fails, the five siblings don’t know how to proceed with their lives. They can’t change what they’ve always known to be true, yet they must change themselves if they stand a chance of surviving. With The Bog Wife, Chronister examines the varying responses within a family system to upended convictions and the ties that bind and break if they cannot bend.
On his deathbed, the senior Haddesley lays out what his children must do in his absence in order to preserve the family tradition and bring forth the next bog wife. Despite their various disappointments to their father, none of the five siblings has been able to entirely escape his authority, no matter how far any of them may have strayed from it.
Charlie, the heir-to-be, falls short of a patriarch but can’t refuse the power his family lore wields over him. Percy, the only other Haddlesley male, believes not only in the mysteries of the bog but that he can salvage the responsibility his brother is unfit to carry. Though Eda’s only promise in the family compact as a mortal woman is some semblance of security, she aims to hold the crumbling house and its inhabitants in place. The youngest, Nora, appears less plagued by the sacred family rites than their ties to one another, loose as they are threaded, frayed as they have become. And Wenna, who left long ago, finds herself drawn back in by the bog and everything there she tried to renounce for another life.
Chronister uses each sibling’s perspective to reveal how a family can crumble under the mythology it holds dear, no matter how much any one person within that lineage may try to deny its power over them. Wenna, the only sibling to ever leave the bog and try for a normal life elsewhere, had tried “to see the vacancy in everything,” but ultimately falls short of such cynicism. “The bog was not vacant. It had presence and intelligence, and, she realized, it had changed while she was gone in ways barely perceptible and too subtle to name.”
The bog, though made of the accumulation of decaying plants, is dying. But until the ritual fails them, the Haddlesleys don’t seem to realize that they have not been preserving the bog as they had thought, only their idea of the bog’s ability to protect them. Steeped in fears of ecological extinction subtly rendered by Chronister, The Bog Wife highlights the dangers of deceiving ourselves through old myths that appear “noble” because they seem “ancient”. Each of the Haddlesleys tries in their own way to save something—the bog, the family, themselves—but struggle to recognize that everything must change radically to have any hope of a future. Although “staying was a kind of annihilation,” Wenna knows firsthand that leaving doesn’t necessarily mean escaping, or rather, that escaping doesn’t necessarily equal release.
It’s difficult to let go of a story that binds you together, makes you and maybe others feel whole. To recognize, much less accept, that, as a shopkeeper tells one of the siblings of their family heirlooms, “Meaningful to your family, to you, but not worth as much to someone who didn’t grow up with it, at the end of the day.”
The Haddlesleys have to surrender their notions, and free themselves from their father’s grip, if they are to find another story they can imbue with meaning, one less disastrous to their senses of self and to the land they inhabit. Rather than upholding a bloodline, they must come to terms with the fact that the “life of their forebearers was killing them,” and the bog, too. No family, no ecology, can survive on what was known before. What was known wasn’t true, or is no longer. The Bog Wife is a novel about what can grow from decay.
FICTION
The Bog Wife
By Kay Chronister
Counterpoint
Published October 1st, 2024
