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# The Living Realm
- URL: https://www.notesonbooks.net/the-living-realm/
- Published: 2026-10-23T10:31:04.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-23T10:31:04.000Z
- Description: A gay archaeologist spends a drought summer cruising a Berlin forest, where he sees his dead lovers.
- Author: Editorial
- Tags: Jordan Tannahill, #rating-3-5, Queer Life, Late Life, The Body

Novel · 160 pages · Hardcover · 2026 · [Farrar, Straus and Giroux](https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621728/thelivingrealm/?ref=notesonbooks.net)

## The archaeologist stops asking for proof

[Jordan Tannahill](https://www.notesonbooks.net/tag/author-jordan-tannahill/)’s *The Living Realm* spends most of its length testing its narrator, and its final quarter believing him.

A retired British archaeologist, brought to Berlin in 1991 by his friend Birgit, passes a drought summer at Teufelssee, a nudist lake in the Grunewald forest whose woods gay men have [cruised for generations](https://www.notesonbooks.net/what-belongs-to-you/), meeting strangers for sex among the pines. Three of his dead lovers, two of whom had HIV, appear to him there.

Before a single sighting is narrated, the opening pages file those months under strange and unaccountable occurrences he alone seemed to witness.

Each piece of evidence settles a single fact and declines the fact beside it. One evening he talks on a blanket with Thomas, a former lover, whose sister dates his death to the night before. A friend confirms which evening it was and cannot confirm who sat on the blanket with him. On a night walk with Lukas, a lover long dead, a phone left recording in his pocket captures hours of gravel underfoot and no voice at all.

[Police walk into the cruising grounds one afternoon](https://www.notesonbooks.net/tag/theme-queer-life/), a place they have left alone for decades, and fine two elderly men for public nuisance over a blow job on a blanket. Tannahill builds up to it as a historian would, through Thomas’s uncle, caught in a Frankfurt raid on cruising spots in 1950\. The uncle lost his job and his marriage and was dead six years later. An archivist in Bruges traces a silted inlet to a rise in the burning of sodomites as the city’s trade collapsed. That history lands in the present. This is the finest work in the novel.

The narrator’s friend Gabor, chased out of Hungary for organising against Orbán’s party, is arrested for squaring up to the officers and says he will frame any summons he is served. Gabor’s partner, Eren, grew up in Neukölln, where that week swastikas were painted on the doors of four buildings housing mostly Turks, Kurds and Syrians, his aunt’s among them. Speaking as a Muslim, he says his family faces fascists every day, and Gabor faced them once, for five minutes, and wants a certificate for it. Gabor calls that unfair. Eren agrees.

The prose is the other strength. A downstairs neighbour’s photograph of a child on a sled leads, within two minutes of kitchen talk, to the coal cellar where she says she hid as the Red Army took Berlin, and to mass rape. An ant with a crimson thorax crossing the arm hair of the dying Lukas sits in a paragraph about time slowing and outlives it. The epigraph, from Gerald Murnane, states the idea outright, that [time is only place](https://www.notesonbooks.net/on-the-calculation-of-volume-iv/), and the last pages state it again. Neither improves on the ant.

The narrator’s friends explain the summer away, first as psychosis and then as a brain tumour, and Tannahill doses the narrator with psilocybin before the summer’s strangest night. Each explanation takes some of the strangeness the opening built, and the narrator answers each by saying it does not matter.

Late on, he stops requiring evidence. [A fair position for a dying man](https://www.notesonbooks.net/tag/theme-late-life/), after a season noting in a notebook the men he sees walk into the woods and never come out. Nothing in the diagnosis forces it. He drops the method himself and Tannahill drops it with him. That is where the construction fails. Agreeing with the narrator is what the ending asks, and the one thing the novel had declined to do before.

The book gives Lukas a vision like the narrator’s, decades earlier, resting on a fallen tree. A second witness, after the fact. Another fallen tree in the cruising grounds has two knobs sanded smooth. Lukas mounts one, and the narrator, on the other, lets “the forest fuck” him and the prose sheds its full stops before he passes out. Two strangers wake him still joined to the tree.

Over dinner the next day he states what the tree performed, a continuity with death indistinguishable from living, in a full sentence. Birgit’s answer, that it was very generous of Lukas, is the best review the tree gets. The summons Gabor promised to frame is never mentioned again.

He marries Birgit by the lake so that his pension and his cottage in Cornwall go to her. She nursed Lukas, who died alone one morning while the narrator was lecturing. She got the narrator to a doctor too, and this time he does the caring.

Elsa, a wild sow at the lake, is spared a cull in July by a petition the narrator started, and the forestry director later sets her beside the two thousand boars the city culls every year. The penultimate passage is hers, an interior monologue. What comes is hunger, males in the rut taking as many as eight sows, [lesions on the jaw, rot in the lungs](https://www.notesonbooks.net/tag/theme-the-body/) and a death in the cold with her daughters warming a body that does not rise. Her lesions recall the ones Lukas died with, and the rot came in with the strange males.

Then the narrator’s ashes go to the lake in a sandwich bag and his first person carries on after the water takes him. The continuation he wanted for himself is not extended to the animal whose voice he invented.

The watch he lost in the lake in the opening pages is still counting at the end.

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