Joint Winner of the 2019 Booker Prize - which I captured in this photo.
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You’ll labour over this manuscript of mine, reading and rereading, pi
Joint Winner of the 2019 Booker Prize - which I captured in this photo.
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You’ll labour over this manuscript of mine, reading and rereading, picking nits as you go.
I was fortunate enough to attend one of the live cinema screenings of the readings and author Q&A from the National Theatre on the evening of the book's official publication, managing to complete my first read of the book just as the event started.
The event was excellent - and I think only reinforced my view that Handmaid's Tale is a great works of fiction. Great firstly because it proved so prescient - I always felt that Brave New World was a better written book than 1984, but only one is still widely quoted and referred to today - and Handmaid's Tale has I think equalled if not eclipsed 1984. And great also because it has inspired and resonated with so many people.
Trump and anti-abortion male legislatures (Atwood remarked that young, fertile women - a minority in any society have across so many civilisations and cultures been a resource that society feels it can shape for its own purpose and without their consent) have been subject to the silent but dramatically effective protest of the Handmaids.
Even these last two weeks in the light of the proposed (and now executed) prorogation of the UK parliament a quote from the Handmaid's Tale is going viral:
"That was when they suspended the Constitution. They said it would be temporary. There wasn't even any rioting in the street. People stayed at home at night, watching television"
So to the extent that the publication of the Testaments causes people to revisit the novel - address some of the misconceptions around its message, celebrate Atwood as a writer then I welcome it.
But it is the novel itself where I start to pick nits:
Atwood has said that she was inspired to write the novel as she wanted to examine how oppressive regimes fall, and perhaps secondarily to explore how people survive in those regimes and even what causes people to resist the regimes.
On the second front I think she does succeed. The Aunt Lydia character is an excellent one - inspired heavily by Thomas Cromwell. From the event this evening Atwood is fascinated by the paralles between Gilead and Henry VIIs court and particularly the way in which Thomas Cromwell navigated his way to a position of power while carrying out his own schemings. She is obviously familiar with and a fan of both the Mantel trilogy (well the two published and knows of the one to come - she jokingly stage whispered "it doesn't end well for him") and the Diarmaid MacCulloch biography last year (she did not mention the author).
On the first though I struggle really to see the insights she brings. Atwood has made a big thing - in both books (and as a pre-condition for the TV serialisation of the Gilead world) that all events must have a basis in real life events. However I am struggling to tie the way in which the Gilead regime to the downfall of various regimes that she references heavily as inspirations for the book. These include USSR (where the Stalinist purges are a key inspiration for this novel), East Germany (more of an inspiration for the first), Pinochet's Chile, the Argentina Junta (the latter two inspiring the stadium scenes in this book and the disappeared babies of Argentina having clear parallels with one of the characters here). In most if not all the cases the actual abuses of the regime I think emerged as a result of (and post) their fall rather than precipitating it.
And the resistance part of the novel ends more as a rather simplistic adventure story - I don't really read literary fiction for passages like this
“Glad you made it,” said Captain Mishimengo. He shook our hands; he had two fingers missing. He was stocky, about sixty, with tanned skin and a short black beard. “Now here’s our story, supposing you’re asked: this is a cod schooner, solar, with fuel backup. Flag of convenience is Lebanon. We’ve delivered a cargo of cod and lemons by special licence, which means the grey market, and now we’re heading back out. You’ll need to stay out of sight during the day: I heard from my contact, via Bert who dropped you at the dock, that they’re bound to be looking for you soon. There’s a place for you to sleep, in the hold. If there’s an inspection, coast guard, it won’t be thorough, it’s guys we know.” He rubbed his fingers together, which I knew meant money.
I also felt that rather than illuminating how things in Gilead worked, the book at times struggled to maintain a coherent and consistent world view (for example I was not entirely convinced how the extreme punitive emphasis on the sanctity of the handmaids tied with the dentists ability to abuse children; the food shortages did not always seem prevalent; the continuing use of "MayDay" as a password by an organisation known to everyone as MayDay, and the addition of "June Moon" to add more secrecy is just silly) and other than the Pearl Girls I did not gain as much additional understanding of new depths to the societal picture as I had wished.
And whereas I liked the Aunt Lydia character - her depth and complexity, the other characters seemed far more one-dimensional. While I think I can excuse this for the Gilead based girl (and I think she does give a sense of how people can rapidly become assimilated to any culture if they have grown up with it); the Canadian girl was much less convincing - the device of having her unable to curb her language, attitude or atheism was significantly over-used and her (lack of) reaction to the murder of the people she thought were her parents for the first 16 years of her life was simply implausible.
The book ends - like Handmaid's Tale - with a 22nd Century Symposium looking back at the events of Gilead and using source materials (which are effectively the book we have been reading).
This is one area where The Testaments is better constructed than its predecessor - we are given more convincing explanations of the provenance of the documents that make the novel and even a clever hint by Atwood (via a link with Mary Queen of Scots and the Casket Letters) that the Aunt Lydia piece may even be a fake - Atwood left a rather hanging comment in the launch event that she is "fascinated by forgeries".
The character links between this book and its predecessor (taken for granted in pretty well every review - not least due to the influence of the TV series) are instead described as "not definitively excluded .... jumping to conclusions .... [for] future scholars to examine"
We are also told that the Professor and his assistant prepared a "facsimile edition of the three batches of materials, which we have interleaved in an order that made approximate narrative sense to us" - initially for the symposium attendees but also for the "benefit of a broader audience".
And here I think is the crux of my dilemma with this novel. The Handmaid's Tale even as a novel had moved well beyond the literary fiction space, and the TV series took it into popular culture. Atwood has I think written a novel which is deliberately broad in its appeal: it cleverly builds on the novel, fan theories and the TV series while adding her own stamp; it is also much more clearly an adventure type book and less literary. But its those very strengths which I think will lessen its appeal to fans of literary fiction.
So on the day of its publication I am: more convinced then ever of the greatness of its predecessor; glad I read this book; pleased it has been written; unconvinced of its individual literary merits; of the view that a lifetime achievement Nobel Prize would be a more appropriate recognition for the author than the Booker would be for this book....more
He talked about wanting to take on the destructive, mind-numbing junk culture of his time just as Cervantes had gone to war with the junk culture of his own age. He said he was trying to write about impossible, obsessional love, father-son relationships, sibling quarrels and, yes, unforgivable things: about Indian immigration, racism towards them, crooks among them; about cyber-spies, science fiction, the intertwining of fictional and “real” realities, the death of the author, the end of the world. He told her he wanted to incorporate elements of the parodic, and of satire and pastiche …. And it’s about opioid addiction, too he added.
Now shortlisted for the 2019 Booker Prize.
See also my other review for further notes on the book from a public interview Rushdie gave on the day of the book's publication
“I now find myself about halfway through the first book of Don Quixote, in the terrific Edith Grossman translation. This is proving to be a more complicated encounter. On the one hand, the characters of Quixote and Sancho Panza are as beautifully realised as I remember them, and the idea of a man determinedly seeing the world according to his own vision, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, feels strikingly contemporary. On the other hand, how many more times are the Knight of the Dolorous Countenance and Sancho going to get beaten up and left in pain in various roadside ditches? The “greatest novel ever written” – I voted for it myself once – turns out to be just a little bit repetitive.”
And Don Quixote forms the obvious inspiration for this novel – a man who has read so many chivalric romances that he loses his mind and is unable to distinguish the world they portray from reality, and a tale which starts, in perhaps the most famous line in Spanish literature “Somewhere in La Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember” is replaced by the opening
“There once lived, at a series of temporary addresses across the United States of America, a travelling man of Indian origins, advancing years, and retreating mental powers, who on account of his love for mindless television … has suffered a peculiar form of brain damage as a result”
After a very lengthy Rushdie-style list of examples of this mindless television (not exactly the only list to appear in the book) we are then told
“As a consequence of his near total preoccupation with the material offered up to him … he feel victim to that increasingly prevalent psychological disorder in which the boundary between truth and lies became smudged and indistinct ….. and began to think of himself as a natural citizen (and potential inhabitant) of that imaginary world beyond the screen”
And our link to the original is established with cable TV substituting for the chivalric romances. (together with a fairly unsubtle allusion – not the last – to current politics and Fake News)
Our character – Ismail Smile (Smile itself an Anglicization of Ismail) is a travelling salesman for the family owned Pharma conglomerate (Smile Pharma) which has recently made it big due to the development of an under the tongue method for delivering powerful opioids, as well as an aggressive sales approach towards incentivising doctors to take a rather relaxed approach to prescribing the drug for those not suffering from unbearable cancer related pain.
Ismail is obsessed with a Bollywood actress turned US television chat show star – Miss Salma R, and decides to set off on a quest to prove himself worthy of her love, not before renaming himself Quichotte after listening to his favourite recording – Jules Massanet’s “Don Quichotte” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Qui...) which he is told is “Only loosely based on the great Masterpiece of Cervantes … [Like] you’re a little loosely based yourself”.
Wiki lists a main change from the original as being that the “the simple farm girl Aldonza (Dulcinea) of the original novel becomes the more sophisticated Dulcinée, a flirtatious local beauty inspiring the infatuated old man's exploits” – which more fits the Miss Salma R character (whose background we learn more about in the third chapter – as well as learning of her present day addition to prescription drugs, an addiction which ends up drawing her to the Smile company).
Just as Don Quixote took much more of a meta-fictional turn in its second part, so this book takes a metafictional turn in its second chapter – the first chapter we learn was written by Brother – an Indian now living in the US who writes Five Eyes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes) based spy fiction under the pen name of Sam DuChamp.
Brother is alienated from his Sister (a prominent human rights lawyer in London – who we learn about starting in the fourth chapter including her near miss as speaker of the House of Lords, her cross-dressing High Court judge husband and her cancer) and his Son (who we later find is a hacker).
Quichotte himself in a later chapter imagines a son – Sancho – who quickly becomes more real (aided by an Italian cricket and blue fairy straight from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinocch...) and increasingly we and Brother realise that much of Quichotte’s life is a fictionalised reimagining of Brother’s life.
Other inspirations for the book, explicitly acknowledged by Rushdie at the end but which are worth, like I did, reading in advance are two classic science fiction short stories - https://www.gutenberg.org/files/51193... - a story which is referenced perhaps a little too much in the novel, with simultaneously the novel’s summary rather spoiling the delight of the short story and the short story itself rather obviously telegraphing the novel’s end and https://urbigenous.net/library/nine_b... which is nicely appropriated for Quichotte’s quest (as his fictional universe only exists to sustain his quest).
And the lack of subtlety transfers to the events in Berenger as the town’s inhabitants revert to Mastadon status, and just to make sure we get the picture we are much later told
“maybe they said something about our growing dehumanization, about how as a species, we, or some of us, might be losing our moral compass and becoming, simultaneously, creatures out of a barbaric, pre-human, long-toothed past, and also monsters tormenting the human present.”
A final inspiration (not acknowledged) seems to be a science fiction series Rushdie was widely announced to be developing a few years ago – which seems to have gone nowhere – but which he said was a “kind of a parallel world story, in which it was our earth and another variation of it, and they somehow come into contact with each other” – Rushdie referred to the series in interviews on “Golden House” and mused it was “interesting preparatory work for the way [that] book turned out.”
The influences here are clearer with another main character Evel Cent being a Elon Musk type visionary who suddenly announces that the world (Quichotte’s one) is being destroyed and that the only hope is a portal he is building allowing escape to a parallel earth, something Quichotte and his talking gun (yes really) seek to find.
The above is a vastly simplified version of the book’s crude topical commentary and its bizarre plot. It is also a vastly shortened version of the copious references to classic and popular culture it contains.
If at any stage during the book’s writing Rushdie felt he had taken any aspect (the lack of political subtlety, the surreal nature of the happenings, the randomness of the plot, the levels of allusion) to excess – then rather than drawing back and adding more foundations on which to build his often teetering edifice, Rushdie clearly chose to add yet another layer.
But for all its sprawling complexity it is also a book which is very explicit in what it is trying to achieve - Rushdie frequently literally putting words into his characters mouths to explain what is happening.
The opening quote is an example or later when criticised by his Son about what he has really achieved
He told the young man about the mastodons, and his indebtedness to Ionesco’s Rhinoceros. “So many great writers have guided me along the way” he said, and mentioned, further, Cervantes and Arthur C Clarke. “Is that okay to do” asked “That kind of borrowing?”. He had replied by quoting Newton, who said he had been able to see further because he was standing on the shoulders of giants. Son looked doubtful “Yeah but Newton would up discovering gravity” he said, unkindly “You haven’t got anywhere close to that”
Brother responds
“I think it’s legitimate for a work of art made in the present time to say, we are being crippled by the culture we have made, by its popular elements above all …. And by stupidity and ignorance and bigotry”
Rushdie is an author that can infuriate some people with the pretentiousness of his prose, or exhilarate and entertain some people with his imagination of his writing; often the same readers, in the same book, sometimes in the same page. On most of his books I find myself trying to work out where on the infuriation/exhilaration scale I have landed – and here I was very much at the exhilaration end.
I have heard this describes as a mess of a book, one that is inspired by rather elitist viewpoint, as well as drawing on tradition.
But traditional, elitist messes can, depending on your tastes, be extremely enjoyable, for example
Now shortlisted for the 2019 Booker Prize after having been re read following its longlisting - my final comment proving prescient - and with additionNow shortlisted for the 2019 Booker Prize after having been re read following its longlisting - my final comment proving prescient - and with additional comments added.
The book takes its cue from research that shows (as a medical examiner in the book reflects during an autopsy) which “observed persistent brain activity in people who had died …. for as much as ten minutes and thirty-eight seconds.”
The subject of the autopsy is Leyla Akarsu, a mid-40s (albeit claiming to be ten years younger) Pera-based prostitute (who changed the spelling of her first name – trading the y of yesterday for the i of infinity – and was given the nickname Tequila by her madam), who was reported abducted and was found battered to death and dumped in a wheelie bin.
The book opens immediately after her death in 1990:
In the first minute following her death, Tequila Leila’s consciousness began to ebb, slowly and steadily, like a tide receding from the shore. Her brain cells, having run out of blood, were now completely deprived of oxygen. But they did not shut down. Not right away. One last reserve of energy activated countless neurons, connecting them as though for the first time. Although her heart had stopped beating, her brain was resisting, a fighter till the end. It entered a state of heightened awareness, observing the demise of her body but not ready to accept its own end. Her memory surged forth, eager and diligent, collecting pieces of a life that she was speeding to a close. She recalled things she did not even know she was capable of remembering, things she believed to be lost forever. Time became fluid, a fast flow of recollections seeping into one another, the past and present inseparable.
And the first section of the book (Mind) has each chapter taking place over one minute of her surging memories and fluid recollections (with one chapter for the thirty seconds, and one for the last eight), the Proustian nature of which takes its cue from the many conversations she had over nine years with a student activist and artist Ali (who defiantly adopted the nickname with which his racist German classmates had taunted him when they found out his artistic ambitions) who stumbles into the brothel after fleeing the police on the day of the riots following the visit of the US Sixth Fleet to Istanbul in 1968.
‘How did you end up here [in a brothel]” men always asked. And each time Leila told them a different story, depending on whatever she thought they might like to hear … But she wouldn’t do that with D/Ali and he never asked the question anyhow. Instead he wanted to know other things about her - what did breakfasts taste like when she was a child in Van, what were the aromas that she remembered most vividly from winters long gone, and if she were to give cities a scent, what would be the scent of Istanbul. If ‘freedom’ were a type of food .. how did she think she would experience it on the tongue? And how about ‘fatherland”. D/Ali seemed to perceive the world through favours and scents, even the abstract things in life, such as love and happiness. Over time it became a game they played together, a currency of their own: they took memories and moments, and converted them into tastes and smells.
Each chapter starts with a different taste or smell – salt, lemon and sugar, cardamom coffee, watermelon, spice goat stew, wood burning stove, soil, Sulphuric acid, chocolate bonbons, deep fried street-food mussels, wedding cake, malt whisky, homemade strawberry cake - which unspool one of a series of seminal moments in Leila’s life, starting from her birth through to just before her death, as Leila’s life plays out against an occasional background of world and Istanbul events, and she answers for herself the question “How did you end up here [murdered]”.
We also meet “the five”, Leila’s five closest friends – Sabotage Sinan (a childhood friend), Nostalgia Nalan (a trans woman), Jameelah (a fellow prostitute people-trafficked from Somalia), Zaynabi122 (cleaner in the brothel, fortune telling Lebanese dwarf), and Hollywood Humeyra (a bar singer) – and learn in separate chapters about the tales of rejection, prejudice, trafficking, forced marriage and (in one case) unrequited love that lead them to Istanbul. These sections in particular seem designed to include many of the themes around which Shafak admirably campaigns, but this did not feel excessively forced.
The second section of the book “Body” is more conventional in its style and plot (and is based around a plot – in the (real life) Cemetery of the Companionless), if not in its ensemble. The five friends work together to give Leila’s body the end they believe it deserves and to prove that she is not companionless (with her "water" family stronger than her "blood" ones), in what ends as a brief but madcap grave robbing escapade culminating in a scene on the Bosphorus Bridge (which plays an important role in the novel).
The brief closing section follows her Soul on its journey into a peace she never found in her life.
The other key character in the book is Istanbul variously described as: a liquid city; a mighty metropolis ... still not solidified .. water .. shifting, whirling, searching; [a city which] made killing easy, and dying even easier; an illusion, a magicians trick gone wrong; multiple Istanbul’s - struggling, competing, clashing ... [which] lived and breathed inside one another like matryoshka dollar”. A city which attracts Leila and her friends when the flee their former lives but which turns out very differently to their expectations and very hostile to the marginalised (despite adding as a magnet for them) and for women.
This is the third Shafak book I have read – she is always an author I have been disposed to like.
She writes about one of my favourite cities (which I used to visit for work); her talks and essays are clearly written and insightful; her activism across a whole range of causes admirable (as shown by the opposition she attracts, even recently from Turkish conservative authorities); her literary involvement shows great taste (most recently as Goldsmith judge and Wellcome Prize chair – both of which recognised the brilliant “Murmur” by Will Eaves and where she must have been the common factor).
And yet … my previous reads have been three stars – due to their implausibility of plot, rather overtly forced themes and really poor endings.
As a writer I am reminded of Zadie Smith – brilliant and admirable in so many ways, and yet just not quite able to convince me in a novel.
However this is the strongest of Shafak’s novels that I have read – the central conceit of the novel is an ingenious new way of approaching an old technique which goes back beyond Proust (memories evoked by sense) even to Lawrence Sterne (memories stretching back to birth), and functions as an excellent way to examine her themes.
The key moments that made Leila’s fate seemingly inevitable, which led to her lifelong but fully unjustified sense of guilt, and her perpetual status as undeserved victim, were I thought conveyed in a subtle but powerful way.
I was less enamored with the five, their backstories and with the Body part of the novel. This was I think, meant to be a deliberate, enlightened (if not entirely successful) twist on the Hollywood ensemble/buddy quest movie and which was designed to include two things that Shafak is keen to address in this book (and in much of her writing)
- Writing from the viewpoint of the outcasts, those on the peripheries of Turkish society - Trying to reclaim urban Istanbul as a feminine space - the city always being seen as female in Byzantine days - e.g. (my example here rather then hers) the church of St Sophia as the most important in the City compared to St Peter's in Rome.
So overall a strong and enjoyable novel – and I would not be surprised to see the author this year receiving rather than giving out literary prize longlistings....more
the fact this won the 2019 Goldsmith prize, Golden Syrup, Golden Retriever
the fact that this is shortlisted for the 2019 Booker Prize, shortlist, shorthe fact this won the 2019 Goldsmith prize, Golden Syrup, Golden Retriever
the fact that this is shortlisted for the 2019 Booker Prize, shortlist, shortbread
the fact that this is longlisted for the 2019 booker prize, longlisted, longleat, lions of longleat, mountain lion
the fact that madeleines are like little memory sticks, but when you bite into one you get closure, the fact that all her life that mountain lion has been alone and free and unnamed, and now she has a name and she’s not free anymore, and that’s sort of spooky, or is it just the thought of the way she lived before, so alone and hidden from the world, that spooks me, the fact that I’m pretty alone and hidden from the world myself a lot of the time, but not the way a mountain lion, the fact that I think it’d be great if the right to bear arms thing turned out to be about wearing short sleeves, the right to bare arms, or else maybe they meant heraldry, like the right to a family crest, the fact that you get to have a pennant with a lion rampant or dormant on it, armorial, armed conflict, Ben’s book on heraldry, dormant, torpor, the fact that it would be really nice to see all these gun nuts just settle down and design their own coat of arms and get some plaques made, the fact that maybe they could have their own tartan too, get a whole Scottish thing going, a family clan, kilts, swordies, the fact that I wouldn’t even mind bagpipes if they’d just quit talking about the 2A for a while, and stopped killing people too
the fact that I started reading Ducks, Newburyport in Gander, Newfoundland, the fact that I came home and my daughter was reading Laura Ingalls Wilder, the fact that Mr Darcy, Darcey, the fact that BTP, MTBE, CTE, KRW, AES are all things I discussed while reading the book which featured in the book, the fact that Mary Ellman wrote the seminal Thinking About Women and this book will become the seminal A Woman Thinking, the fact that this book is in the tradition of Joyce and Proust but with a fierce anger purely of its own, the fact that Edna O’Brien said she had yet to meet anyone who has read and digested the whole of Finnegan’s Wake except Richard Ellmann, the fact that unlike Proust Lucy Ellman’s narrator bakes as well as eats madeleines, the fact that I finished the book and my daughter bought a madeleine back from her school trip to France, the fact that Open Carry, Daily Carry, the ability to carry off a 1000 page sentence, the fact that baking and shooting in the kitchen, Galley Kitchens, Galley Beggar, the gall to publish such a rule-breaking fiercely-blazing book, the fact is Galley Beggar, beggars, beg/borrow/steal but best of all buy a copy, the fact that Jane Austen, Persuasion, I hope I have persuaded you to read the book, the fact that the Lucy Ellman does so much better a job
Now shortlisted for the prestigious international 2021 Dublin Literary Award
Winner (jointly) of the 2019 Booker Prize - perhaps appropriately given itNow shortlisted for the prestigious international 2021 Dublin Literary Award
Winner (jointly) of the 2019 Booker Prize - perhaps appropriately given its closing words
this is about being together
A book I have read and loved three times so I was delighted to be present for its win and to get these photos
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When hearing the winner announcement I immediately thought of a passage very early in the book when it says
Amma then spent decades on the fringe, a renegade lobbing hand grenades at the establishment that excluded her
until the mainstream began to absorb what was once radical and she found herself hopeful of joining it"
At the Foyles/New Statesman Booker Winner reading on the Thursday of the award I asked the author if she had also reflected on that passage when the announcement was made and how it applied to her own situation.
Her answer was: that she had in fact been reflecting on it for some time (including when she was completing the book), but crucially that when she first started writing the book she did not think it was true for her at all - she did not expect any positive reception from the mainstream as she did not think it had moved far enough or the book would be seen as topical enough. However the #metoo and #blacklivesmatter movements shifted the ground significantly in her view and meant that the mainstream was ready for a black woman writing about black women.
MAIN REVIEW
The book is written as a series of twelve chapters, each featuring a named character.
These characters are Black (although in one case not aware), British (although in one case no longer thinking of themselves as such) and Female (although in one case no longer identifying as such)
They are however of different age, sexuality and sexual identity, formative experience, family unit structure (both parental unit and their own family unit), ethnic make-up, ancestral origin, shade, region, occupation, cultural background, class, and degree of activism (as well as journey along the activist/conventional spectrum over time).
This is a novel of polyphony, polygenetics, polygenderism.
But crucially it was not one that at any time I felt was a forced attempt to represent diversity but more of a natural attempt to examine the core shared identity of the characters alongside their differences and their journey; and more crucially an attempt to give visibility to black British women in literature.
The author has described the style she chose to adopt here as “fusion fiction” – a fluid form of prose poetry, with a dearth of conventional sentences with capital letter openings and full stop endings
I found this style very effective – form matching content, style matching theme. Evaristo has always been someone who challenges convention in art (as captured in Amma – the most autobiographical of the characters). The fluidity of the prose enables her to range within the characters thoughts and across time, and between stories and characters.
The characters are grouped in four sets of three – with clear and immediate links between the characters in each set, but less obvious and emerging links between the characters in different sets.
The first set has Amma (a provocative theatre director), her daughter Yazz (studying literature at the UEA) and Dominique (now based in the US but at Amma’s original partner in disrupting theatrical culture).
The second Carole (who pulled herself from difficult origins, via a Maths degree at Oxford to a banking job in the City), Bummi (her mother) and La Tisha (her one time schoolfriend now working in a supermarket as a young Mum of three children by three absent fathers).
The third has Shirley (a friend of Amma’s since school, now veteran teacher whose greatest project as a teacher was Carole), Shirley’s mother Winsome (now retired in Barbados) and Penelope (a now retired colleague of Shirley’s who resented the increasing multi-culturalism of their school for many years, while secretly struggling with finding out on her 16th birthday she was a foundling).
The last has non-binary Megan/Morgan (they are a social media influencer and activist), Hattie (their great-grandmother, a 90-something Northumberland farmer) and Grace (Hattie’s mother).
Thee are only the main characters though and Evaristo also brings in the backstories of their parents, their closest friends and even the parents of their closest friends.
She has said in an interview ”At one point I thought maybe I could have one hundred protagonists. Toni Morrison has a quote: ‘Try to think the unthinkable’. That’s unthinkable. One hundred black women characters? How can I do that? I need a more poetic form. Now there are only twelve main characters.” and while adopting the poetic form the novel still retains strong elements of her centurion ambitions.
And the backstories are important I believe in what the author is trying to achieve. From the same interview: ”Even though I don’t have a protagonist who’s a young teenager, a lot of the characters went through that stage. So you have a sense of who they were as children, how they became adults, and then how they are as mothers. I’m deeply interested in how we become the people we are. Coming from a radical feminist alternative community in my 20s, and then seeing these people in their 40s and 50s, I’ve seen people become extremely, almost, conservative, establishment, having lost all the free-spiritedness, oppositionality and rebelliousness of their younger years. To me that’s fascinating. When I meet young people today and they are a certain way, I think: ‘You don’t know who you’re going to be.’ That feeds into the fiction. How do we parent our children? What are our ambitions for our children? How does that link to how we were raised? How does gender play out?”
Amma is perhaps also the most central character - and it is in the after-party on the opening night of her first play at the National Theatre “The Last Amazon of Dahomey”, that the various characters and their stories converge and interact (Carole as her partner is a sponsor of the National, Morgan invited to review the play by tweet for example).
A final epilogue reveals a final link via an examination of hybridity of origins and finishes with the quote with which I open my review.
I found this a strong novel – there is polemic and challenge, but also warmth, humour and self-awareness.
Carol’s idea of bed-time reading includes
“also monitoring the international news that affects market conditions, the weather conditions that affect crops, the terrorism that destabilizes countries, the elections that effect trading agreements, the natural disasters that can wipe out whole industries”
which could simply not be closer to my own work-related reading, but she also comments
“and if it isn’t related to work, it’s not worth reading”
which could simply not be further from my own view of literature – and a book like this is why wider reading is worthwhile.
At the after-party we are told:
a five-star review has already been uploaded online from one usually savage pit-bull of a critic who’s been uncharacteristically gushing: astonishing, moving, controversial, original
Well as my profile picture shows I am more Golden Retriever (incidentally one such Humperdinck features as Penelope’s loyal companion – “always there for her, always eagle for a cuddle, who’ll listen to her for hours without interruption .. greets her as soon as she steps in the door”) than savage pit-bull of a critic (although I have my moments) but five stars from me....more
Now shortlisted for the 2019 Booker Prize having been re-read following its longlisting.
As part of my re-read I came across two articles in the MillioNow shortlisted for the 2019 Booker Prize having been re-read following its longlisting.
As part of my re-read I came across two articles in the Millions by the author which I found very helpful for understanding the writing style that the author has deployed is and it’s very deliberate contrast in its expansive prose and layers of reality to what he sees as the minimalism and literalness that has come to dominate much Western literature. Both articles locate his writing firmly in a Nigerian tradition and appear a conscious effort to portray himself as a successor to Chinua Achebe. Given a number of the expansive books on the longlist I feel that the judges may agree with his take.
In one of his essays, the late Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe stated that “no one be fooled by the fact that we write in English, for we intend to do unheard-of things with it.” That “we” is, in essence, an authoritative oratorical posture that cast him as a representative of a group, a kindred of writers who — either by design or fate — have adopted English as the language of literary composition. With these words, it seems that to Achebe the intention to do “unheard-of” things with language is a primary factor in literary creation. He is right. And this should be the most important factor
Like most other art forms, fiction has undergone many configurations over the years, but its core has remained, as always, the aesthetic pleasure of reading. When we read, we connect to the immaterial source of the story through its outstretched limbs. The “limb” or variants of it are what the writer has deemed fit for us to see, to gaze at and admire. It is not often the whole. But one of the major ways in which fiction has changed today — from the second half of the 20th century especially — is that most of its fiction reveals all its limbs to us all at once. Nothing is hidden behind the esoteric wall of mystery or metaphysics.
ORIGINAL REVIEW
“A poultry farmer named Jamike Nwaorji, having groomed him for some time, having plucked excess feathers from his body, having fed him with mash and millet, having let him graze about gaily, having probably staunched a leg wounded by a stray nail, had now sealed him up in a cage. And all he could do now, all there was to do now, was cry and wail. He had now joined many others, all the people Tobe had listed who have been defrauded of their belongings –the Nigerian girl near the police station, the man at the airport, all those who have been captured against their will to do what they did not want to do either in the past or the present, all who have been forced into joining an entity they do not wish to belong to, and countless others. All who have been chained and beaten, whose lands have been plundered, whose civilisations have been destroyed, who have been silenced, raped, shamed and killed. With all these people, he’d come to share a common fate. They were the minorities of this world whose only recourse was to join this universal orchestra in which all there was to do was cry and wail.”
The author’s first book and debut novel, “The Fishermen” prize, a deeply allegorical but simply narrated story set in Nigeria, was, perhaps surprisingly, shortlisted for the 2015 Man Booker Prize. This is his second novel and more ambitious in scope.
The genesis of the novel is contained in this 2016 article written by the author for the Guardian
The author recounts his own experience as a Nigerian student in (the largely unrecognised state of Turkish) Northern Cyprus and his realisation that many if not most of the other Nigerian students there had been swindled out of money they had paid in advance for fees and accommodation; and also deceived into believing that entry to Northern Cyprus would give them jobs, prosperity and the right to move anywhere in the EU.
The author himself had been able, via his family, to pay his fees direct to the University and from his degree was able to gain a place as a Creative Writing lecturer in the US. However his experience was very much the exception and one of his fellow students Jay (who appears as a character in this book) committed suicide as a result of his despair on arriving in Cyprus and realising the way he had been deceived. The author was clearly hugely affected by this incident and wondered about the Nigerian who had carried out the swindle, who was presumably unaware that his small momentary gain had such cataclysmic consequences. The article also covers an image of Northern Cyprus which stuck with the author - trapped birds trying to escape their fate.
In interviews about the book, the author has also talked about how this incident and other things he witnessed in Cyprus caused him to examine what he sees as the great topic of literature - the contradiction between free will and fate and how he interprets them through, not so much traditional Western views, but through the prism of the ancient Igbo philosophy of his ancestors:
“I think it’s the question of fate’s unknowingness, its unquestionability, its irrationality, its madness, its unpredictability, its mercy, its brutality, its generosity, its elusiveness, its banality, its vitality, and all the things you can ascribe to it. It is the most metaphysical of all phenomena—if we can call it a phenomenon. I cannot conceive of a greater topic for great literature ............. I’m more chiefly concerned with metaphysics of existence and essence as they relate to the Igbo philosophy of being. We believe that life is in essence a dialectic between free will and destiny. It is a paradox: that you can make a choice, yet, that everything is preordained? And it is in this space that I anchor my stories.’
The novel that he produced (originally conceived as per the 2016 Guardian article, as “The Falconer”) features a young Nigerian man Chinoso - his mother having died in his childhood, the recent death of his father has left him newly orphaned and in sole charge of a the poultry farming business he and his father developed. Somewhat at a loss in live, one day he persuades a girl against committing suicide by jumping from a bridge into a torrential river, sacrificing two of his precious newly purchased birds to shock her with the physical horror of what she is contemplating.
Later the woman seeks him out and realising what he sacrificed for her, as well as being hugely affected by an incident when he shows the lengths to which he is prepared to go for what he loves, by attacking a hawk which is protecting his fowl, begins a relationship with him.
She however is studying for a Pharmacy degree and the daughter of a tribal Chief, and her family violently reject both his poverty and, more tellingly, lack of education. The latter leads him to the fateful decision to take up an invite from an old school acquaintance (one he used to bully at school) that he will arrange a place to study at a European university (in Northern Cyprus),a one thing he funds by selling his beloved poultry and his family home.
The conventional part of the narrative follows his arrival in Northern Cyprus as the scam played out on him becomes immediately apparent, the tragic spiral of events that follows and his eventual return to Nigeria to confront his past.
A story which while conventional and, explicitly drawing on the Odyssey, is also told in a vibrant way, with pidgin English and Igbo (both translated and untranslated) sitting alongside vivid descriptions.
But what really distinguishes the book is its unconventional part - which is based in Igbo cosmology and philosophy.
The book is narrated by Chinoso’s guardian spirit - his chi. Chapters are told in flashback, effectively in the form of a defense statement drawn up by the chi to the higher powers, setting out Chinoso’s fate and his resulting actions, drawing on ancient Igbo parables, sayings and beliefs in an attempt to explain both, and with the ultimate aim of pleading for divine clemency for Chinoso’s actions, in particular his unwitting harming of a pregnant woman.
On the whole I think this approach works - the chi functions as a form of partial omniscient narrator, successfully re-appropriating the standard (but often criticised) form of third-party Western novelistic narration into a more ancient tradition of African story telling.
And the chi explores dialectic themes, first of loneliness and love in the opening Nigerian section; then fate and destiny, despair and hope in the Cypriot parts; then the ideas of hatred and forgiveness in the closing section.
All the time indulging in vivid imagery:
Most of what he said pivoted around the perils of loneliness and the need for a woman. And his words were true, for I had lived among mankind long enough to know that loneliness is the violent dog that barks interminably through the long night of grief. I have seen it many times.
EBUBEDIKE, the great fathers speak of a man who is anxious and afraid as being in a fettered state. They say this because anxiety and fear rob a man of his peace. And a man without peace? Such a man, they say, is inwardly dead. But when he rids himself of the shackles, and the chains rattle and tumble away into outer dark, he becomes free again. Reborn. To prevent himself from falling again into bondage, he tries to build defences around himself. So what does he do? He allows in yet another fear. This time, it is not the fear that he is undone because of his present circumstances but that in a yet uncreated and unknown time, something else will go wrong and he will be broken again. Thus he lives in a cycle in which the past is rehearsed, time and time again. He becomes enslaved by what has not yet come. I have seen it many times.
Also, it became clear to him now that it wasn’t he alone who harboured hatred or a full pitcher of resentment from which, every step or so in its rough journey on the worn path of life, a drop or two spilled. It was many people, perhaps everyone in the land, everyone in Alaigbo, or even everyone in the country in which its people live, blindfolded, gagged, terrified. Perhaps every one of them was filled with some kind of hatred. Certainly. Surely an old grievance, like an immortal beast, was locked up in an unbreakable dungeon of their hearts. They must be angry at the lack of electricity, at the lack of amenities, at the corruption.
Where I felt it did not succeed so well, at least for my own enjoyment, was when the chi character itself and its own parallel cosmological world took prominence - lacking any real context (and with the author seemingly unwilling to provide it) I often found myself skipping these sections (especially a lengthy sectional the end to the Cypriot part of the novel which ultimately seems to lead nowhere) in a mix of bewilderment and impatience.
I was again mystified by the fact that, despite the dozen or so childish spirits playing, a market went on undisrupted below them. The market continued to teem with women haggling, people driving in cars, a masquerade swinging through the place to the music of an uja and the sound of an ekwe. None of them was aware of what was above them, and those above paid no heed to those below, either. I had been so carried away by the frolicking spirits that the masquerade and its entourage were gone by the time I returned to my host. Because of the fluidity of time in the spirit realm, what may seem like a long time to man is in fact the snap of a finger. This was why, by the time I was back into him, he was already in his van driving back to Umuahia. Because of this distraction, I was unable to bear witness to everything my host did at the market, and for this I plead your forgiveness..
I often struggled to see this element of the book as much more than a unnecessary and only partly forgivable distraction from the power of the main story.
I also felt that a recurring theme, of a Gosling that Chinoso raised as a child, simultaneously loving but holding in captivity, but which was then stolen from him and which he destroyed while taking revenge; was rather over-laboured.
Stronger though was the link between the distress of the poultry during the hawk attack, and other traumatic incidents, and the helplessness of Chinoso and others in the face of oppression and injustice.
Er-he, Nonso, I have been wondering all day: what is the sound that the chickens were making after the hawk took the small one? It was like they all gathered –er, together.’ She coughed, and he heard the sound of phlegm within her throat. ‘It was like they were all saying the same thing, the same sound.’ He started to speak, but she spoke on. ‘It was strange. Did you notice it, Obim?’ ‘Yes, Mommy,’ he said. ‘Tell me, what is it? Is it crying? Are they crying?’ He inhaled. It was hard for him to talk about this phenomenon because it often moved him. For it was one of the things that he cherished about the domestic birds –their fragility, how they relied chiefly on him for their protection, sustenance, and everything. In this they were unlike the wild birds. ‘It is true, Mommy, it is cry,’ he said. ‘Really?’ ‘That is so, Mommy.’ ‘Oh, God, Nonso! No wonder! Because of the small one—’ ‘That is so.’ ‘That the hawk took?’ ‘That is so, Mommy.’ ‘That is very sad, Nonso,’ she said after a moment’s quiet. ‘But how did you know they were crying?’ ‘My father told me. He was always saying it is like a burial song for the one that has gone. He called it Egwu umu-obereihe. You understand? I don’t know umu-obere-ihe in English.’ ‘Little things,’ she said. ‘No, minorities.’ ‘Yes, yes, that is so. That is the translation my father said. That’s how he said it in English: minorities. He was always saying it is like their “okestra”.’ ‘Orchestra,’ she said. ‘O-r-c-h-e-s-t-r-a.’ ‘That is so, that is how he pronounced it, Mommy. He was always saying the chickens know that is all they can do: crying and making the sound ukuuukuu! Ukuuukuu!’
Overall a book which while not entirely successful represents a worthy and ambitious second novel....more
Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer
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