Power Of Powerlessness

THE BOOKER PRIZE is one of the most prestigious annual awards for fiction. The six on this year’s shortlist are testament to the power of storytelling. There is a nod to historical fiction with Paul Harding’s This Other Eden. The other five are broadly family sagas, where families hold each other together but also tear each other apart. Expected ‘big’ names like Zadie Smith (for The Fraud) have not made it, but two debut authors have, Chetna Maroo (for her quiet and brilliant Western Lane) and Jonathan Escoffery (for his structurally inventive and politically astute If I Survive You) have. It is also a good year for Irish authors as there is Paul Lynch for Prophet Song and Paul Murray for The Bee Sting. It is also a good year for Pauls as there are three on the list! The hardest novel to pin down here is Sarah Bernstein’s Study for Obedience as it is eerie while also being very real. While telling of per­sonal stories, these novels speak very much of the terrors of today, whether it is racism or colonialism, climate change or xenophobia. These authors are too astute to use literature for political ends, instead, like true artists, they use fiction for moral reasons. The winner will be announced on November 26.

Western Lane| BY CHETNA MAROO | Picador | 176 pages | ₹599

“He was quiet, and then he said: ‘The chil­dren. The girls. Sometimes I look at them and I think they will eat me.” This is a sentence spoken by a recently widowed father to his daughter’s friend’s mother. Little does he know that his daughter and her friend Ged are no longer practis­ing squash and their sprints, but are instead overhearing this raw confession.

Western Lane is a strangely melan­cholic and disquieting novel about the dynamics of family, how they scatter and how they cohere, and the hold of sports. It revolves around Papa and his three daughters (Gopi, Mona and Khush) struggling after the death of their matriarch. Told in the voice of 11-year-old Gopi who is a natural at squash, this debut novel holds a magnifying glass to grief. Their mother may have died, but she remains a presence in the household, “not through any experience of her…but through the quality of Pa’s attention.”

Silences, pauses and dangling con­versations fill the home of this Gujarati family living in London. The sisters deal with the bereave­ment in isolation and in rare moments of solidarity. The white box of the squash court gives Gopi the one chance to travel away from her everyday­ness. Papa similarly invests his energies in Gopi at the cost of his job as an electrician, while also neglecting the running of his house. Together Gopi and he spend hours poring over videos of Pakistani players Jahangir Khan and Hiddy Jahan.

Western Lane can be seen as a coming-of-age novel, a sport novel, an immigrant novel all rolled into one. Where each concern—sisterhood, squash and belonging—is dealt with equal skill and vigour. But ultimately it is a family novel, which asks the question, will the father be able to give one of his daugh­ters to Uncle Pavan and Aunt Ranjan to look after?

The growing friendship between Pa and Ged’s mother forms another layer of the story. In the company of this white woman, he, perhaps finds an ease that he cannot elsewhere. This heartfelt novel reveals the isolation of grief, the tensions and tenderness of families, and the comfort and escape of sports. From Kenya-born and London-based Maroo this is a wonderfully well-constructed debut novel, which reminds readers that love is care.

If I Survive You| BY JONATHAN ESCOFFERY | Fourth Estate | 272 pages | ₹499

The other debut on this Booker shortlist is by American writer Jonathan Escoffery. If Maroo’s Western Lane was essentially about South Asian women in London, If I Survive You is all about Black men in Miami. This is about America in the 1980s and ’90s, it is also very much about America today.

Interestingly, the book can be read both as a collection of short stories and a novel. In an interview, Escoffery said that from the start he imagined the chapters as standalone stories and the chapters as building a narrative arc and a final climax. He felt that this structure would reflect the “episodic nature of human experience”. The book moves backward and forward in time, im­mersing readers in muggy Miami and unresolved family tensions.

The focus is Trelawny who is considered “too American in Jamaica, not culturally or phenotypically Black (American) enough in Miami, and too Black in the American Midwest”. He lives in Miami, but his brother Delano and all his living relatives are Jamaican. The concern with identity is central to the book, and we come to know this from the opening line itself, “It begins with What are you? hollered from the perimeter of your front yard when you are nine—younger, probably.” The questions that follow include, “Why’s your mother talk so funny?” Trelawny is young, but he has learned “more than to be cowardly and disloyal, though, it’s shameful to be foreign.” In high school, he is accused of plagiarism as his research paper sounds “too sophisticated” (meaning White). At bars the wait­ers give him a look, which implies he should be a server rather than a customer.

This book is as much about prejudice and race as it is about poverty. Trelawny’s home is buffeted by hurricane Andrew. His father and brother move out, leaving his mother and him to fend for themselves, and only resentment and recklessness in their wake.

The voice in the novel moves from ‘you’ (addressed to Trelawny), to Trelawny’s first-person voice to Trelawny’s father’s patois. He asks; “what is the bond between certain fathers and certain sons”? And realises it is all too often a game of one upman­ship. Every son deserves to believe that his father is good, but if all fathers were good, he realises, wouldn’t we be living in a very different world?

As opportunities vanish, Trelawny tries to make ends meet in bizarre and increas­ingly desperate ways, from answering an ad by a woman who wants to be punched, to cheating the elderly of their money as the property man­ager of Silver Towers. Money is always a horizon and never a reality. This is a book about absent fathers and grieving mothers and sons who try to find their footing in a quicksand world. The only path away from self-destruc­tion, If I Survive You reminds readers, is to forgive oneself and others.

Study for Obedience| BY SARAH BERNSTEIN | Granta Books | 208 pages | ₹799

In an interview, Canadian author Sarah Bernstein mentioned that Portu­guese artist Paula Rego helped inspire her second novel. In Rego’s exhibition Obedience and Defiance mounted in Scotland a few years ago, one can, per­haps, see the roots of Study for Obedience

This dark, rather macabre book is told through the eyes of an unreli­able woman narrator who moves to a “remote northern country” to manage her brother’s home, as his wife and children have left. Here she must clean, cook, shop, garden, launder, chop wood, polish, wax etcetera etcetera.

It is little surprise that Montreal-born Bernstein lives in the Scottish Highlands overlooking the bay, as this is a novel steeped in the countryside, where nature and man seem to always be caught in an uneasy truce. Strange events happen after the arrival of the narrator; a dog has a phantom pregnancy, cows go mad and must be exterminated, there is a potato blight and domestic fowl need to be con­tained. The village is quick to believe that the narrator, the ‘outsider’, is responsible for these occurrences.

It is hard to get a grip on the novel, as the narrator is a slippery character. Her relationship with her brother is markedly servile, and there are hints of an abusive past. She is ill at ease with the world around, and confesses, “Since girlhood I had an instinct for retreat, knowing perhaps even then that with­drawing into myself was my only tal­ent, the only way I had and ever would have of exercising any control over the situations in which I found myself…”

This dexterous novel forces a reader to confront how the persecuted inter­nalise persecution. She always feels like an “incomer”, “an offlander”, “a usurp­er” and is convinced that others see her as “strange” and “not to be trusted”. Though her ethnic background is not specified, she is deemed by the village, as fit for certain jobs, such as a treasurer. She is chosen for this job not for her qualifications but for her ethnicity. This novel unpacks what it means to be new in town. The narrator presents herself as “meek and clean”, “pressed and pli­able”, but instead her very presence “in­flames their superstitions” and “brings out their fears”. Despite her toils in the town—from scraping chicken coops to pulling out nettles—she remains a figure to be distrusted.

But as the narrator of this novel has been drawn from Paula Rego’s canvas, obedience must be seen as the other side of defiance. She is the persecuted outsider, but she must have agency too, no? She isn’t just the victim of her life, could she also be its protagonist? Like Rego’s striking portrait Angel (1998), is the narrator the woman with a sponge in one hand, and scimitar in the other? Is she both punishment and revenge? Her brother becomes like a doll in her hands, she must bathe him, massage him, dress him as he slowly dissolves under her watch. She ‘sublimates’ herself into her brother’s schedule, into his very body. And as the reader can never hear from the brother directly, one can’t help but find her sinister rather than sisterly.

Study for Obedience unnerves not because of unexpected boos, but simply how the quotidian intimidates. Reading it feels like a walk on a pitch-dark night, where familiar shadows and outlines are rendered otherworldly and can cause jitters.

This Other Eden | BY PAUL HARDING | Hutchinson Heinemann | 223 pages | ₹623

A work of historical fiction The Other Eden is set in America of the 1800s, but many of its concerns would ring true today; such as how evil arises when one group sees another as “human animals” (to use a contemporary phrase).

The Other Eden similarly tells of a ‘civilised’ race which wishes to ‘cleanse’ Apple Island, located off the coast of the US. It raises the crucial question, who does ‘land’ belong to? Those who can produce a piece of paper or those who have lived there for centuries?

Harding’s novel is borne from the true story of Malaga Island, a tiny piece of land inhabited by a mixed-race fish­ing community off Maine who were forcibly evicted by the state in 1912. Harding, who won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, for his debut Tinkers (2009), uses Malaga as a springboard to tell of eugenics and the ‘civilising process’, colonialism and racism. The fictional Apple Island is not a retelling of Malaga, rather it is a reimagining.

The island is home to a handful of families, including the Honey family, made up of the matriarch Esther (who did a terrible thing to her father as a terrible thing was done to her), her son, Eha, and Eha’s three children. An­other fascinating charac­ter is Matthew Diamond, a schoolteacher who imparts lessons in Math and Latin to the island’s children. He acknowl­edges their brightness but will never be able to see Black or mixed-race people as his equals. When ‘doctors’ with callipers come to the island to measure the dimensions of the children, from their skulls to their nostrils, they pronounce the children to be “imbeciles” and “mo­rons”. Through it all Diamond thinks these students can do better Math than the ‘civilised’ folks, even if they cannot recognise a steam engine or a telephone.

Diamond helps one of the Honey children (Ethan, who is the least coloured in appearance) to join an art apprenticeship at the estate of a friend. Here, in picturesque detail, he experi­ences a new world, from tasting lemons and ice for the first time, to finding friendship with a maid who is also from an island. In the impending gloom this tender romance—and the descriptions of his paintings of farmers tilling the land—offers the reader some reprieve.

Even while the concerns of the novel are the big issues like power and powerlessness, race and colonialism, the families always stay front and centre to the story. In today’s ‘politi­cally correct’ times, ‘sensitivity readers’ might question the validity of a white author writing of Black experience. But The Other Eden shows how imagination, lyricism and empathy are true to the best writers. Harding knows how to conjure up the beautiful line and image with his sure-footed prose. Sample this; “The islanders were so used to diets of wind and fog, to meals of slow-roasted sunshine and poached storm clouds, so used to devouring sauteed shadows and broiled echoes; they found themselves stupefied by such an abundance of food and drink. For that evening it seemed to them as if they were sending Ethan off on all of their behalves. And it seemed as if by sending him to paint his beautiful pictures they all might somehow un­house homelessnesss, might somehow bankrupt poverty. It seemed to all of them that evening as if they somehow might even starve hunger itself.”

The Bee Sting | BY PAUL MURRAY | Hamish Hamilton | 656 pages | ₹710

A title like ‘Bee Sting’ is sure to pique a reader’s curiosity. The daughter in the novel, Cass, a bookish rebellious teen­ager, realises that there are no wedding photos of her parents in their house. She then stumbles upon the story that a bee got stuck in her mother’s wed­ding veil and that her face swelled up like a “pig bladder stuck to her face”. Which explains the lack of photos. While the novel is set in smalltown Ireland and is make belief, Irish author Paul Murray (who was longlisted for the Booker in 2010 for Skippy Dies) admits that the bee in a wedding veil happened to a friend of a friend.

Murray’s sprawling fourth novel accurately captures smalltown life and all its frustrations through the Barnes family, namely the children PJ and Cass, and the parents Dickie and Imelda. Early in the novel, Cass’ frenemy captures some of the suffocation when she says, “I just want to live somewhere I can get good coffee and not see nature and everyone doesn’t look like they were made out of mashed potato.”

By using rotating points-of-view in this tragicomedy, the reader gets to see the greatly diminished Dickie whose profitable car business now risks bankruptcy because of “The Crisis”. He is loath to ask his wealthy holidaying father for help and instead spends his time building a bunker in the woods with his friends. Imelda is constantly in the throes of disappointment, either with her husband and children or with how her own life turned out. The local belle—who even as a mother of two has an “electrifying effect on people”— she is now reduced to pawning her jewellery. Cass, like the quintessential teenager, is still deciding whether she wants to be class topper or the babe in the bar. She pushes a dagger into her mother when she tells her, “You hate me because you think I am going to have the life you never had, and you can’t stand it.” Her 12-year-old brother watches in horror as his family comes apart at the seams, all the while planning his own great escape, from both the local bully and the town itself.

The Bee Sting is a chronicle of thwarted dreams and waylaid plans. Fate disallowed Imelda from marrying the love of her life. Dickie could never follow his true inclinations. While the scraping and scratching of family members forms the bones of the story, the overarching themes are many of today’s concerns from the rise of fascism to impending doom of climate change.

Prophet Song | BY PAUL LYNCH | Oneworld | 320 pages | ₹599

Irish author Paul Lynch’s fifth novel Prophet Song is, perhaps, the most zeit­geist-ish novel on the list, and thus, per­haps, the most likely to win. It chronicles mother-of-four Eilish Stack’s attempts to find out more about her husband, a se­nior trade-unionist, who has been taken in by Dublin’s Garda National Immigra­tion Bureau (GNSB). This is a novel about a mother’s determination to keep her family together as Ireland’s democracy slowly melts into totalitarianism. Ellish has a simple question, “The state is supposed to leave you alone, not enter your house like an ogre, take a father into its fist and gobble him, how can I even begin to explain this to the kids, that the state they live in has become a monster?”

It is a social novel that captures today’s political anxieties, whether it is in Ireland or closer home, where an authori­tarian government culls all civil liberties. Explaining the novel, Lynch said, “I was trying to see into the modern chaos. The unrest in Western democracies. The problem of Syria—the implosion of an entire nation, the scale of its refugee crisis and the West’s indifference.”

Prophet Song like The Other Eden, asks why are we so short on empathy when it comes to people who might be ‘different’ from us? It is a novel that reminds readers that the ultimate act of fiction is creating compassion.

booksChetna MarooJonathan EscofferyPaul HardingPaul LynchPaul MurraySarah Bernstein