Conditional absolution and the last fifty pages

As the title of this review indicates, I thought this was a fantastic novel up until the last fifty pages, and then – abruptly, and to my own frustration and disappointment – I began to change my mind. I still think it is a good piece of work, but unfortunately the way Aminatta Forna handled the crucial closing section consolidated doubts that I’d had about the book before, doubts that I would have been willing to overlook if it hadn’t all come crashing down around me. As this is impossible to discuss without full spoilers for the plot of the novel, spoilers lie ahead – read at your own risk if you haven’t read The Memory of Love.

The book is set in 2001 in Freetown, Sierra Leone, and delicately and vividly charts the aftermath of the recent civil war. The central character is ostensibly Adrian Lockheart, an English psychatrist who has come to help the survivors work through their trauma and grief, but he is rather colourless, and I found myself far more involved in the stories of the two other major characters: Kai, an orthopedic surgeon, and Elias, a dying man who tells Adrian the events that unfolded thirty years ago when he fell in love with the wife of a colleague just before the country was swept up in a military coup.

As is probably clear from my previous reviews, characterisation is immensely important to me in a novel, as is a lack of preaching. I don’t believe fiction should come with a moral tacked on the end, although it can certainly deal with moral questions. And for the vast majority of this novel, Forna seems at no risk of straying into either of these pitfalls, although I would have to admit I was disappointed with her portrayal of the female characters. Elias’s lover, Saffia, and their daughter Nenebah, nicknamed Mamakay, are essentially the same person thirty years apart, and that person isn’t very interesting; in fact, she’s the stereotypical strong female, not allowed to have flaws, make jokes, or even speak all that much, unlike the men. Of course, Saffia and Mamakay suffer from being seen largely from the outside, idealised by their respective lovers – Elias, and Adrian and Kai – but this is a question that could have been addressed, and isn’t.

The reason the relative weakness of the female cast struck me so strongly in the last fifty pages of this novel, when it hadn’t before, was the part Adrian plays in its denoument. Mamakay is now pregnant, and he is planning to abandon – I don’t think the word is too strong – his wife and child in England in order to start a new life with her in Sierra Leone. He has also started to suspect that some of what the dying Elias has been telling him about his imprisonment during the military coup is not true, and confronts him about it. To be brief, it turns out that Elias is a bit of a coward, something that was foreshadowed earlier in his narrative. His friend Julius, Saffia’s husband, was imprisoned in the cell alongside him and he could hear that he was suffering an asthma attack, but didn’t dare protest to his guard, Johnson, in case he was never released, as he knows that Julius has been involved in protests. He hopes that Julius has his medication with him, but it turns out that he dies of the attack. Later, Elias rises in the university hierarchy through appeasing men like Johnson, and reports student political activity to the authorities after ensuring that his daughter is safe. His actions are unpleasant and show him to be a seriously flawed man, but he kept my sympathy under the full force of Adrian’s – and the author’s – judgement that he now suffers.

Adrian, who has never lived through a war or under military rule, feels that he can despise Elias, while not giving a thought to his abdication of responsibilities towards his own family. While his relationship with Mamakay fuels his judgement of her father, he scarcely seems to know her – and her death during childbirth handily saves him from having to make any difficult decisions. If this self-righteousness was portrayed as a failing of Adrian’s, it would be interesting – but my impression was that Forna was entirely behind Adrian’s viewpoint here, especially as we hear no more of Elias after this pivotal scene, and there are no more sections from his point of view that might qualify his actions. Disturbingly, in an earlier scene Adrian is fully able to forgive a war criminal who tossed a baby into a burning building, and even compares him favourably to Elias because he is honestly repentant, while Elias is still trying to justify himself. It jars horribly, because my impression from Elias’s narration was that he has not forgiven himself, and that he is suffering; although he marries Saffia after Julius’s death, he knows that she will never love him. Again, there remains the possibility that Forna was intentionally setting up this conflict, but my instinct is that she wasn’t. The narrative, as I’ve already noted, handles Adrian with soft gloves, making his moral decisions for him, whereas Elias is forced into the most difficult dilemmas; not only imprisoned at the same time as Julius, but imprisoned literally next to him; not only imprisoned next to him, but able to hear his coughs through the wall.

And this leads me back to the question of the female characters, who become idealised pawns largely because we are meant to come down on Adrian’s ‘side’. If Adrian (and Kai and Julius, to an extent) were presented more as human beings, rather than the paragons of virtue they become (despite Julius and Adrian’s more nuanced presentation earlier in the book), Adrian and Mamakay’s relationship would be further problematised than it is. Saffia’s random death in a car crash after her marriage to Elias also ties up loose ends rather too neatly; the reader is left wondering what her version of the story would be, were she around to tell it.

And so, instead of writing a largely positive review about a book I enjoyed, I’ve written a rant about those last fifty pages. It’s a shame, because Forna is a fine writer and her depictions of the aftermath of the conflict in Sierra Leone are utterly chilling. I just wish that she had ended her story in a different way, or, I suppose, made the ending rather less like a brick wall. It deserved its place on the Orange Prize shortlist, but I’m glad that it didn’t ultimately win.

No longer quite at home

In this outstanding debut novel, Belinda McKeon tells the very simple story of half-hearted PhD student Mark, divided between his life in Dublin and his father Tom's wish for him to work on the family farm near Edgesworthtown in Longford, and his love affair with trainee solicitor Joanne, who shares the same roots. However basic this subject matter may seem, I found it absolutely gripping. It is McKeon's sure command of language that makes these characters and their choices real; her style is also simple, but surprisingly assured for a first novel, even a good first novel, and I knew from the first few sentences that I was going to enjoy it. Her voice puts me in mind of a younger Marilynne Robinson or - unsurprisingly given his praise on the cover - Colm Toibin.

McKeon places the importance of `home' front and centre in this story, but rather than just rehearsing the familiar theme of the importance of where we come from and what we were, she raises the more problematic possibility that we may need to both break away from home and retain it in equal measure. This is most clearly shown in the conflict between Mark and Tom, as neither man can be said to be fully in the right. Tom cannot understand - as is obvious when he and Mark discuss the career of a friend's son, a software engineer, who also lives in Dublin - why anyone would need to move away from his immediate locality, and he believes that Mark need only spend a few days a month in Dublin to teach. Meanwhile, Mark fails in both worlds as he tries to keep a foot in each, managing to write only two chapters of his thesis - which, ironically, is on local celebrity Maria Edgeworth - in three years, and disappointing his father by only coming to the farm on weekends.

However, other characters also struggle with, and try to solve, this question in differing ways; Joanne breaks completely with her crooked lawyer father, despite his pride that she is the only child to follow in his footsteps, which contrasts interestingly with Mark's closer relationship with his father despite a very different choice of career. A subplot concerning one of Joanne's court cases, between a mother, Elizabeth, and her son, also highlights this theme. It is Elizabeth's daughter, Antonia, who now lives in New York, who fully recognises the tension between one person's concept of home and family and another's; she tells Joanne that her mother considers her to be `estranged', despite the fact that they are in regular contact, because she no longer lives with her. Mark's older sister, Nuala, seems to have achieved the perfect balance, as Tom sorrowfully describes: she moves to London, `coming home to see them only once or twice a year,' although she phones often, and `when she visited, he seemed never to have a conversation with her that lasted longer than their conversations on the phone. Always, she seemed only in the door with her suitcase... before she was heading off with the cases again'. Yet, later in the novel, Nuala's decision to limit her contact with her parents is one she regrets.

McKeon gently reveals these shifts, misunderstandings and unmet expectations in our dealings with other people through her use of switching third-person points of view, juxtaposing one character's inner monologue with another's. On an early date, Joanne anticipates the way Mark will react when she tells him a story about her annoying colleague, how he will take her side, but in the event he is too busy watching her hand gestures to listen to what she is saying. Mark continually anticipates the way Tom will react to certain statements and even plans comments that he thinks will please him, but his father stubbornly refuses to behave in the way that he expects. When they have one of their most serious arguments, McKeon takes it off-page and reveals what was said only in both characters' inner thoughts later; the importance of what passed is only magnified by its absence. Her avoidance of contemporary brand names or TV programmes also gives the novel a timeless quality, despite its obviously modern setting on the brink of the Irish recession, which lends it weight; Tom is puzzled by a miserable English soap, rather than Eastenders, and Joanne's aforementioned annoying colleague shows off the red soles on her shoes, rather than boasting about having a pair of Louboutins. In their own ways, both Tom and Mark are trapped in the past; Mark goes round in endless circles with Maria Edgeworth, while Tom still can't quite believe that Mark is no longer the little boy who was so keen to ride in his tractor, and eventually tries to appeal to that little boy, rather than the adult Mark has become.

While this novel has its tragic moments, it is ultimately well-titled; like Robinson's Gilead, there is balm to be found in Solace for the failures and misunderstandings of everyday life. I very much recommend this, and I can't wait to see what McKeon writes next.

Recent acquisitions!

I've just had delivered:

After The Fire, A Still Small Voice by Evie Wyld

A Visit From The Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

There But For The by Ali Smith

State of Wonder by Ann Patchett

Very much looking forward to reading them all!

Please do tell me about when God was a rabbit

I’m going to try to be scrupulously fair with my review of this debut novel, partly because I recently went to an event in Cambridge where Sarah Winman was one of the writers discussing her work and she seemed like a lovely person, and partly because it has been reviewed well by others and may just not be my thing. But I have to admit it: I’m baffled and a bit bored, but mostly baffled.

When God Was A Rabbit is narrated by Ellie, who begins her account as a child and ends it as a young woman in her late twenties. The book is divided into two halves; Ellie’s childhood in Essex and Cornwall, and her young-adulthood, divided between London and New York. As ever in this coming-of-age type story, the bonds between Ellie and her brother Joe and best friend Jenny that are formed during their youth become central to the narrative of their adulthood, even though they are scattered much further apart. The rabbit of the title is Ellie’s childhood pet and her confidante (and is actually named ‘god’ with a lowercase g, a puzzling detail as I wouldn’t have thought children who name their rabbit god would be too worried about being blasphemous, but never mind…)

The first reason for my bafflement was that I felt marooned in time and space. I was initially introduced to this novel by the reading from it Winman gave at the event I intended, and on the basis of that sample, I was convinced that the entire book was set in America. This was an impression I couldn’t rid myself of throughout the first section, despite pools coupons, currency, and other background details being obvious clues. The sense of place is completely off somehow, although this makes no sense considering the fact that Winman is essentially writing about her own childhood in Essex and Cornwall during the 1960s and 1970s, as she reveals in the author’s note at the back. As none of the details are incorrect, I can only point vaguely to the ‘feel’ of the narrative, and possibly this is down to Ellie’s voice itself. I don’t think that Ellie sounds particularly Americanised; simply as if she belongs nowhere at all, and this impression was confirmed when I couldn’t keep track of whether she was in New York or London in the second half of the novel. Perhaps this was a deliberate choice by Winman to emphasise Ellie’s isolation, but if so, it made the locations in the novel completely forgettable, which I don’t think was her intention.

The second, and more important reason, was that the book didn’t ever seem to start – or perhaps I mean that it seemed to want to end before it began. As childhood experience was clearly going to be a large part of the theme of the story, I was confused when we seemed to be racing through Ellie’s memories of Joe, Jenny, and god (whom I’m going to mention as often as possible, as it’s so amusing to type!) Length doesn’t necessarily mean depth, and a few vivid incidents would have been sufficient, but instead everything seemed sketched out, rather than filled in. The novel, in one sense, is packed with drama: childhood abuse, cancer, a friend being kidnapped in Dubai, a baby killed in a freak accident, Ellie’s dad’s guilt over defending a case in court where he later found his abusive client was guilty… and that’s only in the first 100 pages or so.

However, none of this seems to be fully considered, and this extends to the characters as well. There are certainly suggestions of depth, and I was intrigued by Ellie, Joe, and to an extent their parents – but again, we never seemed to spend enough time with them, and I felt as if there’d been an earlier section of set-up which I’d missed. The novel is broken up into very short chunks, and there are almost no long consecutive passages of dialogue; Ellie describes everything for us, and we hardly ever get to witness these characters or their interactions ourselves. Jenny, her once-best friend, is a particular disappointment; she flares into life in the first half, is abruptly shuffled off-screen, and hardly gets to appear in person at all in the latter section. In fact my favourite character was probably god (Yes managed it again!) – and, unfortunately, considering the death and destruction elsewhere, his fate was perhaps the most moving.

Perhaps what this all boils down to is a problem with the prose. Winman occasionally manages a beautiful description or metaphor, but on the whole it was often overwritten and a little affected. Even just in the extract I heard first, a character opens their eyes ‘to the dull December morn’, and Ellie steps on some dog mess, which, she tells us, ‘coated the underside of my shoe like grease and its sour smell lounged around in my nostrils.’ More broadly, the sentences constantly seem to be understating everything, closing the story before it’s even been written; by the time I reached the end of the novel, I felt as if everything had been tied up at least a dozen times before. Taken on their own, each of these sequences (her eccentric neighbour Arthur’s tangles with death; her father’s belief that he is doomed being flummoxed by a win on the pools; the drawn-out love story between her brother and his boyfriend, to take just a few examples) could have contributed to a fantastic ending. But to paraphrase junior school storywriting, you have to have a beginning and a middle before you can have an end, and by the final page, I found myself wondering when God actually had been a rabbit; it certainly didn’t seem to have happened for long.

Tigers Three: India, 2008

Back to my tigers theme - although The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga, Booker winner in 2008, is actually tigerless. The White Tiger of the title is the way our narrator thinks of himself, a once-in-a-generation entrepreneur who has risen from poverty in rural India to business success in Bangalore. This is a great page-turner, and the narrative voice is what makes it. Balram Halwai, our narrator, fully establishes his own particular way of looking at his country as he writes a series of letters to the Chinese premier, Wen Jiabao, who is about to pay a state visit. Balram fears that the premier will only see one side of India, and wants to introduce him to the side he sees - the exploitation, poverty, and misery of the 'Darkness' in which the majority of the population live.

This has obvious potential to become worthy and heavy - another Fine Balance (Rohinton Mistry, and a novel that I seem to be alone in my dislike for. Anyone else?) but Balram's narrative simply sweeps such concerns aside. He's persistently likeable, despite the fact that he tells us almost immediately that he has murdered his boss, capable of both surprising generosity and shocking contempt for others. And yet... I finished this novel today at full pace and wished for both more pages, and more depth. The ending felt extremely rushed, and I'm beginning to suspect that Adiga simply writes so well that it conceals the fact that there isn't as much substance here as there could be. I certainly wouldn't let most writers off for portraying most of their characters as broad stereotypes (dominating family matriarch, greedy landlords etc). And yet I can't help but recommend it.

PS: (Has anybody read his second novel/collection of short stories, Between the Assassinations? I've just been sent a proof copy of his latest novel, Man In Tower, and am very much looking forward to it, but the lukewarm reviews put me off the previous book).