Homer and Langley by E. L. Doctorow

HOMER & LANGLEY by E. L. Doctorow

Book Quote:

“There are moments when I cannot bear this unremitting consciousness. It knows only itself. Awake, I am in a continuum with my dreams. I feel my typewriters, my table, my chair to have that assurance of a solid world, where things take up space, where is not the endless emptiness of insubstantial thought that leads to nowhere but itself. My memories pale as I prevail upon them again and again. They become more and more ghostly. I fear nothing so much as losing them altogether and having only my blank endless mind to live in.”

As one reads Homer & Langley and is swept along on its strange tide, one tries to raise one’s head intermittently to admire the craft. But that craft is, like the shoes made by the elves in story, so seamless, so perfect, that it’s hard to grasp until one is deposited on the other shore and left to linger for a while.

The novel uses the theme of the real-life case of the Collyer brothers, Homer and Langley Collyer, who lived on 5th Avenue in New York from the 1880s to 1947. A case of great notoriety, the brothers (suffering from extreme compulsive hoarding disorder) effectively mewed themselves up within their house. Over the decades this filled with newspapers, collections of mainly non-functional items, and garbage. They disassociated themselves from the outside world to the extent that their electricity and water supplies were cut off – a situation they did not attempt to rectify. After their death (caused directly by the accumulated items within the house), over 100 tons of hoarded rubbish were removed from the house.

The case is of such notoriety that dramatisations and fictionalisations of it abound. Novels include Marcia Davenport’s My Brother’s Keeper (1954) and Franz Lidz’s 2003 Ghostly Men (a history of the brothers). Stephen King used details from the story in Salem’s Lot (1975). Movies either based on or inspired partially by the story include “Unstrung Heroes” (1995), a movie based on Ghostly Men. References to the case crop up in numerous TV serials, and at least six plays have been based directly or loosely on the story. It is so well documented there is little point in listing them all again here. Suffice it to say, the case is well-known.

Unlike the bulk of writing pertaining to this case, Doctorow does not focus on the squalor and scandal of the situation: those aspects which are most titillating to the popular media and the public. The first-person narrator, Homer (“I’m Homer, the blind brother”) recounts the past years of their life within the house with a diction so gentle, so unassuming, thoughtful and musical that it is well into the narrative before we start to suspect things are seriously amiss. The novel pretty much comments on itself when Homer’s “Muse” Jacqueline (the French reporter) tells him:

“There is music in words, and it can be heard you know, by thinking. (…) You think a word and you can hear its sound. (…) words have music and if you are a musician you will write to hear them.”

The sound of Homer & Langley is of a soft voice by a fireside, never too fast or too loud, and always considerate of the listener. The strange narrative is gripping not because of drastic happenings or fast action, but because one doesn’t want to get up from that fireside, or stop listening to the voice.

This is not to ignore the laconic humour that pervades most of the book. The tone is so deferential and quiet that quirky tongue-in-cheek moments creep up on us unexpectedly. It’s ambiguous, though, as to how much self-awareness Homer has. As to whose tongue is in their cheek, Homer’s or Doctorow’s, is not always entirely clear.

Despite its genteel tone and historical setting, the impression Homer & Langley gives by the end of the narrative is that it has more in common with typically post-apocalyptic settings and themes than with fin-de-siecle writing, the latter of which it more closely resembles superficially. Why?

One of its main themes is consumerism. Langley’s grand “Theory of Replacements” which leads to the disastrous accumulation of junk inside the house states that “everything is replaced.” Children are replacements for their parents, current events are merely a cycle of typecasts which endlessly repeat each other: as one is forgotten, another immediately takes its place. Langley, however, is a mass of contradictions. Despite his cherished theory, none of the myriad of items he brings into his own house are ever “replaced” – they merely get buried. The brothers cannot find anything useful they know they have (such as candles in a black-out) because they have long-since been covered in other items.

Langley’s fatalistic view is that as humanity is such a polluter and exploiter, the sooner it blows itself up the better, as it will make way for some other more worthwhile species. This tends to be the conclusion that novels of apocalyptic devastation often pose, and generally stems (as in this case) from a direct disgust with consumerism and bureaucratised waste. Langley, however, is also the ultimate consumer: always acquiring, never passing anything on. It is in this way that Langley’s own theory of greed bringing about the demise of mankind is fulfilled in miniature within his own house, when he is finally overwhelmed by his own falling booby-trap of junk.

Langley’s more confrontational nature in response to the pressures of the modern is the perfect foil, however, to what is possibly the main focus: the world of Homer, the narrator. What seems at first to be a gentle narration of a stoic, romantic individual turns slowly towards us until we finally see it for what it is: a comment on the process of growing old. At this point, it is useful to look at which aspects of this story the author has decided to change.

Most pointedly, he has made Homer blind at a much younger age than in reality. Homer Collyer actually lost his sight at the age of 52, not 14 as in the novel. By depriving the character of visual input at this age, Doctorow effectively chrysalises part of his psyche into the innocence of a sheltered pubescent boy, to highlight his lack of culpability for the famous squalor surrounding him. It emphasises his idealism and romanticism. Another significant detail which has been altered is that it was actually Langley who was the musician, not Homer. Homer, on the other hand, was the one with law skills, not Langley as in the book. The allocation of all “sharper” capabilities like law to Langley, and the more sensitive ones to Homer again help to accentuate his romantic innocence.

So why is it so important that Homer is not culpable? His role is to observe the progress of time and not to alter it – and once again, here facts have been adjusted dramatically to accentuate the effect. In the novel, the brothers live on in their house well into the 1970s, possibly the 80s (making them almost a century old), when in fact they both died in 1947. Doctorow has extended their lives by decades to emphasise the difference between the life they knew as children and the situation they find themselves at the end of it. As boys they rode in horse-drawn carriages and the streets had the organic smell of manure and leather. By the end Homer is nearly knocked down by a passing car, the air is filled with exhaust fumes and the Cold War creates global fear.

The passage of time brings changes, which the brothers try to interpret in their own way. People come in and out of the house; lives are touched briefly, but always revert to the status of the two of them, together in their isolation. And as the junk accumulates, the isolation increases.

Because Homer is blind, he relies on his other senses to interpret the world. He is particularly proud of his sense of hearing, and Langley supports this by describing him as bat-like. Homer navigates by hearing the differences in sound patterns as objects are shifted around the room: as he puts it, by the volume of air they displace. “I feel shapes as they push the air away, or I feel the heat from things, you can turn me around till I’m dizzy, but I can still tell where the air is filled in with something solid.”

Homer’s ability to navigate the world around him decreases incrementally. As a boy, still fully sighted, he says of himself: “I was in the fullness of my senses, then.” Then he loses his sight, but with his fine hearing and his stoical acceptance he does not feel it to be too much of an impediment. As the years progress he realises more and more how much his lack of sight bars him from a normal family life, until towards the end of the novel he also loses his hearing and the world of utter isolation closes in with a totality that is unbearable.

Meanwhile, the diminishment of visual powers has been firmly tied to memory. He narrates: “My memories of our long-dead parents are considerably dimmed, as if having fallen further and further back in time has made them smaller, with less visible detail as if time has become space, become distance, and figures from the past, even your father and mother, are too far away to be recognised.” While Homer himself increasingly relies on memories, those very memories are described as having a finite number of uses. Each time a memory is used (remembered), it loses a little of its gloss, its immediacy, until the edges are vague and features are generalised.

As the potency of input sense capacity goes down and the material store of sustaining memories is used up, the house around him increases its clutter – a factor which directly makes his life difficult as he cannot navigate round the objects as he used to do. There is too much junk in the way, he cannot feel the displaced air as he did previously. The junk which obscures useful items like candles is the material equivalent of the “memory junk” that accumulates as a person ages, and itself forms a barrier between them and the outside world: in this case made literal by the absolute barricading of the front door so that all ingress and egress is barred.

Doctorow manages the tempo of the isolation carefully. The real-life brothers’ major utilities were disconnected in 1928, nearly two decades before their deaths, but the account of this in the book comes very near the end. The long-drawn-out downwards trend (masked to Homer partially by his own volition, partially by his lack of sensory input) continues steadily until, as in the decay of an aged body, things suddenly start to fall apart in good earnest. “Langley and I (…) had metamorphosed, we were the ghosts who haunted the house we had once lived in. Not able to see myself or hear my own footsteps, I was coming around to the same idea.”

In the latter stages, the two inseparable brothers are connected only by a small tunnel through the debris, and as Homer can neither hear nor see his brother he says again of him, as for his parents: “I sense the passage of time as a spatial thing, as Langley’s voice has become fainter and fainter, as if he has walked off down a long road, of is falling away in space. (…) It is almost as if the reality is his distance from me and the illusion is his presence.”

Diminishment of attachment to the living world experienced by so many millions of elderly people in our increasingly ageing society is manifested in concrete form by the vehicle of the Collyer brothers’ story. Homer and Langley is a small and mellifluous piece which leaves a haunting, reverberating note of sadness of ageing and regret at the transience of things, and is not easily forgotten.

(Book Review originally published in Mostly Fiction Book Reviews, Sept 2010)

Title: Writers Abroad Short Story Anthology 2010
Compiled by: Louise Charles
ISBN: 978-1-4461-7886-7
Published: Lulu
Date: 2010

Last year, online writer’s group “Writers Abroad” put together this fantastic collection of short stories of facets of expatriate life. The stories range from Spain and France to right across the globe. Some stories (such as ‘The Brood Mare Blues’) don’t even name a country, they simply extract some ‘essence of expat’ and speak directly about the confusing, powerful forces at work when an individual becomes uprooted, transplanted and watered in foreign soil.


Now, I have to declare my vested interest. Since the publication of this book I happen to have joined the group myself, and many of the stories have the added appeal of familiarity with the style of the author. Notwithstanding possible partiality on that count, this IS a genuine, bona fide excellent collection of short stories I would recommend to anyone.

For a start, when was the last time you picked up a book from Lulu (or any other self-publisher) and found NO typos? NO sloppy errors? These books are thin on the digital ground, and this is one of them.

There is not a single story that’s not at the very least, good. Most of them are exceptionally good, and some of them stunning. I guess your choice of which ones come out top will differ from mine – it’ll be a matter of personal preference, because technically there isn’t a bad apple among them. I’ve recently read several anthologies and compilations from extremely well-known authors, and frankly none of them come close to the overall quality of work produced here. The piece is a gem.

I won’t pick out any pieces, because then I’ll want to list them all and that would just be spoiling things. There is, however, a peculiar similarity running through all of these stories, wildly disparate in setting, tone, style and delivery though they are. They are all confident. It’s almost as if the daily need to stand one’s ground amidst constant questioning of what one’s identity truly IS once immersed in cultures alien to its own origin, has seeped through into the fabric of the stories. There’s a difference between ‘competent’ and ‘confident’. Reading the collection leaves one with the very ring of Babel (in the most positive sense), where each voice can be distinctly and unapologetically heard. It is a stimulating and an exciting read.


You can buy it here at Lulu in paperback, download a digital copy for free here or even read it online here. How much better does it get?

The Four Fingers of Death by Rick Moody

Title: The Four Fingers of Death

Author: Rick Moody

ISBN: 978 0 316 11891 0

Published: Little, Brown and Co.

Date: 2010


Book quote:

Morton no longer wished to be exposed to the battery of human intoxicants with which they seemed to fill their days. Now that he employed the English language in his own way, now that he was capable of the helix of desire and consciousness that enabled the one primate to feel that it can subdue the others, he had no interest whatsoever in dulling himself. He would, with a clear mind, with a will to power, wrest life to his purposes.

_________________________________


The book is written in three chunks – two main, one introductory. The introductory portion is narrated in first person by Montese Crandal, the author of the second two sections. They are a novelisation of a remake of the 1964 film ‘The Crawling Hand’: the severed arm of a crashed astronaut wrecks havoc and disease on a 2026 populace.



Where to start? The novel’s 725 pages long, and about 600 of them should be cut. It’s quite the most self-indulgent piece of wittering I’ve had the misfortune to clap eyes on in a long while.


The writing itself, if you happen to be chained to a radiator and have nothing to do for the next two weeks, is not too objectionable, and there are plenty of entertaining passages. It is, however, so endlessly repetitive, so utterly disregarding of the reader’s need to have a reason to keep reading, one really is left wondering how it came into print in the first place. One gets a distinct feeling that not even Moody’s editor could really be bothered to check through it properly, leaving tell-tale signs like allowing the use of the same adjective in two sentences running.

The first large section deals with the trip to Mars made by nine (rapidly dwindling) astronauts. This section is relatively entertaining, perhaps because the limited subject matter (or rather limited number of characters) forces the narrative into some coherent flow. Even so, satellite communication to Earth manages to siphon in numerous extraneous characters, including a computer-generated image of a gryphon in an online sex simulation. (Yes, this goes on for quite a number of pages). The disintegration of the Martian community and collective insanity that results in the second part of the narrative is moderately absorbing, if slightly predictable. Claustrophobia, agoraphobia, panic attacks, conspiracy theories, cover-ups, deadly microbes, fisticuffs, sex and violence of all sorts are freely distributed. It’s not bad. Lots of repetition too but one still forgives it – just.


Then there’s the last portion. Back on Earth, Colonel Jed Richard’s severed arm is the only piece of astronaut that’s made it back to Earth, and is now crawling about propelled by the bacteria it’s picked up on Mars, busily strangling people and spreading disease. Well, essentially that’s the pot of ‘The Crawling Hand’.
The two main problems are firstly (again) endless repetition. How many times do we need to be told about what the desert looks like or what the homeless people do? Lots, apparently. More than you’d imagine.


The second problem is that back on Earth, Moody simply cannot stick to one subject or character. He’s like an ADD child, wandering from one room to the next, picking up random things, looking at them, shaking them up a bit, and tossing them aside. While it may be entertaining to read as a snippet, it does not make for good novel-building. You rather tend to lose any relationship with your reader like that.

One of the central themes, the relationship between ‘higher’ life forms, civilisation, and the ability to speak, is quite interestingly put together. On the one hand, the Martian bacterium (which ‘disintegrates’ higher life forms) has the effect of rendering those it infects unable to speak. On the other, Morton, the laboratory chimpanzee, has suddenly acquired the ability to speak through an injection of human brain cells. With his newfound ability he also gains a lot of confusion, and desire, and will to overpower: to subdue.

One cannot but reflect that the garrulousness that Moody both exhibits and discusses is indeed, in his case at least, an impediment to forward movement and evolution. It seems his own bacterium has infected the novel and has quite dismantled it to piecemeal incoherency.

Emotionally Weird

Title: Emotionally Weird
Author: Kate Atkinson
ISBN: 0 312 20324 1
Published: Picador USA
Date: 2000

Book quote:

“You hadn’t kissed him?” (How hard is seems to be to get a kiss off the man of one’s dreams. Has Nora ever been kissed?)



- No, she says regretfully – as you would if you were thirty-eight and had never been kissed, but then I am nearly twenty-one and have been kissed many times and all of them put together aren’t worth an imaginary kiss with Ferdinand.

__________________________________________


Not so much emotionally weird, as metatextually weird. Oh, enjoyable, without a doubt. One can’t help feeling as one reads, however, that the author is slightly off her rocker. If you want to read something and come away with an aching hairline (due to permanently raised eyebrows) and aching sides (due to intermittent convulsive laughter), this is the one for you.
Story. Hm, let’s see. Effie is a 21-year old, living with her mother in a weather-battered deserted holiday home off the coast of Scotland. Her mother’s inscrutable, busy turning into a geological feature, as Effie puts it, and has seemingly been on the run for decades: what from, Effie has no idea. On their island, they tell each other their stories. Effie tells of her life at Dundee University in the early 1970s, amid the expected shambles and drug-induced students and teachers all steeped in their own scandals and obsessions. Her mother (very unwillingly) contributes some short and unembellished accounts of the falling fortunes and exceptionally strange family life of her ancestors, the Stuart-Murrays.

But that’s not the only way the narrative is broken up. The bulk of the text is Effie’s account, in standard print (Times New Roman). Nora (her mother) and text from their conversations while on the island, is in something like a small, cramped Arial Narrow. Effie’s English Literature colleagues at Dundee all write pieces of something, and they all likewise have their fonts. Kevin (a fat geek obsessed with writing a Dungeons and Dragons type epic) writes in something like Matura MT Script. Effie herself writes mysteries and her eternal essay on George Elliot in a small Courier. One of the teachers’ slovenly wives writes a romance novel in a precise and flowing script. You get the drift. (Unfortunately Blogger doesn't t so fonts, I've just realized.)

The scripts and stories are not necessarily distinguished from the ‘real’ story (if such a thing exists): au contraire. In fact, for the first page or so of the book we’re plunged straight into the detective mystery which Effie is writing: which, if moderately intriguing, is deliberately amateurishly written. I did wonder at this choice of style for the very opening paragraph: it takes a confidence bordering on the suicidal.

After that a seeming solidity sets in for a while, with Effie’s account of her life at university. There’s plenty of humour, in all forms. I was reading the opening chapters in a public place and had to close the book and leave due to eruptions of irrepressible, embarrassing laughter. Then we start getting more of the metatextual element raising its head and slapping up around in a disorientating (but not entirely unpleasant) way.

The ‘plot’ is changed, re-written and re-shaped by the desires and suggestions of the characters themselves. Phrases and situations tumble about impossibly, translated from future narrations into later versions of past events, echoes and mirrors and ghosts of textual allusions jump from behind bushes. Supremely unnervingly, even (or perhaps especially) the readers’ own experiences whilst reading, and their anticipated objections and desires, are woven consciously into the crazy fabric. The readers swim in and out, referred to as the ‘poor confused narratees’ through the waves of text.

Amongst this anarchy, what is the ‘real’ story? Ostensibly the whole narrative swings round the fulcrum of Effie trying to find out who her father was, and the story of her family. The conclusions are reached by such an ambiguous route that although she seems satisfied with final revelations (if ‘satisfied’ is the right word) one hardly knows what to believe. It’s no coincidence that the never-ending and seemingly impossible battle to get her George Elliot essay written is concluded ambiguously when she attempts to hand it in but had no idea how it became the mangled mess she pulls out of her bag. The essay is on ‘Middlemarch’, but George Elliot’s ‘Silas Marner’ looms through the pages as another unspoken ghost: another mirror of dubious parentage and unsuspected treasures lost and found, along with its own semi-orphaned wild-haired child, Eppie.


In short, this was a vastly entertaining and pleasing book, but make sure you’re sober when you read it. Otherwise you’ll just put the trippy factor down to whatever substances you’ve been indulging in. Come here for a bona-fide text-induced buzz.

Sliver of Truth

Title: Sliver of Truth
Author: Lisa Unger
ISBN: 978 0 307 33846 4
Published: Crown Publishing
Date: 2007
Book quote:
“The phone number was listed but I couldn’t bring myself to call. What could I say? Hi, I’m Ridley, your second cousin. How’s it going? So, about the night my grandmother was beaten into a coma…”
______________________________________



Having read and adored Unger’s previous book Beautiful Lies, I plunged into this one with considerable zeal. High expectations are never a good thing.


It’s astonishing how the same thing can taste so different when re-hashed. I loved Beautiful Lies for its forward thrust, the clear writing, the unashamed use of cliffhangers and the genuinely good plot. Sliver of Truth carries on where the Beautiful Lies left off: Ridley Jones is in a now-disintegrating relationship with Jake Jacobsen and there’s something fishy emerging about her Uncle Max’s state of demise. Now, there’s nothing wrong with carrying on where you left off. It’s endlessly hearkening back to the earlier narrative that gets annoying. I read the first 50 pages, thinking ‘surely now we’ll leave all that stuff behind’ – nope. Carries on right to the end. In a way it’s the very theme of the book: not being able to move forward.

This is not to say that the volume isn’t stuffed with action, sex and intrigue. Ridley lurches from one crisis to the next, gets involved in international espionage, gets onto the FBI Wanted list, people drop dead like flies and whenever she manages to take a breath she takes the opportunity to plunge into bed with someone. Theoretically it’s all good stuff.

But there are several problems. First the incessant harping back to the previous book. Second, the endless analysing of motives and feelings. If I submitted something with that degree of mumbling introspective discussion, I’d get my wrists slapped for ignoring ‘show not tell’, and sent back empty–handed with nothing more than a flea in my ear.

Third… it’s plain sloppy at points. Overwriting and careless use of words. (I never thought I’d write this of Unger. She must have been distracted at the time.) Frankly the sort of things that an editor should pick up on anyway. I could tell it wasn’t just me that was being irritated by this: my copy as usual came from the library and I found that someone had gone through it with a neat black biro correcting grammatical errors and word misuse… and they didn’t even bother with things like split infinitives and tautologies.

So why did I pelt through it so quickly, then? I read it slightly despairingly, but to the end, and fast. I didn’t feel like giving up on it. Which leads to the conclusion: all those writing rules are good but if you’ve got a good story with pace to it, you’ll drag the reader behind you, kicking and screaming. Will I read it again? No. Will it put me off other Unger books? No. I’ll just be hoping she’ll be on better form next time.

Beautiful Lies

Title: Beautiful Lies

Author: Lisa Unger
ISBN: 978 1 86325 480 9
Published: Bantam
Date: 2006

Book quote:
“It’s a little-known fat, but parents are like superheroes. With just a few magic words they can make you feel ten feet tall and bulletproof, they can slay the dragons of doubt and worry, they can make problems disappear. But of course the can only do this as long as you’re a child. When you’ve become an adult, become the master of your own universe, they’re not as powerful as they once were. Maybe that’s why so many of us take our time growing up.”


“In the gleaming glass [of trendy East village boutiques] I caught sight of a woman who didn’t know who she was anymore, who didn’t know from where of from whom she came.

I stopped to look at her. She looked real enough, like flesh and blood and bone. But if you reached out to touch her, she faded like a hologram.”
___________________________________________________________

Ridley Jones is an ‘impossibly hip’ freelance writer in New York. She’s recently split up (amicably) from her childhood friend and almost-betrothed Zachary: Mr Squeaky-Clean. Zack’s a paediatrician like Ridley’s father, and his mother Esme works in the clinic: they’re all one big happy family. Supposedly. Even her recently-deceased “Uncle Max” used to be a “happy” alcoholic before he went through the windscreen of his car one night. He was a very rich bachelor, with lots of toy-girls hanging on, endlessly indulgent of his adoptive niece. The only discordant note seems to be Ace, her brother. He’s a drug addict who’s walked out on the family. Ridley has always idolised him and can’t reconcile herself to his current state.


One day, Ridley accidentally steps into fame when a journalist takes a photo of her saving a small child from getting run over by a truck. With her name all over the papers, one morning her postbox reveals a newspaper clipping with a photo of a child and a note that that simply says: “You are my daughter.”

The story follows Ridley’s investigations into this claim, to the person who sent the note, and unravelling of who exactly her “Uncle Max” was, and what some of his “pet projects” really involved.


As she embarks on this process, someone new moves into the apartment block. As she puts it, “He was hot.” Hot but mysterious. She mistrusts his guarded air, and his Spartan furnishing in his apartment. She’s uneasy about it because there’s nothing there that he couldn’t leave in a second, nothing to tie him down. It takes until the next chapter for us to even learn his name. Jake. “Hot” and “mysterious” don’t go together without accumulating the extra noun, “sex.”

Beautiful Lies concerns itself overwhelmingly with the issue of loss of identity and the need to define oneself. How does one really know “who” one is if all the premises of background and origin are washed away? How much of a character is intrinsic, and how much is defined by those who observe the character? Once again, it’s the Little Lost Girl, only this time it’s identity and sense of self that’s lost, not a body. Ridley passes through a sort of Limbo before she can wear her new identity and learn to trust again.


As ever, there’s the omni-present character of New York in the fabric of the novel. Unger can’t seem to leave it alone, as if it’s an essential part of clothing for words. “Long before I married New York City, I had a passionate love affair with the place. I don’t remember ever wanting to live anywhere else.” Throughout her works, the city itself seems to be an identity: its streets and cafes, the apartment blocks and stairwells act almost like personal moods or thoughts. Venturing outside the city is nothing less than a detachment from self – yet the city, like a personality, conceals its own terrors and dark corners.


The book is a fast, memorable read, stuffed with action, intrigue and suspense – not to mention plenty of spice along the way. Recommended. 

Purple Hibiscus by Chimananda Ngozi Adichie

Book Quote:

“I sat at my bedroom window after I changed; the cashew tree was so close I could reach out and pluck a leaf if it were not for the silver-coloured crisscross of mosquito netting. The bell-shaped yellow fruits hung lazily, drawing buzzing bees that bumped against my window’s netting.”

Book Review first published in Mostly Fiction Book Reviews, August 2010

From the first few pages this novel leaves no room for doubt as to how the narrative will unfold: the struggle of the “outside” and more natural world against that of domestic oppression and enforced sterility. As the book opens with a domestic crisis which overwhelms the narrator in its almost silent enormity, she retreats to her room.

The netting in the above quote is the perfect simile for the walls and boundaries, real and invisible, which surround the narrator. Whom do they keep out, and whom do they keep in? In an instant, we know from this passage alone that although they may keep the mosquitoes out, they also enforce a separation between the narrator and the leaves and bees: a separation decidedly unwelcome.

I found it extraordinary that the message was so clarion, as both the novel’s physical setting (post-coup Nigeria) and spiritual setting (stringently Catholic) are subjects I am personally completely unfamiliar with. I felt I ought to be reading the book with a full-scale guidebook to Africa, so laden is it with unknown phrases and concepts, scents, sounds and sights. It is proof of the superb writing that the unfamiliar and the unknown are in no way alienating, but entirely tantalising in a heady, spicy, dusty mix, making the uninitiated want to touch, taste and feel what the words set before us.

The narrator is Kambili Achike, a girl born to a wealthy family headed by her despotic and sadistic father, Eugene. Her fellow sufferers within the house walls are her mother Beatrice and her brother Jaja. Eugene is well respected within the community: he donates money to churches and the poor, he runs a politically subversive newspaper at tangible physical danger to himself and is seen as no less than a hero. At home he enforces his will on the inmates of the house without a chink of mercy, and with the help of torture and battery at regular intervals.

When the two children manage to escape from the immediate clutches of the household for a short while to Eugene’s sister, Aunty Ifeoma’s residence, the wheels of change start to turn. Ifeoma’s household is an almost pantomime foil to Eugene’s; they are poor but liberated, they have fun. Once they have put the initial chips into the glass coating that keeps the children from admitting their abuse to anyone (including themselves, mostly), there is no return and Eugene’s family starts to disintegrate.

While the physical world and settings may be unfamiliar to many readers, the central core of sadistic domestic abuse and subjugation transcends all cultural boundaries in its immediacy and intimacy. The psychological bullying from her father produces palpable physical effects on the narrator – she develops a fever in response to a crisis, or her legs feel “loose-jointed.”  When she gleans some approval, the joy and relief are also physically palpable: her mouth feels “full of melting sugar;” the abused’s gratitude for sops of “kindness’ shown to them by their abusers. The problems of the nuclear family are mirrored in the larger world, with the omnipotent bullies in power invading every waking and sleeping moment of their subjects, exerting almost complete control.

There is no doubt that in reaching an international audience, Adichie is acutely aware that many of her readers will be as unfamiliar with the Nigerian element (which is the core of the book) as I am. By an impasto technique with the symbolism and parallels, Adichie counters this problem by explaining the state within the country with reference to the domestic situation.

Both nature and the social structure join forces in elucidation. The sadistic “Papa” is the drying, dust-covering Harmattan wind, the (typically female) positive forces have moisture-laden imagery – again, juxtaposing sterility and fertility. This is a central theme both in the family life and at the State level. The narrator’s mother faces possible divorce and destitution for producing insufficient children, but the fault of this lies with her husband Eugene and his physical battering of his ever-pregnant wife.

One aspect that has been noted to be omni-present in this book is the prevalence of food. Its smells, textures, preparation, effect, quality, quantity, power, implications; some readers find it overwhelming. This insistence is directly tied to the sterility/fertility male/female theme. In Eugene’s wealthy household, food is plentiful and good, but there is no contact with the preparation of it, no knowledge of where it comes from. By contrast in the poor household of Aunt Ifeoma, food is scarce and takes a lot of time and effort both to procure and prepare, but appears to be relished more. (No prizes for guessing which is portrayed as the happier state). Most importantly, the enforced separation which the narrator has endured at home from the “womanly” dealing with food is shown as a type of disabling, a condition that debilitates, a sort of castration of abilities. Learning about food empowers the narrator much more than merely to the extent of being handy in the kitchen. It is as if her whole outlook on life changes (albeit incrementally) by learning how to peel a vegetable properly. In peeling it, she learns how to peel herself, to remove the casing to just the right degree.

This brings us back to the walls and boundaries we started off with. The uncrossable boundaries of the family life are admitting to the tyranny and abuse that is being inflicted. The narrator and her brother “speak with their eyes” to each other, as they dare not speak otherwise. As the status quo in the household starts to dissolve under the influence of external forces like Aunty Ifoema and Father Amadi, this method of communication becomes jammed, blocked. The change that heralds this blockage is one for the positive, but it involves great pain. The implication is that this pain cannot be avoided, nor will it ever be eradicated.

Here, we are taken back to the implied view on Nigerian politics Adichie is making. Kambili is not the only protagonist forced to embrace change. When the inspirational Aunty Ifeoma herself is targeted as a trouble-maker by the University authorities, she is extremely reluctant to leave the country which she loves but which tortures her, in favour of an alien one that will offer relative sanctuary from persecution. The argument is mooted in the household: if all the brains leave, who’s going to pick up the pieces? For this, there is no answer.

It perfectly mirrors the escape from tyranny on the domestic level. From the conclusions drawn there, one can only assume that the author sees this situation as inevitable. In the aftermath of the ultimate domestic collapse, the erstwhile victimised members of the family attempt to rebuild a life. They have however been permanently “expelled” from the state they had known hereto, and their efforts are uncoordinated and wandering. The lasting blame which lands on all of them, but particularly the mother (who has possibly been shown to have suffered the most) is drawn with such absolute precision that it is impossible to sidestep the implication that the wronged commoners will nevertheless carry the burden of their oppressors with them wherever they go. Through the telescope of the immediate and intimate, Adichie elucidates the political and cultural situation for outsiders.

But it seems that she has portrayed the abuser only too convincingly for some readers. Many reviewers opine that Eugene is “not all bad” and that the family’s love for him is “genuine.” In fact, the overwhelming majority of reviewers suggest that poor Eugene, he’s got terrible faults but he means well, bless him. This is both a frightening testament to how household bullies get away with what they do, and a homage to Adichie’s skill in portraying the process. Perhaps also it is a more reassuring reflection that the average reader is thankfully shielded from acute domestic violence, physical and psychological. Any “love” the abuser appears to show to his victims is self-directed, his good deeds in political and economic circles are all salves to his own background of abused childhood and repressed impulses. The abuser cannot see his family (and by extension, anyone who comes within his field of power) as anything but reflections and facets of himself. They have no rights or individual standing in his view, and as he forces his own view onto his victims, his view becomes theirs. This is not to say that Eugene does not suffer for his misdeeds: the disfiguring rash that keeps coming up is like a reflection of the myriad wrongs he has inflicted, which no amount of dabbing away with money will erase – and his body knows it, even if he doesn’t.

But by the very process that she has created to explain the Nigerian situation, is seems Adichie might have overdone herself. The excuses which so many readers see in Eugene’s behaviour make the politicians by implication less culpable, and the love of their subjects less conditional. I am sure Adichie’s message is that patriotic love should be conditional, and if the relationship between state and citizen turns abusive then those conditions should be enforced, even if the citizens feel pain and regret at the process.

In a final reinforcement of the parallel, Kambili’s hidden talent which emerges towards the end of the narrative turns out to be:  running. The symbolism is not veiled. From a domestic situation like hers, the best one can do is run, as fast as possible. Perhaps this is what the writer feels is the ultimate fate of the Nigerian people.

(First published in Mostly Fiction Book Reviews, August 2010)