The Darling

This might be a spoilerish review, better read after the book. As we meet Hannah Musgrave, she's an organic farmer in her fifties; a woman haunted by a past that she is finally willing to confront. In a first-person, confessional tone, Musgrave brings the reader along as she returns to Africa; revisiting the climax of her early life. Along the way, we learn that Musgrave was the privileged daughter of a semi-famous liberal activist father and a Junior League/charity works mother; a civil rights agitator in college; a fugitive member of the Weather Underground during the 70's; and after finding herself in Liberia, the wife of a mid-ranking minister in the corrupt government of William R. Tolbert, Jr. It is from that last pampered position that Musgrave has a front row seat to the coups and countercoups that led to the grisly Liberian Civil War of the 1980's. After visiting Liberia once again -- ostensibly to find traces of the three sons she left behind when she first fled the country (even though she had known at the time that they had become child soldiers in the revolution) -- Musgrave flies back to NYC on September 11, 2001.

(I) made my way home to a nation terrorized and grieving on a scale that no American had imagined before, a nation whose entire history was being rapidly rewritten. In the months that followed, I saw that the story of my life could have no significance in the larger world. In the new history of America, mine was merely the story of an American darling, and had been from the beginning.

Reading The Darling, I thought the book was about one thing (the life story of a former hippy and how her idealism had no practical effect in the real world), but by having the story end on 9/11, it became something different (a record of a time when people could be idealists and protest against their own government without violating the Patriot Act). This turnabout was so extreme that I needed to find out more about Russell Banks and his motivation, and after learning that this was his first post-9/11 book, I found this interview: 

For me the central theme, and it's one I've gone back to in other books in other ways, is the unintended consequences of good intentions. She is in many ways emblematic even of American foreign policy if you want. Today in other areas of the world, especially in a post-9/11 world, we are suddenly filled with good intentions and are killing people as a result and probably radically altering our society in the process in a very dangerous way. You can look at the history of Liberia for instance: the creation of Liberia. In its conception there were good intentions lying behind it. There was a nefarious and a dark side to those good intentions as there almost inevitably are because pure motives don't exist. The bloody civil war that started in 1980 is in fact the unintended consequence of good intentions, which started in the 1820s. Let's send them back to Africa, make the world safe and pretty, make it civilized and Christianized, and at the same time solve our race problem here in the United States with all those free blacks appearing in the streets of Philadelphia or New York. That to me is the central theme running through the book. I like to think of Hannah as emblematic of that; her life is that, the good intentions of the 1960s and 1970s, and the unintended consequences of it that she experiences very directly.

If the good intentions (and their unintended consequences) of the 60's and 70's was the main point of The Darling, it's frustrating that the character of Hannah Musgrave is so unlikeable. Even though she has the full support of her parents, Musgrave is rather cruel and dismissive of them in her years underground; she is blasé about who might get hurt during her Weathermen years of making pipebombs and false passports; she's a sexual user who admits that her attraction to black men is probably a form of reverse racism; she is repulsed by the traditional-living Africans that she had a vague intention of helping; she's fine working in a Liberian medical lab that does experiments on chimps for the enrichment of some big American Pharmaceutical company; she feels no attachment to her husband and children; and she realises too late that during all of the years she spent as the wife of a health minister, she could have been improving the lives of the urban Liberians by teaching them hygiene, or reading, or other important life skills. Essentially, Musgrave is a narcissist, and every "good intention" has herself as the intended recipient, dismissing the whole hippy-movement thus:

When you abandon and betray those with whom you empathize, you're not abandoning or betraying anyone or anything that's as real as yourself. Taken to its extreme, perhaps even pathological, form, empathy is narcissism.

Despite not liking her, I did buy the character of Hannah Musgrave. It's not often that I find female protagonists as written by male authors believable, but Musgrave was plausible because she had so many masculine traits (sexual exploitation, a non-nurturing nature, swaggering self-confidence). And although it's meant to explain Musgrave's own diffidence, I think most young mothers have experienced the following to some degree (even if we're not supposed to admit it):

First you think, This is what my life is now. This is who I am. My life is this endless grinding and thumping, being ground and thumped. Then you think, no, my life now will be spent floundering clumsily inside and around the thick waters of my own strangely misshapen body. No, it's shitting red-hot coals to give birth. Turning myself into an inverted volcano. Then you think, no, I'm the leaking person who gives her sore breasts over to another creature's sucking mouth, and when the baby is filled, cleans up its vomit, piss, and shit.

Over and over, the same cycle, month after month.This is what my life is now, you think. This is who I am. And everyone, especially if she's a woman, assures you that you will love all the stages of this life, that each stage will make you feel for the first time increasingly like a fully realized woman, an expanded and deepened version of your old self.

So, I did believe Hannah, was intrigued by the revelation of Liberia's sad history, and enjoyed the format of skipping back and forth through time (so that, as Hannah explains, we can get to know her and not judge her too harshly when we get to her major failings). I liked everything to do with the chimpanzee sanctuary that Musgrave oversaw (and could almost understand why she preferred her "dreamers" to actual people). But I don't know if I loved this book -- there may have been just too many things going on: too much about her parents; too much about chimps (that could have been its own book); too much about her life today; all of these could have been cut out without losing anything. And there were just too many coincidences (and these are really spoilers): Hannah finally reuniting with her parents a week before her father dies; dropping in on Carol and finding Zack living there; Zack having been in federal prison with Charles Taylor; Hannah acting as a useful dupe for the CIA when she jailbreaks Taylor; flying into NYC on 9/11. And, while I understand that part of the theme of this book is America's interventions abroad and their unintended consequences, there was something uncomfortable (more reverse racism?) about the fate of an entire African nation being affected by the naive actions of one white American.

I can appreciate what went into The Darling: it's sweeping and smart and very well-constructed, but it totally lacked heart. I couldn't truly identify with or root for the narcissistic protagonist, and if she was supposed to represent the regretfully lost idealism of an earlier generation, it's not shown to be something to lament passing. It wasn't the hippies who led the Civil Rights Movement (although I'd imagine Black America appreciated what support they received); it wasn't the hippies who ended the Vietnam War; hippies never changed the world one bit; were they all darlings; dilettantes?  In the end, hippies feel like they've done pretty well if they end up wearing silver ponytails and granny glasses on their organic farms in upstate New York (this is Banks' evaluation from the above interview), but I have to wonder if that was worth it (especially for the Weathermen). I did not love this book but I'm giving it four stars because it's so much better than most of my three star reads.

I would definitely read Russell Banks again. Unintended synchronicity: Today is September 11th, and I didn't even realise that this is a 9/11 book until the final passage. 

And because this is the anniversary of 9/11, it's as good a time as any to record what that day was like for me.

As I wrote in the review, as a new mother I did sometimes feel like This is my life now? The pregnancies and labours and sole responsibility to care for these little humans while Dave was at work (and to a large degree, when he was home) was exhausting and seemed to consume my whole life; to consume me. (And I wouldn't trade away a day of it -- even at the time I knew that my girls' total dependence on me wouldn't last but there's no denying that motherhood is hard.) When Kennedy started grade one, I decided to create some time just for me by joining a women's gym that had a daycare for toddlers, and Mallory enjoyed her daily playtime as much as I enjoyed mine. Our routine was to take Kennedy to school at 8:30 every morning and then go home, take our time getting our stuff together, and leave the house around 9:20 (so I'd have about a half hour on the treadmill before whatever class started at 10).

That September 11th, Kennedy had just started grade 2, so Mal and I had been in our routine for over a year. Just before 9 am, my mother called me and said, "Are you watching CNN?"

 I said, "No, Ma. Me and Mal are just on our way out the door." (Me not wanting to get tied down on the phone.)

"Put it on," she said. "A plane just crashed into the World Trade Center."

"What?" I asked, grabbing the remote. "Like a Cessna? It's just lost or something? How does that happen?" 

And just about the time I got CNN on, Ma was saying, "No, it was a jetliner. And the tower is burning. It could fall."

This is what I saw, and like everyone else watching live, I could not comprehend what I was seeing. "How does that happen? How does a jetliner accidentally hit a skyscraper?" And because it was so unthinkable, it took minutes before I said, "Do you think this happened on purpose?" My mother didn't have an answer for that, and then suddenly, the second plane hit and we gasped in unison.

It was no longer possible to believe that this was an accident but it was still incomprehensible. Why would someone do this? How does this change the world? What could this possibly mean for me and my family? And because these questions were just too big for me, I gathered up Mallory and my stuff and we went to the gym.

When I brought Mal to the daycare room, the two staff ladies were watching CNN in there and, because I was trying to carry on with my day as though the world hadn't just changed forever, I asked them if they thought it was appropriate for them to be watching those plane crashes -- replayed endlessly -- in front of the kids? Even at the time, I appreciated that they were as horrified as I was to be carrying on with our routine, but I was grasping for normal and I wanted everything to remain normal for my 3-year-old daughter. They apologised and put in some dumb Disney movie -- like normal! -- and I went out to the treadmill. As the clock drew nearer to 10 o'clock and the start of some Power Crossfit exercise class, I felt queasy and disgusted with myself, and before I started crying in front of everyone, I went to the locker room, grabbed my stuff and pulled Mallory away from her buddies. We went home, I got caught up on the Pentagon crash and the Pennsylvania field crash, and it was still all questions and theories and just the dawning of the ties to Al Qaeda and some madman named Bin Laden. I called Dave (who worked close to Toronto and right beside its airport at the time) to make sure he was safe and learned that they were all glued to CNN, too. That it was doubly eerie in his office to feel the absence of planes going by as all of North America was grounded. That if there's one thing he and I knew for sure: we in the comparative safety of Canada felt every bit as under attack as anyone in the States; that we were all American now. 

The following day I wrote my first and only ever letter to the editor of the newspaper I read. It was something about thinking I was speechless until I realised that I had been howling all day. Something about how the vengeance I felt came from deep within my caveman, pre-verbal brain; a place beyond rationality, civility, or limits. It wasn't a long letter, wasn't published, but it was cathartic to try and verbalise the horror that I felt.

I was numb and gutted for days afterwards but the images kept replaying themselves. The image of people jumping to their deaths instead of facing the flames and smoke. The images of the first responders running in while everyone else was trying to run out. The towers falling. People on the other side of the world ululating and firing rifles into the air in celebration. It is no exaggeration to say that my world changed that day; even though 9/11 didn't rob me of anyone I know, it robbed me of a sense of innocence and security that I hadn't even known was mine until they were gone.

I remember going to church that Sunday and Father Dunne was his very best pastoral self. He urged us to remember that the Muslims are our brothers in faith; that they also believe the Old Testament to be a holy book and regard Jesus as a great prophet. And although I'm not a person of particular religious faith, I was comforted to be sharing that moment within a community. And as consoling as the hymn was that followed the sermon, I cried as I sang all the way through it:

You shall cross the barren desert

But you shall not die of thirst

You shall wander far in safety

Though you do not know the way.

You shall speak your words in foreign lands

And all will understand

You shall see the face of God and live.

Be not afraid

I go before you always

Come follow Me

And I shall give you rest.

If you pass through raging waters

In the sea, you shall not drown

If you walk amidst the burning flames

You shall not be harmed.

If you stand before the pow'r of hell

And death is at your side

Know that I am with you, through it all.

Be not afraid

I go before you always

Come follow Me

And I shall give you rest.

Blessed are your poor

For the Kingdom shall be theirs

Blest are you that weep and mourn

for one day you shall laugh.

And if wicked men insult and hate you

All because of Me

Blessed, blessed are you!

Be not afraid

I go before you always

Come follow Me

and I shall give you rest

I am fighting back tears even as I remember this: 9/11 was truly life-changing, even if I don't think of it every day. I appreciate Russell Banks' attempt to capture the pre-9/11 world, but I don't 100% agree with his premise that the history of the United States was rewritten from the moment that the planes slammed into the towers. I think that day was definitely a dividing line: the world changed after and set the before in amber; the hippies had made darlings of themselves -- but that wasn't Bin Laden.