Bina: A Novel in Warnings

My name is Bina and I'm a very busy woman. That's Bye-na, not Beena. I don't know who Beena is but I expect she's having a happy life. I don't know who you are, or the state of your life. But if you've come all this way here to listen to me, your life will undoubtedly get worse. I'm here to warn you, not to reassure you.

I love love loved Anakana Schofield's Martin John and went on to love love love her earlier novel, Malarky, and even though I was beyond excited to get my hands on her latest, Bina, and even though Bina herself was a character in Malarky, and makes a brief reference to the main character in Martin John, I didn't love love love this. I don't know if my expectations were too high, or if Schofield's fractured writing style and interconnected stories finally just felt like more of the same, but whereas those first two works fired off all the pleasure centres in my brain, Bina simply didn't engage me in the same way. I'm going to go with three stars here, but that really feels like I'm evaluating Schofield to a higher than usual standard: against her own work that I found more satisfying. 

I'm only telling you this to warn you. I've better ways to waste my time than mithering on here. I'm a busy woman. Of that be certain. People think old women have nothing to do but stand around. They're very wrong and very ignorant and do take that last combination of wrong and ignorant as another warning. If people think you have time to stand about, let them know otherwise, by not standing about. Take off! Take off when they least expect it. Could you just hold this for a minute? Don't. Be gone. Would you like to? No. I wouldn't. Can I borrow your bread knife to take on a picnic? No. You can't. Because you'll never bring it back. Would there be any chance...? No. There's no chance. None. None. None.

Subtitled “A Novel in Warnings”, Bina is the story of an old Irish woman who has finally had enough of being used and abused, and having taken to her bed, is writing out her version of recent events on the backs of old bills and envelopes, hoping to distill her hard-earned wisdom into a series of warnings to whoever might eventually find them. Bina is anxious and forgetful, so her writing is both rushed and repetitive – a format that makes for narrative tension (just what is going on?) and provides a lot of blank space on the page and what looks like poetry:

You're going no place
I said to her
You're going no place that I'm not going.
Well.
She said.
Just that.
Well.
Open-ended well for me to fall into.
Come with me.

We eventually learn that the majority of Bina's troubles can be attributed to two men: Eddie (or “Forty Guts” as Phil from Malarky calls him), who fell into Bina's ditch and never left; and the Tall Man, who came in for a cup of tea and a game of Scrabble and got Bina tangled up in all kinds of shadowy business. Now, with a yard full of Crusties, reporters and inspectors snooping about, an answering machine filled with hateful messages, and Phil having gone and made her own mistakes, Bina is glad that Eddie and the Tall Man have disappeared, but can only lay in bed, write out her warnings, and make her way towards the red dot. In a book that seems mostly to be about the need to take control over one's own life (even if that control means the right to lay in bed and do nothing at all; or the right to ask the lady from Meals on Wheels for a special favour), it was shocking to me the extent to which Bina had allowed the vile Eddie to take advantage of her (spoilery quote):

His anger came from no specific location and yet it could become an urban settlement of rage in 60 seconds. The words scared me less than his sounds. The anger of displaced objects being flipped off a surface. The kick of his boot into my sideboard and the crashing of the three cups that fell down and smashed. Which cups were they, I wondered, under the crunch of his hoof as he walked on them and stamped them further into smithereens. Then another hurl let out of him and the sound of cup fragments being kicked further across the floor. But the repeated sound that stayed with me was always his fist. I never recovered from that first time he punched me straight in the ear. I never heard right since on that side, in that ear. And to this day I am none the wiser as to why he landed that first punch at all.

I once again found Schofield's writing to be engaging – sometimes funny, sometimes touching, always artful – but Bina left me wanting more. Obviously, I will happily still look forward to whatever Schofield comes out with next.