The Starless Sea

Far beneath the surface of the earth, hidden from the sun and the moon, upon the shores of the Starless Sea, there is a labyrinthine collection of tunnels and rooms filled with stories. Stories written in books and sealed in jars and painted on walls. Odes inscribed onto skin and pressed into rose petals. Tales laid in tiles upon the floors, bits of plot worn away by passing feet. Legends carved in crystal and hung from chandeliers. Stories catalogued and cared for and revered. Old stories preserved while new stories spring up around them.

I was surprised by how enchanting I found The Night Circus; not really within my regular wheelhouse, I was, nonetheless, thoroughly charmed by Erin Morgenstern's whimsical, magical world. When I started The Starless Sea and discovered that it had a similar vibe but centered on books and storytelling (with a dollop of magic; bibliomancy, as Morgenstern writes), I thought, “So much the better. What's not to like?” But here's the thing: what felt effortless and bewitching in Morgenstern's first novel now seems too deliberate and laboured; Morgenstern attempted to recapture lightning in a bottle, but all I ended up seeing was the bottle itself. Looking at the quotes “liked” over on Goodreads, one can't deny that Morgenstern writes beautiful sentences, but this time, they don't add up to much at all. Call me disappointed.

This is what his mother would call a moment with meaning. A moment that changes the moments that follow. The son of the fortune-teller knows only that the door feels important in a way he cannot quite explain, even to himself. A boy at the beginning of a story has no way of knowing that the story has begun.

It all begins so well: After a brief introduction to a pirate (whom, we are assured, may be thought of as a metaphor), we meet the son of a fortune-teller (also known as Zachary Ezra Rawlins; always referred to by his full name, which grows irksome) when he is a young boy. On his way home from school, the boy discovers an impressively painted door on the rear wall of a building, and although the doorknob looks real enough to turn, the boy decides against testing it; a hesitancy he will regret for years. When, as a grad student, Zachary Ezra Rawlins finds a mysterious book in his college library – a book which describes his childhood experience with the painted door, down to referring to the main character as “the son of a fortune-teller”, as he is himself – Zachary is set on a quest to discover the origin of the book, the truth about a shadowy Collectors Club, and maybe even find love along the way. Interspersed with the narrative of Zachary's quest are snippets of fairytales, excerpts from longer mysterious books, and descriptions of the phantasmagorical Starless Sea. The beginning is so intriguing, the mysteries so provocative, that I thought I was in for another surprisingly rewarding read. But nothing really happens in this book; it's all sizzle, no steak; no plot, no growth, no meaning. 

“We are the stars,” he answers, as though it is the most obvious of facts afloat in a sea of metaphors and misdirections. “We are all stardust and stories.”

Admittedly, the imagery is gorgeous; stardust and stories. I was instantly hooked by the swords and keys, the rabbits, feathers, doorknobs, and eggs. I wanted to know more about the Owl King, and the Innkeeper who met the Sun and Moon, and the lovers trapped outside of time. I want to navigate a river of honey, place amber bees in the open palms of an alabaster statue, and wander the papered halls of a human-sized dollhouse. The background is lovely, but it's peopled with flat and unbelievable characters (I was touched more by the brief love stories in the fairytales than anything that passes between the "real" characters).

To rewind to the beginning, Zachary is studying emerging media (with a focus on the storytelling of video games) and there was a scene with an informal seminar on the subject that provided for some interesting dialogue around what a consumer wants from a video game vs what one wants from a book; especially regarding how a gamer wants the impression of exploring by dint of her own decisions, while knowing that there's a predetermined ending that she's working towards; so different from a novel, where one is forced to follow the author in a straight line. This theme is picked up near the end of The Starless Sea, when Zachary has been missing for quite some time and one of his classmates tries to follow his trail. Helpfully, Kat keeps a journal of her detective work, excerpted in the book:

I got to thinking all of this might be a halfway decent game if it were a game. Part spy movie, part fairy tale, part choose your own adventure. Epic branching story that doesn't stick to a single genre or one set path and turns into different stories but it's all the same story. I'm trying to play with the things you can do in a game that you can't do in a book. Trying to capture more story. A book is made of paper but a story is a tree.

And, ultimately, I believe that this was Morgenstern's overarching goal: to write a book that experiences like a video game, branching off into side quests and backstories, creating a tree instead of a path. Unfortunately, as much as I admire an author striving for the new, I don't think this really worked.

10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World

Researchers at various world-renowned institutions had observed persistent brain activity in people who had just died; in some cases this had lasted for just a few minutes. In others, for as much as ten minutes and thirty-eight seconds. What happened during that time? Did the dead remember the past, and, if so, which parts of it, and in what order? How could the mind condense an entire life into the time it took to boil a kettle?


As 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World begins, middle-aged Istanbul sex worker Tequila Leila – born in the small Turkish town of Van in 1947 and officially given the names Leyla Afife Kamile – has been murdered, her body dumped in a rubbish bin. Completely aware of her situation, Leila is bemused to find her memory drifting randomly over the events of her life, and as the minutes and seconds (as per the title) count up, the reader is led on a journey that encompasses much of the variety of life for women in Turkey (and especially in Istanbul) for the period of Leila's life, up to her death in 1990. This book is much more about history and social commentary than characters and a plumbing of the human heart, and while I completely recognise the value of commemorating the lives of those who might otherwise remain voiceless, the basic writing and the tonal shift of the second part left me rather underwhelmed. Good, not great, for me.

Three minutes had passed since Leila's heart had stopped, and now she remembered cardamom coffee – strong, intense, dark. A taste forever associated in her mind with the street of brothels in Istanbul. It was rather strange that this should follow on the heels of her recollections of childhood. But human memory resembles a late-night reveller who has had a few too many drinks: hard as it tries, it just cannot follow a straight line. It staggers through a maze of inversions, often moving in dizzying zigzags, immune to reason and liable to collapse altogether.

The first sections, counting away Leila's post-death minutes and seconds, were maybe a little gimmicky to play out as long as they do, but I did like how author Elif Shafak has Leila link every memory to a strong scent: lemon and sugar reminding her of how her mother's friends would gather for raucous leg-waxing parties; the scent of watermelon reminding Leila of the hot summer that her extended family spent at the seaside; a summer that would change the course of her life. Between her family life as a child and her experiences working in a licensed brothel in Istanbul, Leila's story (and those of the four women she meets in the city who will become her closest friends), explore a wide ranging (if all basically repressed) variety of life for Turkish women. In the background, larger historical events play out (the Turkish army joining the Americans in the Korean War, the 1968 protests against the arrival of the US Navy's Sixth Fleet in Istanbul, the student massacre in Taksim Square in 1977), and while I do feel like I learned a lot about Turkey from this time period, I had a lingering sense that Shafak had been working through a checklist of everything that she wanted her readers to learn; details weren't quite organic.

Nostalgia Nalan believed there were two kinds of families in the world: relatives formed the blood family; and friends, the water family. If your blood family happened to be nice and caring, you could count your lucky stars and make the most of it; and if not, there was still hope; things could take a turn for the better once you were old enough to leave your home sour home.

Shafak's dedication reads: To the women of Istanbul, and the city of Istanbul, which is, and has always been, a she-city. Shafak then proceeds to populate her story with outsider women: one transgendered, one a little person, one an illegal African immigrant, one a cabaret singer who had fled a stifling marriage (and again, I had the sense of a checklist being ticked off somewhere). Along with Leila's childhood best friend (the token male of the group who came to Istanbul in order to watch over Leila), these women form Leila's “five”; her “water family”. After Leila's ten minutes, thirty-eight seconds are up, the omniscient point-of-view shifts to these friends as they gather outside the medical examiner's office, demanding their friend's body for a proper burial. Unfortunately, Turkish law is clear that where a body is unclaimed by blood relations, it can only be disposed of, without ceremony or religious ritual, in an unmarked grave in a place like the Cemetery of the Companionless in Kilyos (an actual cemetery, now famous as the last resting place for those would-be refugees who wash up on Turkey's shores). In what I found to be a jarring shift in tone, the plot from here becomes a bit of a slapstick caper (yet ends in an appropriate place).

10 Minutes – in what I interpreted to be its primary intent: the commemoration of those who might otherwise remain voiceless – reminded me very much of the Man Booker-co-winning Girl, Woman, Other. And while I did have some impatience with that book's literary pretensions, it was, very much so, literary. By contrast, I found Shafak's writing here to be very basic (metaphors, in particular, were frequent and clunky), and the swerve towards humour, unnecessary. And yet, I do appreciate what I have learned about Turkey, and the lives of Turkish women, and am pleased that this book was longlisted for the Booker, thereby coming to my attention. It deserves to be read.

Man Booker Longlist 2019:

• Margaret Atwood, The Testaments 
• Kevin Barry, Night Boat to Tangier 
• Oyinkan Braithwaite, My Sister, The Serial Killer 
• Lucy Ellmann, Ducks, Newburyport 
• Bernardine Evaristo, Girl, Woman, Other 
• John Lanchester , The Wall 
• Deborah Levy, The Man Who Saw Everything 
• Valeria Luisell, Lost Children Archive 
• Chigozie Obioma, An Orchestra of Minorities
• Max Porter, Lanny 
• Salman Rushdie, Quichotte 
• Elif Shafak, 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World 
• Jeanette Winterson, Frankissstein 

Eventually won by The Testaments and Girl, Woman, Other in a tie, my favourites on the list were Lanny, Night Boat to Tangier, and An Orchestra of Minorities. I fear the Man Booker has become too political for me - favouring identity politics over excellent storytelling - and I don't know how much longer I'll think it a badge of honour to keep reading the longlists.

Reproduction

At first, Army was 99 percent sure, then 98 percent sure, and now he was down to 96 percent sure that he couldn't be the father. It was biologically impossible from what he understood about reproduction. He would have had to had had, have had to had had, sex.


Ian Williams is an award-winning poet and that fact is totally apparent in his first novel, Reproduction: word choices are precise and often surprising; he plays (repeatedly) with structure; and I constantly had the feeling that something was going over my head. This may have won the 2019 Giller Prize, but I found most of it dull and more concerned with form than content; this one is for the juries. Spoiler-full from here.

If two people travelling in a straight line meet in a hospital room, is that a vertex or an intersection?

In the beginning...we meet Felicia (a nineteen-year-old student, recently arrived from an unnamed Caribbean island, now living with her mother in Brampton, Ontario) and Edgar (a fabulously wealthy but feckless 35-to-45 year old German businessman who has been banished to the Toronto branch of the family business where he can't screw up anything too badly), and the two of them meet when their mothers are put in the same hospital room. Felicia's mother soon dies of her heart condition, Edgar's Mutter grows strong enough to be discharged, and between Felicia's youth and grief and Edgar's laissez-faire attitude towards his mother's care, he convinces the young woman to quit school and move into his enormous house to act as his mother's caretaker. Mutual consolation turns to something like friendship, turns to something like romance, and a maybe-it-was-consensual sexual relationship begins: 

Felicia wanted him to press down on her and crush her face into stone so someone would come in and rescue her. Yet, contradictorily, she kept trying not to get hurt, kicking his zipper away from her ankle, where it was grating, trying to breathe under the weight of his body, he did not remove her underwear, or allow her to, she tried, but he slid it aside. And if not her mother, then the boy with the cow eyelashes from the small unrecognized island would intervene, the same half-muscle half-bone feeling of a turkey neck, in her hand, when she, because he had to be helped if she wanted him to kill her, but in her hand, now inside her, he only felt like a low hum, like a fluorescent light buzzing, despite the earnest thrusting of a snowman's carrot, the smell of his armpit and smoke and alcohol, his face buried in the pillow beside her face, was that his lip on her shoulder, was he dribbling, despite what she felt to be an earnest effort by a man ascending the mysterious and simple heights of male pleasure, already oblivious to her name and face, to whom she had died, despite this man so attentive to the pleasure her body offered him that he wouldn't care if a cat or his mother walked in, despite all that, she could only feel a low hum, the vibration of an automobile in park. Intervene.

What was decidedly not consensual was the pregnancy that ensues: In the beginning, Edgar had made it clear that he had had a vasectomy because he never wants children, and when Felicia becomes pregnant he turns it around on her (“I said I wanted a vasectomy, you should have been protecting against this”), and when she refuses to have an abortion, Felicia is kicked out to begin a long, hard life as a single mother to a biracial son.

Fast-forward fourteen years (to the 90's) and Felicia and Army (short for Armistice; Felicia had her Canadian History textbook alongside her bed in the maternity ward) move into the basement apartment of Oliver: a bitterly divorced has-been-wanna-be rockstar who has custody of his two children for the summer – Hendrix (a quirky seven-year-old) and Heather (a hot sixteen-year-old who drives Army crazy). We see that Felicia has worked hard to care for her son (with no support or contact from the millionaire baby-daddy) and has instilled in him good values, a work ethic, and an obsessive curiosity about his father. Heather flirts and makes out with Army but her heart thumps for the long-haired wanna-be rockstar who works the stockroom at the nearby Zellers. It's a summer of playfully exploring her burgeoning sexuality for Heather until the stockboy and his buddies roofie and gangrape her:

The second time, if there was a second time and not a third or fourth, it was like Skinnyboy was angry with her. Only it wasn't Skinnyboy, it was Skinnierboy, was it, then it was Skinnyboy again, then laughter, and smoke and the muttering, all like the beginning of a headache between her legs. She didn't feel anyone dragging her jeans down to her knees. She woke up on a Ferris wheel. But even that she couldn't be sure of, how their faces kept changing, every time they swished hair out of their eyes, and she was awake, but not. How many pills – what pills – had she had? It was just Ecstasy, no? She wanted to be awake when he opened her centrefold. She wanted to set her face in a certain way. Why was he so skinny? The top of her head was counting against the door handle. How many sips was this? She felt like she was upside down. She decided that she was asleep. It was dark. There was no way.

Definitely not consensual, but Heather does blame herself for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. And when she discovers she is pregnant, Heather's American mother sends her daughter back to live in Brampton with her Dad; to have the baby secretly. When Riot (short for Chariot; Army comes up with the rad name) is born and Heather refuses to give him away as per her mother's plan, Oliver and Felicia decide to officially adopt the baby – even though they are not and never become a couple – and let Heather get back to being a kid.

The narrative jumps twenty or so years to the present and Riot is an artsy moviemaker, studying film at a local college. When he uploads videos of himself self-pleasuring to the cloud and sends links to a girl he likes, it turns into a big tribunal, with the girl's father accusing Riot of non-consensual “digital” penetration. Meanwhile, it comes to Felicia's attention that Edgar is dying of cancer, and although she doesn't want to invite him into their circle, Army insists on taking care of the father he never knew (not least of all because he wants to reinforce himself as the heir apparent to Edgar's fortune), and Riot is inspired to make a “slow” (days-long) film of the man's death. 

That is really a bare-bones plot synopsis, but more important would be the shifting formats. The first section is told in rotating POVs between Felicia and Edgar – denoted by an XX or an XY at the beginning of each of the twenty-three sections to indicate which one is narrating; the twenty-three sections meant to mimic the twenty-three pairs of chromosomes on a DNA strand. This is followed by the first of three “Sex Talk” interludes, which read like free verse poetry and each concern boys growing up and learning about their paternity. Part two rotates between four characters, four times, to add up to sixteen sections (marked off by an ever-increasing grid of bullet-points). The third section grows exponentially to 256 subsections, each of which is numbered, titled (often with pop cultural references), and marked with the name of the character whose POV the following few sentences concern. I must admit, the reading was growing tiresome by this point, but the most eye-straining technique was yet to come. As though the format itself is metastasizing, the final section has its sentences invaded by superscript and subscript, usually not referencing anything else in the narrative (and yet I couldn't force myself to ignore them, as much as they annoyed me, in case something important was revealed in them). I can't duplicate the technique, so I took a representative picture (apologies for the quality):

So that's the what and the how, but I have a little more to say about the who in this book. We have a cohort of unlikeable, privileged white men – Edgar is revealed to be an escort-frequenting, incapable of affection, deadbeat millionaire who jet-sets for work even if he doesn't need to; Oliver is a stripclub-(and later, online porn-)client, prone to violence, who has inherited several rental properties and doesn't work a job over the course of the book; Skinnyboy is a rapist who joins the army to avoid Heather's pregnancy (and leaves the story at that point); and Riot is a spoiled man-child who is uncommitted to his education and who believes in his right to making non-commercial art films and allowing others to support him. Felicia is an interesting character – tough-loving and hard-working – but maybe too good to be true. Heather is peripheral – we learn that she successfully hid the childbirth, received a pricey education in Women's Studies, and now has an underpaid administrative job in NYC – and her character isn't really explored. I thought that Army was the most interesting character – I liked his money-making hustle as a fourteen-year-old and ached for him as he was still looking for his first entrepreneurial break as a thirty-six-year-old living in his mother's (rented) basement. And does that just mean that Williams had the best handle on writing a young Black male? There is much about relationships in Reproduction – men and women are bonded together along that double-helix strand of DNA, whether along romantic or familial ties – and the sexual relationships all seem to revolve around the shifting definition of consent (is Army some kind of pervert for not telling Riot's friend, Faye, that he's fifteen years older than her [the same approximate age difference between his own parents] before initiating a sexual relationship with her?) I will add that I thought the book ended on the most appropriate of notes.

After all that, I will reiterate: Reproduction seems more committed to its genre-pushing (and ultimately tiresome) format than any exploration of the humans that people it. In a way I admired this, but I did not enjoy it.

The longlist for the 2019 Scotiabank Giller Prize:

Days by Moonlight by André Alexis

The Testaments by Margaret Atwood
Immigrant City by David Bezmozgis
Greenwood by Michael Christie
Small Game Hunting at the Local Coward Gun Club by Megan Gail Coles
The Innocents by Michael Crummey
Dream Sequence by Adam Foulds
Late Breaking by K.D. Miller
Dual Citizens by Alix Ohlin
Lampedusa by Steven Price
Frying Plantain by Zalika Reid-Benta

Reproduction by Ian Williams


The prize was won by Ian Williams for Reproduction, but my favourite was Michael Crummey's The Innocents.

Crow Winter

"The sky. The way the clouds keep hanging out by the horizon. I think we might get a crow winter this year...That's what it's called when it snows too soon for it to be called winter. Like, the second week in October, or maybe even earlier...It's real annoying because everything dies before it's supposed to."

I'm a fan of Canadian Indigenous fiction – I am open to anything First Nations writers want to share about their history, mythology, or how they're living now – and while I don't demand that they mould their storytelling to fit the distinct tastes of my settlers' culture, I can't give a complete pass to Indigenous authors whose writing I don't think is of the highest quality. Crow Winter is a fine story that brings mythological beings into the modern world, much like Eden Robinson's Trickster series, but unlike Robinson's precise and imaginative storytelling, author Karen McBride's writing seems amateurish and uninspired. I appreciate this effort, but am not dazzled by the result.

With every word he speaks, the sky darkens as Nanabush's shadow grows larger. I can feel some primal part of me screaming that I need to either fall to my knees or run. I shouldn't be able to commune with someone like him. But I can't move. The wind picks up again and tosses the few pieces of loose hair around my face until each touch feels like lashes from a whip. For the first time, I see the echo of the old powers of Nanabush. As if I know that he's not what he was. I understand him. Something connects us and I see him for the tired, unworshipped, forgotten soul that he is.

After graduating university, Hazel Ellis decides to move back home with her mother on the Spirit Bear Point First Nation reserve in Quebec. Hazel's father died after a long illness eighteen months before, and she, her mother, and her brother are all still broken over the loss and unable to talk to one another about it. Once home again, Hazel finds herself being shadowed by an unusually intelligent-looking crow, and once they begin communicating, she discovers that he is Nanabush: the Trickster demigod, neither mortal nor immortal, trapped in avian form and sent by the Seven Grandfather Teachings to put Hazel back together again. As the two develop their relationship, Hazel and Nanabush realise that not only must they help each other for their own healings, but they are set on a mission to save the Spirit World and its connection to this side of the Medicine Wheel.

I did like the depiction of rez life – everything from Band Council politics to the slangy dialect used by Hazel's mom and other residents – and I appreciate what McBride shares about sweat lodge ceremony and other customs, beliefs, and rituals of her Anishinaabe people. But I didn't find the overall plot to be compellingly unique or the up-close writing to reflect the author's Master of Arts in creative writing (from her acknowledgments, it would seem that this began as McBride's Master's thesis). There is plenty of telling-not-showing, repetition of details, and plain clunky writing:

It's a beautiful day. Hot, sunny, with the right amount of wind, so I've got the windows rolled down – which seemed like a good decision when I set out but isn't great now that I'm nearing the actual heap. There's no other way to describe the smell of garbage. It's awful. The epitome of rot. I'd roll the windows up but that would only lock it in with me. This way I have a bit of air flow, even if it's nasty, hot garbage air.

I think it's totally fair for an Indigenous author to depict First Nations' lamentable history with the colonising culture in any way that feels right to her. And I don't feel defensive when white people are depicted as greedy, racist exploiters, but cartoonishly evil historical figures don't feel real enough to me to evoke a sympathetic reaction – and neither does making the only living white person in this book (a wanna-be ally to the Spirit Bear Point residents) react with spite instead of understanding when he's given the chance to act like a human being instead of a businessman. Again, McBride has every right (perhaps even a duty) to put disparaging remarks about white people and the history of colonisation in her characters' mouths, but I still find myself challenged by the wording in passages like the following (regarding Hazel's brother, Gus):

Until recently, he worked as part of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Helping those of us still suffering from second-wave cultural genocide to find peace. Which is a fancy way of saying he helped people apply for the money that was owed to them by the Canadian government.

I wish I liked Crow Winter better, but I will say that it wasn't a waste of time to have listened to the story that Karen McBride wanted to share.

Last Christmas in Paris

P.S. I had a dream last night that we were in Paris for Christmas. You, me, Will, Alice. The snow fell in thick fat flakes as we strolled along the Champs-Élysées, the lights of the Eiffel Tower twinkling in the distance. It was the most perfect dream, Thomas. I know we will get there one day. I promise we will.

Last Christmas in Paris was a book club pick for me, and while it's not the sort of thing I'd typically pick up, I am always game to read something outside of my comfort zone. Unfortunately, I simply didn't think that this “Novel of World War I” – a romance told in letters – was very good at all. With florid and maudlin writing, the storyline reveals nothing new about the Great War or the lives of the people affected by it, and honestly, I found the whole endeavor pointless; I have no idea why this book was written (or why it took two authors, Hazel Gaynor and Heather Webb, to complete). Not for me, but judging by its high rating on Goodreads, admittedly of value to others.

I don't have much to say about this one, but I do want to voice (once again) my complaint that I find novels set in the big wars to be a lazy and easy appeal to sentimentality; the author needn't work too hard at setting the physical and emotional scene when we all have mental pictures and readily accessible reactions from watching news reels and films; and where the work is half-done like that, I expect an author to have something new or important to say by using those settings. I wasn't a huge fan of The Nightingale or All the Light We Cannot See, but at least their authors were attempting to tell stories about little-known groups or situations within WWII. With Last Christmas in Paris, we follow the correspondence of some upper-crust Brits as their attitude turns from “What jolly good fun is training camp! I do hope we see some decent action with the Hun, but they say this will all be over before Christmas!” to “Real war is terrifying and there's nothing more pitiable than watching a soldier crying out for his mother as he dies in the mud.” What's new in that? As the years go by, we are told about mustard gas and the sinking of the Lusitania and the Spanish Flu, and what's new about that? And as for the romantic angle – and its constant complications – I couldn't connect with that relationship either. Simply not my cuppa vin chaud.

Girl

I was a girl once, but not any more. I smell. Blood dried and crusted all over me, and my wrapper in shreds. My insides, a morass. Hurtled through this forest that I saw, that first awful night, when I and my friends were snatched from the school.

On the night of April 14–15, 2014, 276 female students were kidnapped from a government school in the town of Chiboki, Nigeria by the Islamic terrorist group Boko Haram (and as of today, 112 of these stolen girls are still missing). Having seen an interview with one of the Chiboki schoolgirls who eventually got away from her captors, acclaimed Irish novelist Edna O'Brien travelled to Nigeria and spent many months interviewing other survivors of the kidnapping, NGO workers, government officials, doctors, and journalists. From this wealth of information, O'Brien wrote Girl: a fictionalised account of one Chiboki schoolgirl who is kidnapped, enslaved, brutalised, and after making a harrowing escape, finds herself further marginalised by her family and community. I suppose any of us could imagine what the first half of Maryam's story would look like (the beatings, forced labour, and repeated rapes), but by so deeply investigating the variety of Nigerian culture, O'Brien spins her story out in some ways that surprised and enlightened me. This isn't a long read but it includes a wealth of information, and while I can't say that I “enjoyed” this, it feels like a necessary act of witnessing; over a hundred of these girls are still out there.

“Open her legs.” He is still yelling it, even though they know exactly how his desires must be met. I both died and did not die. A butchery is being performed on me. Then I feel my nostrils being prised open and the muzzle of the gun splaying my nose. I know now that within minutes that gun will explode inside my head.I will not wake from this, I will die with my scream unfinished.

The first chapter of Girl is set during the time that Maryam is making her way, with her baby, away from the Boko Haram encampment – so, the escape isn't really a spoiler, and no matter how hard the conditions get for Maryam in the camp, there is the comforting knowledge that she will eventually get away. Maryam appears to be narrating her story in the future – at a time when she is suffering some form of PTSD – so the storytelling is a bit sketchy, with scant details, large time lapses, and shifting tenses. Others in the camp tell Maryam their stories – kidnapped girls and captured boy soldiers explaining how they came to be there – and some longer stories are set apart in italics. When Maryam does escape, she's helped by some women from a nomadic herding tribe – until a rumour gets out that they're harbouring an escapee from Boko Haram and the group fears a retaliatory attack; as Maryam's story proceeds, it would seem that the entire countryside is gripped by a fear of the Sect and their mid-night raids. When Maryam begs for help from a military outpost, the “buffoon” soldiers are more inclined to believe that this half-starved girl with a baby strapped to her chest is a suicide bomber than a victim of terror. Even their commander has lost faith in the stability and security that the military can provide:

He sat on the stool next to me, saying there was something I must know. Human nature had turned diabolical. The country as I had left it was no more, houses torched while people slept inside them, farmers no longer able to till their land, people fleeing from one hungry wasteland to another, devastation. A woman pouring her own faeces on her head and her children's heads each morning, to deceive the Dogs, to delude them into believing they were all mad.

Maryam eventually meets the Nigerian president (at an event where she is rolled out for his aggrandisement), is reconnected with her family (and learns how the families of the kidnapped Chiboki schoolgirls could be torn apart by efforts to free them), is shown charity in a convent (until the Sisters require their one guestroom for a visiting Irish nun; O'Brien needed to get that dig in there, natch), she experiences an internal camp for displaced persons (a nasty place from which everyone hopes for rescue), and she learns that having been forced to become a “Bush Wife”, she will never again be wholly accepted by her own community:

Even as they arrived, these cousins and neighbours, I felt a freak. I could read their minds, by their false smiles and their false gush. I could feel their hesitation and worse, their contempt. I knew they were thinking, Jihadi wife, with the Sambisa filth still clinging to her.

I note that most reviewers feel the need to comment on whether or not this book is an act of cultural appropriation; so, is the Chiboki schoolgirl kidnapping a valid subject matter for an old white woman to write about? Having read some of Edna O'Brien's work before, I want to note that she seems to have always been interested in the ways that men who derive great power from their religious positions will attempt to exert that power over women's bodies; and that is the same issue whether she's writing about Roman Catholic clergy or Boko Haram's twisted version of Islam. And as this is a real and ongoing humanitarian issue right now, I would think that anyone who is inspired by the pitiable plight of these stolen and broken young women ought to be writing about them; shining a light where the hashtags have done exactly nothing. Certainly, that makes this both worth the writing and worth the reading.

Frying Plantain

“This likkle girl here, she love the plantain, yuh know,” she tells Sister Bernice. “It nah Christmas food but mi cook it on Christmas for her. I bring she back to Hanover last year for my niece's wedding, must've been Kara's second visit to Jamaicar. Nothing troubled her when she visit the first time but last year? Lawd. She had a sickness inna her belly that make she chrow up. Only thing she could keep down was plantain and she nah want Bredda's wife plantain, she only want fi eat what mi fry.”

Frying Plaintain is marketed as a collection of twelve interrelated short stories, but as they are primarily narrated in the first person, by the same main character, and follow a straightforward chronological timeline, this reads like a novel. Further, the chapters don't have that completeness of thought or sudden swerve that one encounters in finely written short stories – I can't imagine any of these chapters standing on their own in a magazine – and honestly, the writing itself is fairly basic. What Frying Plantain does well is to serve as a bildungsroman for a first generation Jamaican-Canadian daughter navigating her single mother's demands and expectations in downtown Toronto (more than anything, this has the feel of a lightly fictionalised memoir; I have no idea how closely these stories match the lived experience of author Zalika Reid-Benta), and although the writing doesn't get very deep, it does shine a light on one of Toronto's largest and most vibrant immigrant communities. 

I could tell she knew I was lying but she didn't ask me any more questions, she only turned the volume back up on the TV. She had to know what I'd only just now discovered: that peace could only exist in this family when we lied about everything, at least to each other.

Frying Plantain is primarily a domestic tale and explores the relationships between three generations: Kara is the main character, born in Canada and strictly controlled by her mother, but under pressure from her friends in their Caribbean-rich neighbourhood to let loose sometimes; Eloise is Kara's Jamaica-born single mother, working and putting herself through university, doing whatever she can to ensure her daughter doesn't compromise her future through teen pregnancy as she did; and Verna is Eloise's Jamaica-born mother (speaking in the dense patois above), who works two jobs to keep her little bungalow (which Verna keeps spotless, down to the plastic-covered furniture), and whose husband, George, steps out with other ladies. There are secrets and lies, screaming, slaps, and stoney silences, months gone by without visiting the grandparents, and everyone seems more worried about how things look to outsiders than any individual's happiness. Much is written about how to avoid frizzy hair and ashy skin; what level of affected accent is acceptable and what appears false; and Kara is warned to neither act like the faas girls from their old neighbourhood or to believe that she can get away with the common acts of rebellion that the white students in her new high school engage in – these stories aren't quite about race, but her hair, her skin, her connection to her culture, and her mother's expectations are challenges that Kara needs to navigate every day. Nothing very surprising happens in this collection, but it was an easy and interesting read.

The longlist for the 2019 Scotiabank Giller Prize:

Days by Moonlight by André Alexis

The Testaments by Margaret Atwood
Immigrant City by David Bezmozgis
Greenwood by Michael Christie
Small Game Hunting at the Local Coward Gun Club by Megan Gail Coles
The Innocents by Michael Crummey
Dream Sequence by Adam Foulds
Late Breaking by K.D. Miller
Dual Citizens by Alix Ohlin
Lampedusa by Steven Price
Frying Plantain by Zalika Reid-Benta

Reproduction by Ian Williams


The prize was won by Ian Williams for Reproduction, but my favourite was Michael Crummey's The Innocents.

Rebecca

I could fight with the living but I could not fight the dead. If there was some woman in London that Maxim loved, someone he wrote to, visited, dined with, slept with, I could fight her. We would stand on common ground. I should not be afraid. Anger and jealousy were things that could be conquered. One day the woman would grow old or tired or different, and Maxim would not love her anymore. But Rebecca would never grow old. Rebecca would always be the same. And she and I could not fight. She was too strong for me.

The eightieth anniversary of the initial publication of Rebecca seemed reason enough for me to pick it up this year, and what a delight to discover that I had zero clue what the story was about. If there could be other readers out there who don't know the basic plotline, I'd wholly recommend going in cold like I did: I was consistently surprised and charmed by the story's turns. There's something of the old-fashioned, Gothic-Brontë-Romance-Novel about Rebecca, but there's also astutely observed characters and setting and a weird interiority to the narrator that makes this a unique read unto itself. I enjoyed everything about this, was consistently entertained, and can't quite believe that this quasi-thriller hadn't been ruined for me; can't quite believe that I've never read any Daphne Du Maurier before, but this certainly won't be the last.

Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.

One of the most famous opening lines in English fiction and I never grasped how haunting the implications. Barebones plot setup: A twenty-one-year-old Englishwoman, orphaned and doomed to act as a paid companion to a rich and vulgar American matron, happens to meet the handsome and haunted (and recently widowered) Maximilian de Winter in a swank hotel in Monte Carlo. After spending some innocent, carefree hours driving and dining together, when the unnamed narrator tells Maxim that her benefactress has announced suddenly that they are to make their way to New York, he offers the unlikeliest of proposals:

“Either you go to America with Mrs. Van Hopper or you come home to Manderley with me." 

"Do you mean you want a secretary or something?" 

"No, I'm asking you to marry me, you little fool.”

(It's ridiculous, but with our protagonist's heart pounding in her throat, tears sprang to my own eyes at this most unromantic of propositions.) A quickie wedding, a rushed honeymoon, and the bride – young, shy, untrained for high society – is brought to Manderley; the imposing country manor of the de Winter line; a marvel of architecture whose depiction the narrator had once bought on a postcard as a child. It has all the hallmarks of a fairytale: the orphan, the handsome prince, the castle...the looming menace:

Suddenly I saw a clearing in the dark drive ahead, and a patch of sky, and in a moment the dark trees had thinned, the nameless shrubs had disappeared, and on either side of us was a wall of colour, blood-red, reaching far above our heads. We were amongst the rhododendrons. There was something bewildering, even shocking, about the suddenness of their discovery. The woods had not prepared me for them. They startled me with their crimson faces, massed one upon the other in incredible profusion, showing no leaf, no twig, nothing but the slaughterous red, luscious and fantastic, unlike any rhododendron plant I had seen before. I glanced at Maxim. He was smiling. “Like them?” he said. I told him “Yes,” a little breathlessly, uncertain whether I was speaking the truth or not, for to me a rhododendron was a homely, domestic thing, strictly conventional, mauve or pink in colour, standing one beside the other in a neat round bed. And these were monsters, rearing to the sky, massed like a battalion, too beautiful I thought, too powerful; they were not plants at all.

Soon enough, the second Mrs. de Winter is introduced to her staff, and the housekeeper Mrs. Danvers (with her “skull's face, parchment-white, set on a skeleton's frame”) soon lets her know that she will never replace Manderley's true mistress: the beautiful and charismatic – and tragically dead before her time – true Mrs. de Winter, Rebecca. Everyone tells the bride that Rebecca was extraordinary – men, children, and dogs were helplessly attracted to her – and Rebecca's tastes and choices were everywhere on permanent display throughout the home. Our narrator is so overwhelmed by her unsuitability for stepping into Rebecca's shoes (slim, delicate slippers which Danvers insists her new mistress place her hand within) that she trembles before the staff and attempts to hide from visitors. Noting how haunted her husband Maxim still appears to be, the narrator finally understands that she will never replace Rebecca in his heart either.

We're not meant for happiness, you and I.

Back to the beginning of the book: After the first, extraordinary chapter – in which the narrator has dreamt of returning to a nightmarishly twisted Manderley – the next chapter describes a calm, middle-aged life of pleasant married routine, lived in exile on the continent. Naturally, throughout everything I outlined above, I kept wondering how the couple gets from point A to B (and couldn't quite remember if it's made plain that the narrator is with Maxim de Winter on this exile; rereading that chapter now, it's never said outright) and that lent much tension to what follows. Nothing at Manderley is quite what it seems, and secrets are kept, and walls of politeness are erected between people, and surprising turns of events transform Rebecca into a different kind of story than I was expecting.

I believe there is a theory that men and women emerge finer and stronger after suffering, and that to advance in this or any world we must endure ordeal by fire. This we have done in full measure, ironic though it seems. We have both known fear, and loneliness, and very great distress. I suppose sooner or later in the life of everyone comes a moment of trial. We all of us have our particular devil who rides us and torments us, and we must give battle in the end.

And it is this transformation of character that was such a delight to witness. The narrator – as young and as untrained as she may be – has such an extraordinary habit of constantly playing out imaginary conversations and situations in her head. This often works against her (as she imagines the conversations that the locals are having, comparing her to Rebecca), but hers is a mind always away on flights of fancy:

I wondered why it was that places are so much lovelier when one is alone. How commonplace and stupid it would be if I had a friend now, sitting beside me, someone I had known at school, who would say: “By-the-way, I saw old Hilda the other day. You remember her, the one who was so good at tennis. She’s married, with two children.” And the bluebells beside us unnoticed, and the pigeons overhead unheard. I did not want anyone with me. Not even Maxim. If Maxim had been there I should not be lying as I was now, chewing a piece of grass, my eyes shut. I should have been watching him, watching his eyes, his expression. Wondering if he liked it, if he was bored. Wondering what he was thinking. Now I could relax, none of these things mattered. Maxim was in London. How lovely it was to be alone again.

The sense of unreality is added to as the narrator frequently compares her life to events from a play or a book: I glanced out of the window, and it was like turning the page of a photograph album...Oh, God, I thought, this is like two people in a play, in a moment the curtain will come down, we shall bow to the audience, and go off to our dressing-rooms...I thought of all those heroines of fiction who looked pretty when they cried, and what a contrast I must make with a blotched and swollen face, and red rims to my eyes. We don't even know the narrator's name – other than Maxim noting early that it's lovely and unusual (and I loved that she had this one moment of wit in the book to reply that it was because her father had been lovely and unusual) – and it felt twisted for this to be the case in a book literally named for another woman. The housekeeper whispers poison in her ear, she's reluctant to ask her husband any questions she'd rather not have answered, and so knows nothing of his truths, and perhaps worst of all, is the way that the narrator allows Maxim to treat her like a child:

“Listen, my sweet. When you were a little girl, were you ever forbidden to read certain books, and did your father put those books under lock and key?” “Yes,” I said. “Well, then. A husband is not so very different from a father after all. There is a certain type of knowledge I prefer you not to have. It’s better kept under lock and key. So that’s that. And now eat up your peaches, and don’t ask me any more questions, or I shall put you in the corner.”

What kind of fairytale is this, living with a brooding and unknowable husband? Is he Bluebeard? The Beast? The Big Bad Wolf? But then a moment comes when Maxim needs his wife's support and the narrator finally decides, “This is my husband and Manderley is my home and neither of them belongs to Rebecca anymore.” It is a coming-of-age, a moment of triumph, but as we know from the beginning, it's to be a short-lived victory and the journey from here is a tense one. I can see why this was filmed by Hitchcock (I also had no idea that his movie “The Birds” was based on a Du Maurier short story), and now I want to see the movie, too. This was a wonderful read (just short of whatever it is that makes me award a fifth star) and I'm delighted to have finally made Rebecca's acquaintance.