May is proving to be a bright and gregarious month, of sunshine and chatter. All of my reading has been in the interstices of days, so that the work busyness of April has just been substituted by social busyness. Still there is plenty getting done and I have read some fantastic things already. So I guess I should probably finish off my April round-up before time marches on too far and my thoughts on things get blurry with distance. This time I only have three books to talk about, as the final novel of the month - Annie Proulx's Barkskins - is going to get a post all of it's own.
The Book of Memory by Petina Gappah (Faber and Faber, 2015)
First up is Petina Gappah's The Book of Memory. This debut novel has been long awaited, ever since Gappah's short story collection An Elegy for Easterly was listed for the Guardian First Book Award and won my heart back in 2010. Around the time that I wrote my review of the short stories I was emailing back and forth with Gappah's publicist and remember her saying that a novel was on the way, expected in 2011. It turns out that was a premature announcement, and it's taken another five years for the book to come into the world. Was it worth the wait? Yes in some ways and no in others.
Our narrator, the eponymous Memory, is the only woman in Zimbabwe on death row. When we meet her she has been held at the notorious Chikurubi super-prison in Harare for almost three years, waiting to find out if the endless appeals process will see her sentence commuted or reduced. She swears she is innocent of the murder she stands accused of, the shooting of a wealthy white man called Lloyd. Having been given paper and pen by a visiting American journalist - her position is so unusual she warrants international interest - she sets about spinning her own story of what really happened. As she interweaves her present life at Chikurubi with the long-ago memories of her childhood, the story unfolds slowly and deliberately, spun out for full effect. It hinges on one quite unbelievable claim: that Memory's parents sold her to Lloyd as a child, and that she grew up with him as an adopted daughter. She says that he loved her and that she loved him, and that his death was not her fault. She suggests that all of this happened, in part, because she has albinism.
Memory's storytelling is a compulsion, apparently against her normal inclination. At the beginning she shies away from the limelight; "I spent much of my life trying to be invisible" she says. This need to be unseen is partly physical - sunlight burns and blisters her skin, so she has to keep to margins and shadows - and partly psychological. As a young child still living with her parents she learnt to stay clear of her mother's moods and headaches, to be as inoffensive and ordinary as possible. It's not easy though when the colour of your skin is like a beacon of difference; people can't help but look at you. The looking changes tone when she is adopted by Lloyd. Viewed at a distance she can be mistaken for a white girl, and it's only when people get up close that their faces register that she is black. She goes to an excellent school, learns to ride, goes to parties and benefits from the world of white privilege while never truly feeling part of it. Lloyd's sister Alexandra dislikes her intensely while the local socialites tolerate her as an eccentricity; Lloyd's black house staff treat her with distaste like a strange hybrid animal. When she is accused of Lloyd's murder her albinism is used against her, used to imply that their relationship was some sort of fetishistic perversion and that she is mentally unsound. The faint whiff of bad luck and witch craft hangs on her.
In prison though there is no point in being silent. Memory has to speak up for herself. The story she tells is shaped by issues of race - most clearly played through her own body - but also of class, religion and sexuality. The Zimbabwe she describes is fragmented, chaotic and messy, a place tied in knots with indigenous traditions and colonial morals, where it is difficult for difference of any kind to fit in and grow. Like in An Elegy for Easterly, humour, love and generosity creep into people's life in spite of their context rather than because of it. Gappah builds a world rich with emotional and ethical complexity from these parts.
And so what was it about the book that disappointed me? Foremost I think it was the clunkiness of the unrealiable narration. We are given great whomping clues that this is a book about memory, story and identity from the start; there may as well be a flashing billboard over the title that says "You're going to have to live with the lies and omissions before you find out the truth!". Because I knew it was coming I saw it everywhere, and got frustrated that the obsfucation had to happen before the clarity. Memory dips back and forth in time to a tricky beat but for the first half of the book she tells us very little of anything to move the story on. She dodges and blurs bits of the past in such an obvious way that you know what and where things are being saved for a reveal later on. To some extent you can explain this by her long years of training as a reader. Memory is a lover of books and stories, some of which have clearly influenced her style and she knows what to do to create suspense. Still this only explains so much of the clumsiness and it repeatedly took me out of the story.
Lumberjanes, Vol.1: Beware the Kitten Holy by Noelle Stevenson, Grace Ellis and Shannon Watters (BOOM! Box, 2015)
I went into this on the understanding that I was entering the realm of fun and fluffdom and verily I was not disappointed. This rather slender first volume collects issues 1-3 of this middle grade comic together and has an eye-catching energetic art-style that I very much enjoyed. Shannon Watter's visuals are busier than Stevenson's in Nimona (this time she writes rather than illustrates) and feature a forest palette of greens, browns and reds that are lovely on the eye. The setting is Miss Qiunzella Thiskwin Penniquiqul Thistle Crumpet's Camp for Hardcore Lady Types where aspiring Lumberjanes spend their summers earning badges in survival and adventure. Our five heroines are variously and gloriously unphased by whatever life throws at them, be that three-eyed foxes, white water rapids or mathematical puzzles. Whatever happens their motto of "Friendship to the max!" never fails them. Each comic features a self-contained adventure, though all are linked together by a warning about something called the Kitten Holy which, to be honest, I didn't really follow but hey I was too busy enjoying myself to care.
Things I loved about Lumberjanes:
- The art I mentioned already, but more generally the production values for this comic are fantastic. Each new story is wrapped around with excerpts from the Lumberjanes handbook and "polaroid photos" which make the whole thing feel immersive.
- Like the Rat Queens (but without the swearing, sex and bloodbaths) the Lumberjanes are diverse and differentiated. Jo, April, Mal, Molly and Ripley run a wide spectrum of representation in terms of body shape, skills and personality, and they have fun just being themselves. This might sound twee but it's done in a natural and unforced way that I would have definitely appreciated age 10 and still appreciate now.
- The girls look out for and care for one another. When they interact with adults or boys they still work together and nobody suddenly decides to switch teams because they got a better offer.
I'm really looking forward to Vol. 2.
Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption by Bryan Stevenson (Spiegal & Grau, 2015)
I haven't read a lot of non-fiction yet this year, but as soon as I heard about this book I knew I had to read it. Bryan Stevenson is a director of the Equal Justice Initiative, a legal non-profit that supports defendants and prisoners who have been denied fair treatment by the US justice system. EJI works particularly with children and young adults who are serving sentences in adult prisons and with people on death row; you won't be surprised to discover that race and poverty are significant factors in the cases they cover. Just Mercy tells the story of Stevenson's early law career and the founding of EJI through the lens of one particular death row case - the wrongful conviction of Walter McMillian - interspersed with insights into the imbalance and bias of the justice system.
The death penalty is something that I feel incredibly strongly about, and an issue that I find very hard to debate reasonably. The only time I have ever completely 'broken up' with a friend it was about the death penalty. I'm very glad to live in a country where it no longer happens, though it continues to worry me how often I see 'Bring Back Hanging' posts on Facebook. Stevenson's book didn't tell me anything I didn't already know about the stats and the key arguments for and against, but it did bring death row into painfully clear focus. Some of the stories and experiences of racism, sexism and pure bloody mindedness he recounts from the last 30 years are boggling. My heart was broken and stomped all over multiple times; I cried several times when final injunctions were denied and people were put to death. There is no doubt at all that EJI do astonishing and necessary work.
I'd recommend Just Mercy on these grounds alone, but I have to add some caveats. Stevenson has a penchant for the inspirational encounter and some of his anecdotes can feel massaged to suit the mood. He reports conversations with elderly ladies in courthouses and mentally ill prisoners verbatim at twenty years remove in a style that is occasionally too winsome and self-helpy for my preference. He also tries too hard sometimes to spin the tragic stories of his clients, especially the ones who admit to commiting the crime they are accused of. Extenuating circumstances, context, mental health are all reasons why I don't believe in death sentences, but I think perpetrator-as-victim rhetoric too often turns people off the argument. It opens the door wide to the "you care more about the murderer than the victim" accusation that gets nobody anywhere.
~~Victoria~~