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The Pain Will Get Better: After Lives

16 Monday Jan 2023

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Review: After Lives, by Abdulrazak Gurnah
Riverhead, 2022. 309 pp. $28

In the 1890s, the German colonizers of East Africa suppress revolt after revolt with exemplary cruelty, meted out by their African askari troops. Over the course of years, the turmoil and hard times displace two people: Hamza, a teenage boy who flees domestic trouble to enlist in the askari corps; and Afiya, the young sister of another such would-be soldier, who leaves her in care of a childless businessman and his wife.

After excruciating years in military service, including the First World War, Hamza returns to the town he left and meets Afiya, now nineteen. Her physical sufferings don’t match his, but she’s paid a high price for being female. Before she settled with the businessman, her then-guardians took the money her brother had left for her upkeep, only to treat her like a slave, even beat her for knowing how to read and write.

Karl P. T. von Eckenbrecher’s 1896 painting depicting askaris under German command trading fire with rebels (courtesy bassenge.com via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Afiya’s current situation, though kinder physically, has its perils nevertheless. The businessman’s wife restricts her social activities in the name of Muslim female modesty and imposes religious devotions that the young woman performs dutifully while looking for small ways to rebel, both for respite and to hold onto a sense of self.

The mistress of the household also plans to marry Afiya off, preferably as second wife (read: plaything) to a man much older than herself. Consequently, the nascent attraction between Afiya and Hamza must pass unnoticed.

The story bears similarities to Cinderella, except that Hamza’s no handsome prince, and he’s rootless. Both lovers are. As he once observes about a war wound that troubles him greatly, “The pain will get better.” How that happens for the two of them provides the question the narrative aims to resolve.

After Lives therefore explores how cruel humans can be, and how we withstand it, or don’t. Gurnah recounts in precise detail the brutality shaping the askari existence, whether from training, the German officers’ contempt, methods of instilling discipline, or colonial philosophy. The Great War, which has no name as far as the askaris are concerned, feels like a confused, bloody mess:

The askari left the land devastated, its people starving and dying in the hundreds of thousands, while they struggled on in their blind and murderous embrace of a cause whose origins they did not know and whose ambitions were vain and ultimately intended for their domination. The [baggage] carriers died in huge numbers from malaria and dysentery and exhaustion, and no one bothered to count them. They deserted in sheer terror, to perish in the ravaged countryside.

I’m somewhat familiar with the colonial history of Africa, but I’ve never read anything about it as vivid or compelling as After Lives. By the time Hamza finally gets free, his body and soul have been punished terribly, yet he’s quietly unbowed. He’s withstood routine brutality and occasional help from unexpected quarters, but even the latter feels condescending, delivered from the pretense of moral and intellectual superiority. You have to admire a character as steadfast and dignified as Hamza, who can withstand injury and insult. But be warned: there’s no character arc to speak of, no change.

Afiya, though she copes with hardships she’s even less responsible for—she didn’t enlist in anything—travels a path less fraught, if no happier. I find her somewhat idealized, even a male fantasy in certain scenes, and, like Hamza, she doesn’t change. But she’s also appealing, and for similar reasons: she has the patience to endure until the pain gets better. A little guile also helps.

Gurnah’s storytelling style keeps its distance. This takes getting used to, but at least he shows plenty of feelings, unlike other omniscient narrations that tell them, with far less depth. The novel has much to say about colonialism, war, and, to a lesser extent, feminism, which sometimes reads like nonfiction, as with the passage quoted above. But again, it’s the story that counts, which packs a wallop.

I do find the first thirty pages confusing, full of back story I’m not sure is necessary, and the novel ends rather abruptly, with more of a political point than a personal one. But these obstacles shouldn’t deter you.

Gurnah won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2021. I mention that because it seems silly to glide over it; but I think that awards, even the most prestigious, often say little about an author’s true significance to literature, a judgment that changes over time, anyway. Read any Per Lägerkvist or Mikhail Sholokov recently? Rudyard Kipling’s white man’s burden sounds offensive today. Several years ago, I stumbled on a fine historical novel about the time of Charlemagne, The Days of His Grace, by a Swedish author I’d never heard of—Eyvind Johnson, who shared the Nobel in 1974 with Harry Martinson, whom I’d also never heard of.

So I won’t say that After Lives is deathless literature. But it is a good novel, about a time and place few Western readers know about, and for that, I recommend it.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Plymouth Rock Asunder: Beheld

19 Monday Oct 2020

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Review: Beheld, by TaraShea Nesbit
Bloomsbury, 2020. 272 pp. $26

In August 1630, as the ten-year-old Plymouth Colony awaits a ship from England bearing more colonists, rivalries and resentments divide the settlement. Alice Bradford, the governor’s wife, who sets the scene and narrates much of the novel, ascribes the tension largely to indentured servants who accompanied the pilgrims but don’t follow God’s ways. That summer witnesses the settlement’s first murder and increasing encroachments on indigenous lives and property. Mistress Bradford’s conscience stirs at how the colonists, led by the soldier Myles Standish, have so quickly forgotten how the Wampanoags saved them from starvation through kindness and generosity.

Nesbit performs a great service in her tale of appalling hypocrisy, brutality, and greed. Her historical background seems authoritative, and I’m glad to see she’s countered a few myths traditionally spoon-fed in American schools. For instance, the pilgrims weren’t all fleeing religious oppression; many sailed from Holland originally, where they’d found tolerance. Rather, they feared intermarriage with the Dutch, whom they despised, and sought economic opportunity in the New World.

Further, they meant to land in Virginia, of which they had heard favorable reports as to the climate and soil, and which put them further away from the Dutch in New Amsterdam. But the captain of the Mayflower, perhaps because the storm-filled, illness-ridden crossing had taken such a toll, held to a more northern course. From that decision arose New England.

Portrait of William Bradford, artist unknown, believed to be seventeenth-century (courtesy http://www.socialstudiesforkids.com/articles/ushistory/williambradford.htm via Wikimedia Commons)

Nesbit performs one other service: She focuses on the women of Plymouth, who have been largely lost to history. Alice comes across especially well, the good wife who sees and understands far more than she can say, who believes implicitly that her husband should rule her as he governs the colony, and who suffers mightily for all that. The novel also pays due homage to the back-breaking work she and other women perform to keep the settlement afloat, about which the historical record is equally mute.

I admire how Alice holds fast to an outlook that her sharp perceptions do nothing to shake, though she herself trembles a little. Also fine is Eleanor Billington, wife to John, both former indentured servants and therefore outliers. Eleanor sees the Puritans for who they are and tries to keep her bad-tempered husband from running afoul of them. Like Alice, she’s trapped: The Billingtons lack the resources to move, and even if they pulled up stakes, they’d lose years’ worth of labor and the land they scrimped to buy.

Alice’s voice is vivid and accurate without adornment, what you’d expect from her, as with her description of the new colonists emerging from the ship:

The first heads to pop up from the tween deck were small black-capped men. Then came three heifers and a bull and behind them, more men, half a dozen women, and with them a handful of children. There they were, four dozen or so, sickly and sea-legged. Their pale English bodies, weakened by the journey, as if ghosts, crossing over. One by one, the women’s bare ankles and leather shoes dipped in the surfaces of the sea. I knew their look well — their hopeful and fearful imaginations of the present situation.

Nevertheless, despite a terrific premise, worthy themes and historical perspective, and excellent female characters, Beheld disappoints me as a novel. Much as I’m glad to feed my contrarian soul against the lies my teachers told me, and though the portrayal of fundamentalists so willing to oppress others feels relevant today, Beheld wants more nuance and more coherent storytelling.

Bradford, though a forceful governor, has no redeeming features as a man except that he’s good in bed — surprise! — or as good as any seventeenth-century Englishwoman has the right to expect. Standish, known as Shrimp because of the short stature of which he’s ashamed, is highly disagreeable, vicious, and treacherous. The murder, announced in the second paragraph, is fairly predictable, and the narrative keeps referring to it before it happens, as if the author (or her agent or editor) feared nobody would keep turning the pages without reminders of Something Really Important. I’ve never liked that authorial technique, which has the opposite effect to what’s intended and makes me think that the novel begins in the wrong place.

The blink-of-an-eye chapters interrupt the flow rather than propel it. Some, from an omniscient narrator called Nature, though prettily written, feel dropped in. All that, and the layout, including unnecessary breaks for different “parts,” gives the impression that the publisher worries that the book looks shrimpy. I don’t see why length matters, but I did want longer scenes and fuller development, especially of storylines and the male characters.

So with Beheld, you get an arresting, unusual narrative inherently noteworthy because of our national myths, yet which feels as if it has holes. I wonder whether Nesbit, with her solid command of the subject, could have filled a few in.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Much to Atone For: Crane Pond

05 Monday Dec 2016

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Review: Crane Pond, by Richard Francis
Europa, 2016. 348 pp. $18

This spare, beautiful novel retells a story at once familiar yet full of surprises, that of the Salem witch trials in Massachusetts Bay Colony. Samuel Sewall, a Boston merchant and a man widely respected, tells how those infamous proceedings occurred; how he became one of the presiding judges; what he was thinking during the testimony and deliberations; what the community thought of them (and him); and how he felt afterward. That premise is itself a bold undertaking, because it implies creating sympathy for a judicial murderer who thought a witch hunt was the right idea.

Unattributed illustration from 1876 depicting the Salem trials (courtesy Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

Unattributed illustration from 1876 depicting the Salem trials (courtesy Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

 

But Francis goes one better. Not only does he show Sewall at his worst and compel you to consider his protagonist fairly, he begins the narrative years before the Salem trials. There’s no prologue, no portents, no gimmick to placate a reader who might become antsy during such a lengthy backstory. Francis wants you to understand the political, religious, and emotional reasons an honest man like Sewall winds up participating in and endorsing procedures that are flagrantly dishonest. Yet despite what might seem a digression, the tension never flags. Why not?

I think it’s because Francis has entered Sewall’s everyday life, beliefs, and psyche so thoroughly that I can’t help being drawn in. Sewall’s a man who constantly wrestles with his faith. “Trouble and disgrace can come from any source; the world is composed of little things as well as great ones,” he observes. Every conversational misunderstanding, fib, nightmare, unguarded impulse, or declaration of spiritual terror from any of his beloved children sets him off on a soul-searching expedition that will inevitably lead to prayer on bruised knees. Even the bruises prompt reflection:

Would the use of a cushion to ease the discomfort be a popish luxury or simply a practical way of prolonging his devotions?
Also he thinks of his dear wife Hannah, who is somehow able to be both good and sensible at the same time, which ought to be possible for all of us, since God has not sown discord and contradiction in the world–those elements have been placed there by His enemy.

That enemy, Sewall believes, runs rife in his community, as in others everywhere. Massachusetts Bay Colony, though held to be blessed by God, may well have lost its way and fallen under the Devil’s influence. And since Sewall feels himself capable of temptation, whether by lustful impulses toward his pretty sister-in-law or the desire to please men in power, he’s not in the least self-righteous, whereas his judicial colleagues clearly are. Moreover, he’s convinced that the impieties he perceives in himself have brought God’s wrath, which explains, for example, why several of his children have been stillborn. Notice that he never blames Hannah. Rather, he’s quick to tell his wife and children that they have nothing to be afraid of before God, while he spends sleepless nights worrying about his soul.

Consequently, well before the witchcraft trials begin, you know that Sewall does nothing lightly, and that he’s trying his best to do right–if he can only figure out what it is. But aberrations like the witch hunts don’t spring out of nowhere, and it’s hard to pinpoint exactly where the purge takes on a life of its own, and who’s the driving force. That doesn’t excuse what happens, only to illuminate it. And what a horrifying story it is, told so brilliantly that even though you know how it must end, you keep hoping that someone will have the sense to say, What nonsense.

But as the judges hunt down any who object and twist themselves into knots attempting to justify the course they’ve chosen, they silence any voice of reason. Crane Pond thus captures the smug, hypocritical rigidity of fundamentalism at its deadliest, and in that, the novel could not be more timely. With extreme religious factions exerting their muscle in our nation and around the globe, daring to think for oneself or hold a healthy skepticism can be a called a crime, even to deserve a capital penalty.

Like Mary Doria Russell’s Doc, Crane Pond springs from careful research; Francis has written a biography of Sewall, so he knows his ground. But, as I wrote about Doc, it’s one thing to go to the library, and another to weave fact into sturdy fictional fabric. Like Russell, Francis does so with utter confidence, because’s he’s imagined what his characters would say or do in any situation, and, most importantly, why. What’s more, he’s kept his prose style muted and plain, like the churches in which they pray, yet the words spring vividly to life, proving that a gifted author need not display verbal pyrotechnics to create a luminous work of literary fiction.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.