The Long Song by Andrea Levy

The Long Song by Andrea Levy  may be my favorite novel of all that I’ve read this year and that is very unexpected.  It is the story of Miss July, who lived in Jamaica in the 1800s first as a slave and then as a free black.  I mostly think of slave novels as “difficult” because of the subject matter.  I also tend to think novels about the West Indian slaves tend to go overboard on the “voodoo” aspects.   I admit that I’m also sometimes suspicious that they are going to be preachy.  So I tend to not pick them up as a first choice.  Then I kick myself when they turn out to be wonderful as, for instance, Toni Morrison’s Beloved is wonderful.

This novel is funny.  Really. 

Levy writes Miss July as having a wonderful sense of humor and lets it come through in the most unexpected circumstances.  She doesn’t shy away from the horrors of slavery.  Miss July is the result of the casual rape of her mother by the overseer of Amity Plantation in Jamaica.  Miss July is casually taken away from her mother by the sister of the plantation owner, almost as a pet would be taken.  Miss July witnesses murder and other horrors.  She has children she must give up willingly and unwillingly.  And yet she is a survivor and her sense of humor is part of her survival instinct.

I really liked the structure of this novel.  The story is told from three points of view, although two points of view are from the same person and yet are different.  First, there is Miss July’s son, Thomas Kinsman, who is a publisher and who encourages his mother to write her story.  He provides the Introduction and also jumps in with a few editorial comments.  Then Miss July tells the story, writing in the third person.  But she also jumps in with first person interpolation, addressing us as “reader” and explaining the arguments she is having with her son.  It all works.

Another reason it works is that Miss July treats all of the people in her story, black or white, irreverently while, at the same time, taking her story very seriously.  By walking the fine line of caricature with all of her characters, Levy solves the problem of trying to explain the motivations of a large and diverse cast of characters.  They do what they do because they are who they are – it is as simple as that.

The one thing that is abundantly clear, though, is the corrupting influence of slavery.   There are no good characters because no one can be good in this environment.  Good men are corrupted.  Even Miss July is appalled and indignant to find that her “worth” is not more than the worth of the kitchen maid.

It might sound odd to say that a novel about the harshness of slavery is funny and that it works.  But over the past few years I’ve read a number of non-fiction books about life on the English Sugar Islands of the West Indies during the 18th and 19th century.  None of them captured the absurdity of the situation for all involved as well as this novel did.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet by David Mitchell

I must confess that this is the first David Mitchell novel I’ve ever read and I picked it up, not because it was a David Mitchell novel, but because it was historical fiction and had received good reviews and was now on the Booker longlist.  I like good historical fiction. 

On the other hand I’ve never really been much interested in historical fiction about Japan.  I never could get into Shogun back in the day.  So I was a little apprehensive.  I shouldn’t have been.   It became clear as the novel progressed that Mitchell’s intent was not to create for the reader the Japan of 1800 in detail but to give the reader little glimpses of Japan such as one of the rare visitors of Japan in 1800 would have seen.  Japan was a closed society, visitors were discouraged and the study of Japanese society or even its language was not allowed.  The few visitors who were allowed to visit were closely watched and could not fully interpret what they saw.  As a reader, that is how we experience much of the Japan that we see in this novel.

This novel is not, then about Japan in 1800.  And even though much of the action takes place among members of the Dutch East India Company, it is also not a novel that is principally intended to tell us what it was like to be a member of that company.  Through long months out of the year, the men stationed in Japan did nothing but maintain a Dutch presence.  It is not, in fact, a traditional historical novel.  It doesn’t have a traditional love story.  It doesn’t have a traditional ending.

I think Mitchell was more interested in exploring an idea than in telling a story.  I think Mitchell was exploring the concept of imprisonment.  And while he explores it he tells a pretty good story.  

Jacob de Zoet is a clerk with the Dutch East Indies Company.  He has joined the company for a limited five year stint with the intention of making his fortune so that he can return home and marry Anna, the woman he is in love with.  He hopes to have freedom of movement within the Company by being indispensible to the new chief of the Japanese trading post whose stated desire is to root out the corruption of the previous post administrator.  De Zoet cleans up the records and identifies the wrongdoings, which makes him no friends at the post, but his honesty becomes a liability when the head of the post himself wants to engage in shenanigans.  And so rather than be allowed to return to Java (Jakarta) de Zoet is left behind in Japan as a lower clerk. 

But he is not truly in Japan, he is on the man-made island of Dejima which is walled and has only two entrances:  the sea gate that is opened only when a Dutch ship is in port and the land gate that gives access to the city of Nagasaki over a bridge.  It is, essentially, a large but fairly comfortable prison for the men who live there throughout the year.  A Dutch vessel arrives only once a year if they are lucky.  If they are unlucky it is lost at sea and multiple years can go by with no contact with Europe.   No European is allowed across the bridge to Nagasaki without the permission of the Japanese who are deeply suspicious of the foreigners.  No escape from the island is possible because the  Europeans could not blend into the Japanese population.  The Dutch do not think of themselves as prisoners but they have limited freedom of movement and they are subject to roll calls by their Japanese watchers.

The men on Dejima have, however, varying levels of freedom.  The company doctor, Doctor Marinus, is the most free.  He has no desire to return to Europe.  He has botanical studies that he is interested in and he has allies in Nagasaki through whom he is able to travel more regularly to and fro from the Japanese mainland.  The least free are the slaves of the Dutch traders.  They have no freedom of movement.  In one chapter Mitchell gives us the story from the point of view of a slave who makes clear to us that the Dutch may be able to control his body but they cannot control his thoughts.  Some of the other men are not slaves but are there because they were “pressed” onto ships and sent east, so they are little better than the slaves who were captured from their homeland.   All of the men (except Doctor Marinus) dream of leaving Dejima and returning to their own homes and the people they love.

De Zoet makes friends with one of the Japanese/Dutch interpreters who has access to Dejima, Ogawa Uzeiman, who is interested in European culture.  Japan is a closed society.  It does not welcome foreigners and it does not allow any of its people to leave Japan, not even to study.  Uzeiman would have liked to have travelled and brought back information that would be useful for Japan, but he is not allowed.  There is “no precedent”.  In that sense, the entire Island of Japan can be seen as a prison.

Jacob De Zoet also makes the acquaintance of one Japanese woman, Miss Aibagawa, a midwife and the daughter of a Samurai, who is very intelligent but whose face was badly scarred as a child.  In the opening chapter of the book, Miss Aibagawa unexpectedly saves the life of the newborn child of the highest official in Nagasaki and he is so grateful that she is granted her wish to join the group of Japanese men who are studying on Dejima with Doctor Marinus.  This unexpected freedom of movement does not last, however, and soon Miss Aibagawa is sent against her will to a cloistered nunnery attached to a monastery where she is to live for 20 years.  De Zoet, who has come to believe he is in love with her, believes he will never see her again.  Uzeiman, who is in love with her but who has been forced to marry someone else, is distraught at her absence and a key part of the novel is his breaking with all traditions in an attempt to break her out.

There are prisons within prisons in this novel both literally (the monastery within Japan) and figuratively (the marriage of Ogawa and his wife) and some prisoners are more free than others (Doctor Marinus and the slaves come to mind but also Miss Aibagawa and the other “nuns” are treated differently).  And all of the characters are limited by their literal limited ability to communicate due to the language difference.  But as the slave on Dejima knows, real freedom is the freedom of the mind.

Not much of the action of the novel takes place on the Japanese mainland and sometimes when the scene shifts to Nagasaki we see it through the uncomprehending eyes of the European men who are allowed to visit.  In only a few scenes are we allowed a glimpse of Nagasaki through the eyes of Japanese characters and Mitchell doesn’t waste a lot of time in those scenes with superfluous description.  He moves the plot along.  There is one large section of the novel that takes place in the Japanese monastery but Mitchell’s point is clearly not to paint an accurate picture of a Japanese monastery for us since this one turns out to be an aberration that horrifies even the Japanese who discover its secrets.

How each of these characters deal with the limits on their freedom is the principal stuff of the novel.  It is very well written and I seldom found my attention flagging. When the land gate that separates Dejima from Nagasaki is closed at the end of Part One and the “well oiled bolt” slides home we are aware of the fact that de Zoet is now imprisoned on the island but we are also aware that Miss Aibagawa is locked out.  She has been trying to get onto the island because she believes that being imprisoned as the concubine of Jacob de Zoet would be better than being imprisoned in the Monastery. But she is not allowed to choose her prison.  Later, though, Miss Aibagawa is in a position to escape from the Monastery but turns back at the last minute because she will not abandon a friend.  Jacob de Zoet could, at one point, escape his life on Dejima by going along with the plan of an English Sea Captain but doing so would endanger the life of one of the other men on Dejima and so de Zoet refuses. 

In general I enjoyed this novel.  I have no idea, however, if the picture I got of Japan is at all accurate and I did not feel compelled, when I was finished, to do any research about that.  Late in the novel, Japan is referred to as The Land of the Thousand Autumns and the name of the novel became clearer to me.  The Japan that I was seeing was the Japan of Jacob de Zoet, not the Japan of the Japanese.  In terms of historical accuracy, I will point out that at one point a character states that the American sea captain has told him that Indians were “being cleared west of Louisiana” and he thought he might go take part.  I only point out that in 1799 no Indians were being cleared anywhere “west” of Louisiana by any Americans and the Louisiana purchase wasn’t even a gleam in Thomas Jefferson’s eye yet.  

But that’s a minor flaw.  The main flaw with the novel, in my opinion, was that the ending was anticlimactic.  But perhaps that was intended.  When a man is released from long years in prison and returns home, he often just wants to pick up the pieces of his life and return to “normalcy”.  That makes sense.  It just doesn’t make for a good end of a novel.

The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas

My first thought on finishing The Slap was:  “This is going to be a popular book club book but a terrible choice as a book club book, and both for the same reason.”

The premise of The Slap is very simple and is set out in the first chapter.  Hector and Aisha, an Australian couple in their early forties with two children, are having a barbeque. Hector is Greek-Australian and Aisha is Indian-Australian.   It is their one big party of the year where they pay back all the hospitality of their family and friends and they invite lots of people who don’t know each other well and all of their children.  There is a lot of food.  The guests are diverse.  They invite Aisha’s friend Anouk, a childless unmarried Jewish woman who wants to quit her job as a television writer and write a novel.  They invite Aisha and Anouk’s friend Rosie, a former surfer party girl who now lives with her alcoholic, going nowhere husband Gary and their four year old child Hugo who Rosie is still breast-feeding.   To say that Hugo is undisciplined is an understatement.  Also invited are Hector’s Greek immigrant parents, Manolis and Koula, as well as Hector’s cousin Harry with his wife Sandi and son Rocco.  At some point Hugo throws (another) temper tantrum while swinging around a cricket bat in the direction of Rocco and Harry slaps him. Rosie is furious, files a police report and brings charges against the slapper.  Everyone in the novel has an opinion about the slap and Rosie’s reaction.

The reason that this will be popular with book clubs is that people who never bother to read the assigned book can show up and participate.  As long as they know the above premise they can participate in the discussion.  Everyone in the reading group will inevitably express their opinion about the slap and the prosecution and that will inevitably lead to long discussions about upbringing (their own and their children’s and other people’s children’s). Someone who has read the book will say “oh you’re just like [fill in the name of a character].”  This won’t be one of those gatherings where the book is talked about for ten minutes – I predict that the discussion will go on for hours. Arguments will ensue.  Some of them might be vehement.  Friendships could be at stake.   But in the end the book club group will pat itself on the back and say “look!  we talked about the book all night!”

And that is why it will be a terrible book club book.  Because no one will really be talking about the book, they will be talking about themselves.  So, really, why bother to read the book?   The host could just distribute the above as a hypothetical and discussion could ensue. 

But.   Anyway.

This isn’t a great book but it is a good book.  Tsiolkas creates a set of very believable characters.  They are complex.  Tsiolkas isn’t interested in black and white characters, he goes for the shades of gray.  His characters are dislikeable but no one is really evil although some are worse than others. It is interesting how he achieves the shade of gray.  The novel is divided into eight chapters each of which is told from the point of view of one of the people at the party.  The first chapter is told from the point of view of Hector, the host, and it details the events of the party.  The other chapters are not intended to give us the other characters’ alternate views of what happened.  Everyone agrees about what happened.  Harry, Hector’s cousin, slapped Hugo, the son of Rosie who is one of Aisha’s best friends.  Life goes on, including all the repurcussions from the incident, but the narrative constantly shifts viewpoint. Those who are fans of Maeve Binchy will recognize this structure  but Binchy never created such dislikeable characters.

And they are dislikeable not necessarily because of what they do as much as for how they are.  Here is where Tsiolkas is superb; he is omniscient with the character from whose viewpoint we are seeing the narrative and he shows us the secret thoughts of the character.  But he doesn’t tell us those secret thoughts in an aside.  He creates dueling dialogs.  There is the dialog in the head of the character, what the character wants to say, and there is the actual dialog, what the character actually says.  We see the rage and the exasperation and the ugliness that is hidden behind the veneer of what polite society expects. Thus, in the chapter called “Harry” we see the continuing narrative from the point of view of Harry and we are omniscient with respect to Harry’s thoughts but nobody else’s.   Here, Hector is talking to Harry about what happened.

Harry’s fists were clenched.  He felt the heat of the sun, the stretch of the sky, they were heavy weights descending onto him.  There was a hammer at his chest.  He felt his cousin’s hand on his shoulder.  he shrugged it off.

‘Harry, listen to me.  You’re a good man.  You don’t deserve this.’

‘But?’

‘But you shouldn’t have hit him.’

He wanted to cry.  Take back that moment, fix that moment, change that moment, so that he had never hit that child.  That fucking cunt of a child, that fucking animal of a child.  Panagia, he whispered to his God, I want that child dead.  He was back on the sand, the warm sun on the back of his neck.  He could hear Rocco’s laugh.  Rocco brought him back as he always did.

‘Okay.  Sure.  I’ll go and apologise to them.  Can you organize it?’

But it is not only what the various characters think about Hugo that is hidden by the social veneer.  It is the racial tensions and the sexual tensions and the socio-economic tensions that are also hidden.  Eventually this gap is unsustainable and characters begin to blurt out what they really feel.  Part of this novel is about how people hide their true selves.   People who like to read about likeable people shouldn’t read this novel.  People who are shocked by the above language shouldn’t read this novel.  There is no redemption for any of the characters in this novel. On the other hand, each character is driven by his or her own demons that are revealed to the reader slowly and they make the characters seem very real.  I felt that I had met people like this in real life.  They weren’t people I necessarily liked or wanted to spend time around, but they were real. 

Tsiolkas creates enough of a plot to make the reader keep turning the page but the plot is not the driving force. The court case is, in fact, resolved long before the end of the novel.  This is a character driven novel, and a study of Australian society.  Tsiolkas is, obviously, Greek and he does a very good job in creating the Greek community of Hector’s family and their friends.  One chapter is told from the point of view of Hector’s father Manolis and I felt that an entire novel could have been built around him.  The way that immigrants deal with a culture that surrounds them but that they aren’t quite embracing, the reality of aging and death, the exasperation with the younger generation, Tsolkias captures it all in that chapter.

This is an Australian novel and is some ways it seems very Australian but in others it transcends place.  Five of the eight chapters are from the point of view of characters who either are immigrants or the children of immigrants.  Hector and his family, including his father Manolis and his cousin Harry, are part of the Greek immigrant community.  Aisha is from an Indian immigrant family.  Connie, a teenager who works in Aisha’s office, was born in England.   The non-immigrant Australians are mostly minorities.  Anouk is Jewish.   Connie’s friend Richie is a gay teenager.  Hector’s friend Bilal is an aborigine who has converted to Islam, making him a double minority.  Rosie and Gary are among the few white Australians in the novel, and they are also at the bottom of the socio-economic scale, living just above the poverty level.  Gary is an alcoholic and Rosie is the daughter of an alcoholic who will not leave Gary.  If this were America, they would be overtly called white trash.  And yet Rosie, Aisha and Anouk are friends from their teens and at the beginning of the novel, at least, they still maintain the illusion that they have things in common and they care about what happens to each other. 

This novel is a reminder that Australia is as much of a “melting pot” as other parts of the world and, just as in our part of the world, the melting pot doesn’t really melt anything it mostly just results in a stew.

And that’s really what this novel is about.  Not the slap of a child, but the tensions of a multicultural, multi-ethnic world.  It is about the pull of family and the pull of friendship.   It is about the stress of being old and the stress of being young.   It is about transcending or not transcending your own upbringing.    It is about what makes a marriage happy (or at least tolerable).  It is about the importance or lack of importance of children in your life. 

And that is only scratching the surface.

It is not an entirely successful novel.  Some of the female characters seem to react to men not in the way that women react to men but in the way that men react to women (very visually).    Hector and Harry seem far more obsessed with their own bodies (diet and exercise) than most 40-something heterosexual men that I know.  I think the author meant to end the novel on a positive note with Connie and Richie and their friends looking forward to the future, but watching a teenager partying with his graduating highschool friends using parentally sanctioned drugs and hearing him declare it was the “best day of” his life didn’t really do it for me.  Probably the greatest flaw was that, although Tsiolkas tries to explain it,  I truly didn’t understand why Rosie was letting her child grow up to be so dislikeable.  (I give credit to Tsoilkas that he is able to portray Hugo as an absolute brat but also show that the blame for that is not his but his parents. The next time I’m tempted to slap a child in Starbucks I’ll instead imagine slapping his mother or father.) 

Finally, this book will probably offend people who are easily offended by bad language and obnoxious characters.    But anyone who has plowed through the writings of The Great White Men of the 20th century will not find this novel hard going.