Personal Blogs

This is a book I enjoyed reading and is clearly sometimes well-written. Moreover, its narrative justifies the stylistic changes towards its end – a move to a more lyrical take on a world that seemed, except when it imagined electricity, to be recorded more plainly. And still at the end (without a spoiler), ‘electricity runs through the lines over my head’.

Told in a split temporal narrative, this is not a book for those necessarily who like surprises. The running together of prison narrative and prequel to prison narrative is beautifully done and engaging but when the stories begin to run together, then there is something in this novel that reads like high fantasy. And there is MY problem with it.

Had Beatty’s The Sellout not also been on the Booker List, I may not have noticed how problematic the presentation of a black family in 1920s Alabama is. But the truth is, despite the stark difference in justice meted out to black and white men shown in this novel – Roscoe, the white ‘Massa’ (although the charged term is, significantly not used), is offered rehabilitation (eventually), even if the outcomes of that reform seem merely contingent on the interventions applied, whilst ‘Wilson’ is forced into hard mine labour and his papers lost – there is something of an ‘Uncle Tom’ sentimentality about the family.

Jenny, Wilson’s daughter, has a ‘garden’ (no more nor less an almost certain allegoric place where ‘grasses sprouted through the blackened patch’) but we feel as if it and her are being offered up (sexually, as it were, just as gardens offer up young femininity in Andrew Marvell (Little T.C.)) to Roscoe as compensation for the coldness he met in his own ‘rigidly white, society and wife. The Klu Klux Clan are excoriated but then that historical judgment does not take much human empathy to absorb. If white society is blamed for its ‘attitudes’ to black people, it is blamed in Roscoe’s cold but ‘just’ wife, Marie – who gets the come-uppance towards which our expectations and desire is manipulated – despite the fact that it is she who tries to right the wrongs committed against Wilson.

To write a historical novel is to take on a heavy responsibility although Reeves may not agree. I was alerted to danger to come by the epigrams of the novel, which seem nothing short of a paean to ‘social progress' - one, about the prison featured in the novel, being called ‘Social Progress of Alabama, 1922’, the other praise for Alabama’s ‘restless' progress from Mrs L.B. Bush (any relation to our late Republican Presidential heroes). That is perhaps the source of the meanings surrounding the novel’s take on electrification (even to the extent that we see the invention of the ‘electric chair’ (Yellow Mama), with our hero, Roscoe, sore that he had no direct hand in it).

And what we get is an ending that celebrates racial harmony through mixed marriage (or at least sexual warmth) between a young black girl, Jenny, and one-white-man-and-his-dog. This appals and, though I can’t say I enjoyed Beatty’s novel about the same time and place, at least in Hominy’s recollection, it was a necessary reminder that Alabama brutality, segregation and discriminatory ‘justice systems’ are still alive and well and are not washed away in a sea of progress and were anyway more deeply harmful, as well as enduring, than Reeves allows in her happy fantasy endings. So I refuse to like even the good in this novel, whose naivety seems to me more harmful than more self-conscious racism.

It is the mind-set that sees progress in the Obama election without seeing or wanting more generalised power redistribution. Likewise, Wilson becomes in Roscoe’s stead, a good ‘Massa’, even engineering the return to Roscoe of half the value of the estate given to him by Roscoe’s wife. This is utopia indeed – nowhere very real!   This book is praised heavily, it seems from the jacket, by writers I like very much – Jim Crace and Kevin Powers for two – but I almost feel guilty that I enjoyed it. It should not – ought not – win the Booker. This is a first book by a young person and that might show. Growth is certainly needed – if that comes while the power of the writing persists, we do have a potentially great writer on the horizon.

But that power is definitely that of a writer in the bud and I think Booker selectors do us or writers no favours by taking the latter out of apprenticeships too early. Let’s think about electricity, for instance and this passage (p. 50f.), the hyperbole of which might have worked in the 1920s but now seems merely a point laboured in both writing and characterisation about how wonderful ‘progress’ is:

I had stared at those bulbs (Birmingham streetlamps) the first time I saw them. The streets lit by a force greater than any I’d known – bigger than me, bigger than my father, bigger than his tunnels (coal-mines) even.

“I want to work with electricity,” I remember telling him.

This feels to me like beginning writing.

All the best

Steve