Let us descend
JESMYN WARD
Let us descend is a quote from Dante’s Inferno, overheard by Annis as she eavesdrops on her half-sisters’ tutoring sessions.
It is a line spoken by Virgil to Dante as they descend into hell. It is a worthy title and allegory for this book.
Annis was conceived when the white master raped her mother. She is never acknowledged as his offspring but relegated to slavery work, albeit in the house, not the plantation.
When she grows into a woman and it becomes clear the master is set to rape Annis as well, her mother intercepts him. As punishment, she is sold to a slave trader. Soon afterh, he he witnesses Annis loving another slave, and he sells them both to a slave trader.
As awful as the situation was so far, the journey to hell begins here. The slaves are chained and roped to one another, walk and sleep, and wade through swamps teeming with alligators, even cross rivers with strong currents. Some perish, some run, some are killed.
The cruelties do not end when they arrive in New Orleans where Annis is sold onto a sugar plantation. This seems to be the seventh circle of hell, where one is not only working extremely hard, to the point of utter exhaustion, but needs to contend with hunger as well, only fed enough not to die of starvation. Even that is not the worst. The mistress is capricious and punishes even small transgressions with cruelty almost unimaginable.
All the while, Annis is accompanied by a ghost taking the form of her grandmother who was sold into slavery and transported from West Africa for having the temerity to love a man who was not her master. This ethereal connection with the ghost of her grandmother, in the end, save Annis’s life and dignity.
I loved Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing. I thought it was close to perfect, going as far as saing she may be the new Toni Morrison.
This book is not as well structured. The middle is too long. There is repetition of cruelty that does not seem to serve any purpose apart from stressing how cruel slave traders are. Ward seems to have lost faith in the reader and often tells rather than shows in this section.
However, she redeems herself in the last part of the book where the language soars again and the ending satisfies.
becky
SARAH MAY
I LOVED Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, and I love this retelling of it as well.
I love how Sarah May mashed up the 19th century story of an ambitious young woman who uses all her skills (and looks) to advance in society with a modern twist.
She artfully combines it with the real-life story of Rebecca Brooks who oversaw the rise and downfall of Murdoch’s News of the World, and the horrendous phone tapping scandal.
It raises questions of privilege, ambition and the means to satisfy those ambitions and, most importantly, what is the role of media.
I loved it all!
LOVE AND VIRTUE
DIANA REID
I borrowed this book as light reading over the summer break. Young people at university, relationships, love.
Sounds perfect!
I couldn’t have been more wrong. It is focused on a university and its young people but not in the way I expected it to be.
It is a coming-of-age story with a deadly serious core, where the relationship between two young women, Michaela and Eve, is at the centre of an academic environment, rooted in feminism, sexuality, and Michaela’s self-conscious intellectual and social discovery.
Michaela is constantly torn between the drunken partying of her dorm friends, filled with overt sexism, date rape and hazing rituals, and Eve’s aspirations for a more academic and socially aware existence.
While there is love and unrequited love, the central theme is the attempts of women to fit in while attempting to live up to their ideals.
This is Reid’s debut novel but nothing in it, either the theme or the style, reveals a beginner.
It is a mature work of art, showing a skilled writer and deep thinker.
I can’t wait to read more of her work.
limberlost
ROBBIE ARNOTT
Limberlost is a sort of coming-of-age story, but also an investigation into what events shape our lives, events that determine who we grow up to be.
This is the story of Ned and the events that shaped him. He grows up on an apple orchard in Tasmania, as the youngest of four, not remembering the mother who died when he was little. The household is mostly quiet, getting on with the business, but not hostile or uncaring. Ned knows this and is constantly torn between wanting to show off to his elder siblings and being blasé about his achievements.
The first character-shaping event is the witnessing of a whale and her calf resting in the bay. All sorts of horrific stories are told about her, but Ned’s father, without explaining much, takes his sons to see for themselves what is true.
There are other moments, like the accidental catching and injuring of a quoll and the dream of owning a boat, that shape him.
The book regularly switches to a future Ned where a scene is shown depicting the effects of those earlier life experiences.
The relationship between Ned and his siblings and his father are beautifully shown through their interactions with nature, sparse in dialogue but rich in action.
The love between Ned and his wife is shown to be even more tender because of the juxtaposition of their seemingly cruel actions.
However, as the book progresses, it is clear that Ned abhors how people tend to anthropomorphise nature and his cruelty is in line with nature itself.
His relationship with his daughters is the most verbal and maybe therefore the weakest. He has trouble expressing his feelings and even when he’s attacked about his lack of interest for the indigenous owners of the land, he fails to explain himself. There is nothing he can do. So he stays quiet.
I do not enjoy nature descriptions for the sake of nature description. But this book, with the exception of a few pages in the second half of the book, uses nature description to extend and clarify the main themes of the book. Similarly to Ned, the author Robbie Arnott uses actions in nature to show acts of love, care and a sense of self without the need for floral elucidations.
It has been deservedly nominated for the Dublin Literary Award.
