It’s not unusual for a novel to tell a story from different viewpoints, or from the same point-of-view character at different points and/or places of their lives. Some writers take this a stage further, structuring their novels as a series of related but stand-alone short stories, gradually building up to a whole. Examples among my reviews are This Beautiful, The Green Road, Sophie Stark, Prosperity Drive and Vertigo. Now I’ve found a couple more, in which the disparate narratives combine to create a sense of place.
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The second book by Nigerian-born EC Osondo is a series of episodes from the lives of the inhabitants of “The Family House”, ruled over by the patriarchal businessman Grandpa, over a couple of generations. Despite some touches of humour, and the playful questioning of the stories we construct about our worlds, I found this a pessimistic portrayal of a community dominated by superstition, corruption and misogyny. I don’t know how seriously the author expects us to take the comparison with the West where “the white man has his own witchcraft, only theirs is white witchcraft and they use it to invent great things like airplanes and ships” (p76) but presumably his character was unaware of our obsession with astrology. The author won the Caine Prize for African Writing and my copy of This House Is Not for Sale courtesy of the publishers, Granta books, comes with endorsements from broadsheet reviewers, but it didn’t do much for me. For other annethology reviews of novels with Nigerian settings, see The Fishermen and Under the Udala Trees.
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One quiet evening in Salisbury (UK), a farmer crashes his car and seriously injures the rider of a moped on the day his own wife dies. Convinced she’s going to be imprisoned for possession of drugs, a grandmother who runs a flower stall on the market trashes all her possessions. A schoolboy dares to love the girl he admires in the choir, while his own father lies dying in a hospital bed. A lonely woman, her son at boarding school and her husband in Afghanistan with the army, considers overdosing on painkillers. A young man takes a job as a security guard in an act of the start of his childhood. Each engrossed in their personal tragedies, it’s left for the reader to notice where their paths intersect.
We encounter these characters more through their private thoughts than in their actions. I liked the schoolboy best, but that might have been because he was singing Faure’s Requiem. There’s some fine phrasing in Barney Norris’s first novel (which I can’t quote, as mine is a proof copy courtesy of the publishers Doubleday) but for me the prose is burdened by the weight of self-conscious gravitas. I’ve no reason to doubt that the setting is authentically rendered, but I wasn’t persuaded the events couldn’t have happened anywhere there were churches and a garrison. I think most readers already know that life is precious and, though death is devastating, the world doesn’t stop for us. It seems a lot of words to remind us that, while we take centre stage in our own narratives, we’re only bit-part players in other people’s.
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One quiet evening in Salisbury (UK), a farmer crashes his car and seriously injures the rider of a moped on the day his own wife dies. Convinced she’s going to be imprisoned for possession of drugs, a grandmother who runs a flower stall on the market trashes all her possessions. A schoolboy dares to love the girl he admires in the choir, while his own father lies dying in a hospital bed. A lonely woman, her son at boarding school and her husband in Afghanistan with the army, considers overdosing on painkillers. A young man takes a job as a security guard in an act of the start of his childhood. Each engrossed in their personal tragedies, it’s left for the reader to notice where their paths intersect.
We encounter these characters more through their private thoughts than in their actions. I liked the schoolboy best, but that might have been because he was singing Faure’s Requiem. There’s some fine phrasing in Barney Norris’s first novel (which I can’t quote, as mine is a proof copy courtesy of the publishers Doubleday) but for me the prose is burdened by the weight of self-conscious gravitas. I’ve no reason to doubt that the setting is authentically rendered, but I wasn’t persuaded the events couldn’t have happened anywhere there were churches and a garrison. I think most readers already know that life is precious and, though death is devastating, the world doesn’t stop for us. It seems a lot of words to remind us that, while we take centre stage in our own narratives, we’re only bit-part players in other people’s.
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