Aug. 19th, 2024 03:07 pm
Something suitable
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muckefuckIt's been ages since I've posted about anything I've been reading mainly because I haven't been reading nearly as much as I used to. But I've recently made a renewed push which included choosing something a bit easier on the eyes than the volumes I've been struggling through for the last couple months: a debut historical novel by Eleanor Shearer called River, Sing Me Home.
The narrative is pretty straightforward: Newly emancipated Rachel flees a plantation in Barbados where she's being kept in an exploitative "apprenticeship" with the goal of tracking down her lost children, all sold to various other masters while she was in bondage. This takes her first across the island, then to British Guyana, and finally to Trinidad. It's a perfectly enjoyable book, a respectable first effort, but nothing to write home about. The characters are relatable, the prose accomplishes what it needs to, and historical events are woven into the plot in a way which doesn't seem too clunky.
Where I think it was lacking was first of all in the specificity of the setting. A great deal of the book takes place in semiwild areas. Native flora and fauna are constantly being mentioned--the grandeur of nature is quite important to the protagonist's spirituality and awakening to the world--but nothing is named. Literally, out of all the birds, trees, vines, fish, herbs, etc. featured in the work, the only two given a specific name are sugarcane and the caiman. I don't expect the account of an enslaved woman to read like it was narrated by a naturalist, but, c'mon, who doesn't know the name of a single wild plant in the place where they grew up? Or a single species of bird? Even the most urban among us know what a dandelion is or a cardinal.
The whole book is so starved of local culture that I began to wonder if the author had ever even been there. Apparently she did fieldwork on Barbados and St Lucia but I guess she never ventured out of the cities? This is also evident in the dialogue. Of course I don't expect full-blown creole in these passages (though you know I'd eat it up if there were) but it's possible to effect a compromise that preserves some of the prosody and grammar while still being comprehensible to non-Islanders. I've encountred plenty of Caribbean authors who managed this, but Shearer must not have read them. The mishmash she comes up with sounds thuddingly artificial from the first page to the last.
But I think the real issue I had with the book--the reason it didn't engage me on more than a surface level, despite all the weight of cruelty and tragedy underpinning the narrative--is that the whole setting feels nerfed. Being a runaway in the British Colonies mere months after the end of chattel slavery is an exceedingly dangerous situation to be in, but I didn't get a sense of that from this book. The narrator mentions the danger she's in at several points, but the plot is basically advanced by her meeting one generous benefactor after another. Only a couple of people try to exploit her condition and neither of them is that successful at it.
As a result, it reads like a YA novel. Adult themes like prostitution and abuse are touched on, but not much shown. And that's another bit of awkwardness. One of Shearer's goals is to present something of the range of experiences of formerly enslaved people, which is laudable, but her means of doing that is a bit rote: Our protagonist meets a character, who befriends her for underbaked reasons (yes, she's a sympathetic figure, but so are hundreds of others these people must have met), and then at some point, their tragic backstory gets recounted. There's no real subtlety to it, nothing much in the way of subtext. It's a text you could assign to fifth-graders and be confident that nobody in class would miss anything important.
Do I regret reading it? No, but as the sultry summer days begin to dissipate I'm definitely looking forward to diving into something more meaty.
The narrative is pretty straightforward: Newly emancipated Rachel flees a plantation in Barbados where she's being kept in an exploitative "apprenticeship" with the goal of tracking down her lost children, all sold to various other masters while she was in bondage. This takes her first across the island, then to British Guyana, and finally to Trinidad. It's a perfectly enjoyable book, a respectable first effort, but nothing to write home about. The characters are relatable, the prose accomplishes what it needs to, and historical events are woven into the plot in a way which doesn't seem too clunky.
Where I think it was lacking was first of all in the specificity of the setting. A great deal of the book takes place in semiwild areas. Native flora and fauna are constantly being mentioned--the grandeur of nature is quite important to the protagonist's spirituality and awakening to the world--but nothing is named. Literally, out of all the birds, trees, vines, fish, herbs, etc. featured in the work, the only two given a specific name are sugarcane and the caiman. I don't expect the account of an enslaved woman to read like it was narrated by a naturalist, but, c'mon, who doesn't know the name of a single wild plant in the place where they grew up? Or a single species of bird? Even the most urban among us know what a dandelion is or a cardinal.
The whole book is so starved of local culture that I began to wonder if the author had ever even been there. Apparently she did fieldwork on Barbados and St Lucia but I guess she never ventured out of the cities? This is also evident in the dialogue. Of course I don't expect full-blown creole in these passages (though you know I'd eat it up if there were) but it's possible to effect a compromise that preserves some of the prosody and grammar while still being comprehensible to non-Islanders. I've encountred plenty of Caribbean authors who managed this, but Shearer must not have read them. The mishmash she comes up with sounds thuddingly artificial from the first page to the last.
But I think the real issue I had with the book--the reason it didn't engage me on more than a surface level, despite all the weight of cruelty and tragedy underpinning the narrative--is that the whole setting feels nerfed. Being a runaway in the British Colonies mere months after the end of chattel slavery is an exceedingly dangerous situation to be in, but I didn't get a sense of that from this book. The narrator mentions the danger she's in at several points, but the plot is basically advanced by her meeting one generous benefactor after another. Only a couple of people try to exploit her condition and neither of them is that successful at it.
As a result, it reads like a YA novel. Adult themes like prostitution and abuse are touched on, but not much shown. And that's another bit of awkwardness. One of Shearer's goals is to present something of the range of experiences of formerly enslaved people, which is laudable, but her means of doing that is a bit rote: Our protagonist meets a character, who befriends her for underbaked reasons (yes, she's a sympathetic figure, but so are hundreds of others these people must have met), and then at some point, their tragic backstory gets recounted. There's no real subtlety to it, nothing much in the way of subtext. It's a text you could assign to fifth-graders and be confident that nobody in class would miss anything important.
Do I regret reading it? No, but as the sultry summer days begin to dissipate I'm definitely looking forward to diving into something more meaty.
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