I don't usually do New Year's resolutions. But as last year ended, I made one: to finish the 2022 Booker prize winner, Shehan Karunatilaka’s “The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida,” before 2023 began.
I’d been on a Booker splurge earlier in the year. I realized I had on my to-read shelf three of the six works shortlisted for the prize awarded each year for the best novel written in English and published in the United Kingdom or Ireland. The three on my shelf when the short list was announced in the September were “Glory” by NoViolet Bulawayo, “Treacle Walker” by Alan Garner; and “The Trees” by Percival Everett.
Hope and horror
“Glory” has passages that will bring you to tears. But don't let that scare you. If NoViolet Bulawayo can take it, surely readers can. Especially readers who share her faith in the power of storytelling.
"Sometimes stories will raise the dead, as if they are not dead at all but alive in our mouths, only waiting to be animated by our tongues," Bulawayo writes in this fictional history of Zimbabwe. It's a country I traveled to report on and whose dissidents I interviewed often when I was based in South Africa for The Associated Press.
"Glory" is a novel to be heard as much as read. Bulawayo has a way of repeating phrases like a drum beat or bass line. All her characters are animals -- the autocratic Old Horse whose fall only allows an even crueler despot to take over; a young goat with a personal history that seems too heavy to bear; a wise cat rooted enough in the past to help her countrymen (countrymals?) see a way forward; various pigs, dogs and fowl; an evil crocodile and an angelic monkey.
As in "Animal Farm," the zoological cast makes Bulawayo's story seem like an ancient fable (perhaps that's why I want to hear it spoken, or sung, or chanted) with a modern political twist. Even contemporary. "Glory" has entire chapters written as tweets or the kind of man-on-the-street quotes reporters collect in disaster zones.
One of the tweets is from a none-too-presidential American Baboon. In one scene Bulawayo's animals mourn Black Americans shot down in the streets an ocean away. Bulawayo -- whose allusions include Swift, Dickens, Baldwin, Mda, Achebe and Vera -- knows her fable is as universal as it is old.
"We trip on our hopes, we teeter, hurtle into a red past we now know has been here all along, lurking like a crocodile," she writes.
She also offers solutions: "What truly counted was showing up for each other, was refusing silence, was actively fighting for what was right, was demanding justice for your fellow citizens even if you didn't necessarily agree with them or hold their views, even if they weren't your neighbors or your ethnic group or of your political party or of your religion."
It is a story of hope as well as horrors.
When Bulawayo's heroine sits down to write, she chooses "not to be afraid. This is her way of rising above the past, of putting together that which was broken, this is her way of dreaming the future."
Melancholy and humor
"Treacle Walker", the second Booker finalist that was on my shelf, is as surreal as a dream. It’s lyrical, melancholy, and makes brilliant use of Comic Sans. It’s also so compact that I could easily ruin it for you by saying too much here. Alan Garner evokes "Jack and the Beanstalk," reminds us that fairy tales are dark, and made me think of the decisions adults make and actions we fail to take that rob our children of their childhood. I think climate change is Garner's underlying existential thread. I'm curious about what other readers think.
At the start of "The Trees", the third Booker finalist I’d had on my shelf, it appears Emmett Till has returned as a zombie to exact revenge on the families of the men who lynched him, Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, and on the woman who falsely accused him, Carolyn Bryant. Things aren't always what they seem in “The Trees”. Until they are.
Percival Everett is very, very funny. In the manner of Melvin Van Peebles, Dick Gregory, Richard Pryor -- perhaps humor is the only way out of the quagmire that is America's bloody, racist past.
For all the times "The Trees" made me laugh out loud, Everett never lampoons lynching. One of his characters, Mama Z, has compiled dossiers on 7,006 lynchings, starting with that of her own father in 1913. A researcher who travels from Chicago to Money, Mississippi -- as Emmett Till did -- to visit Mama Z goes through her archive and observes, "In all of those files I read, not one person had to pay. Not one."
In imagining reparations for the murdered, Everett connects to old, old narratives. In an essay on the ghost stories of the formerly enslaved collected by Federal Writers’ Project interviewers, Jennifer Wilson finds that "an unfulfilled yearning echoes across these stories, a palpable desire for divine justice in the absence of any earthly one." And I bet many of those stories have moments of humor.
Everett's researcher, who might be the author himself, begins copying the names from Mama Z's files by hand, in pencil, saying: "'When I write the names they become real, not just statistics. When I write the names they become real again. It's almost like they get a few more seconds here. Do you know what I mean? I would never be able to make up these many names. The names have to be real. They have to be real. Don't they?'
"Mama Z put her hand against the side of Damon's face. 'Why pencil?'
"'When I'm done, I'm going to erase every name, set them free.'
"'Carry on, child,' the old woman said."
And then Everett has his readers read the names. That experience that made me feel the book was a world I was holding in my hands.
And the winner is …
When the winner of the Booker Prize was announced in October, it turned out not to be any of the three I’d had on the shelf – and by then had read. It was Karunatilaka’s “The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida.”
Karunatilaka’s was not yet available in the United States when the short list came out, and still wasn’t available when it won. (Come to think of it, I’d bought “Glory” at Johannesburg’s wonderful Bridge Books during a June visit to South Africa.) I ordered “The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida” immediately upon hearing of its Booker triumph. My copy arrived after Christmas. I stayed up late on New Year’s Eve to finish it.
I’m guessing that one reason it took a while for “The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida” to reach me is that U.S. book distributors figured American readers would not have the context to understand a novel set in Sri Lanka, a faraway South Asian island, during a civil war few in the United States know much about.
I had traveled to Sri Lanka to report on the war when I was based in India for AP so perhaps I’m not the best judge. But I think Karunatilaka provides the necessary context. I also find universal appeal in a book that is about guilt, sorrow, unpaid debts and, fundamentally, the many forms love can take. Karunatilaka writes intriguingly that "all stories are recycled and all stories are unfair."
Of these four, "The Trees" resonated most with me. I started my 2023 reading with Everett’s latest, “Dr. No”, a chilling and mesmerizing novel that offers some insight on the title of its Booker short-listed predecessor:
“’I think trees are like people.’
“‘How is that?’
“’Each one is unique. No oak is exactly like any other oak. They stand in plain view, but what feeds them is hidden from view. And even though they can be old and sturdy, a stiff wind can upset them, rip them from the world they know.’”
Each of the Booker finalists I read was mesmerizing in its own way, none like any other. Don’t call it a resolution, but I’ll try not to wait all of 2023 to read the other two that were on the short list -- Claire Keegan’s “Small Things Like These” and Elizabeth Strout’s “Oh William!”