Review: Beloved

MORRISON, Toni, Beloved, Vintage/Random House Australia Pty. Ltd., Milson’s Point NSW, 1997.

Octavo; paperback; 275pp. Mild wear; hinges and spine creased; text block edges toned with some spotting. Very good.

I feel a bit hesitant in reporting on this book; after all it is a Pulitzer Prize winner. There’s no doubt that it is a great document and very well written. That being said, it took me a couple of goes to get into it and I put it down a few times along the way. My main criterion in reviewing a book is based on whether or not I found it entertaining; well, this book entertains, but it’s gruelling. The subject matter – a tale of escaped and freed slaves relocating and starting new lives after the American Civil War – is not supposed to make anyone feel comfortable or at ease. The reportage contained between these covers is truly chilling and accounts for most of the horror.

There are some books that try too hard and attempt to stun the reader with a variety of literary tricks and fireworks. Sometimes this works; sometimes it’s completely counter-productive. If the reader is fighting the format, then the message fades off somewhere in the distance. Sometimes the trick is the point and that’s fine – William Golding’s The Inheritors is a good example and I urge everybody to find a copy and work with it because the rewards are definitely worth it. Toni Morrison has a couple of tricks in her toolbox as far as this book is concerned, but I’m not convinced that they’re entirely successful.

The first is vernacular writing. Someone like Cormac McCarthy can take the local idiom of his characters and communicate effortlessly in that mode; Morrison struggles with it. It’s not that her ear isn’t completely tuned in to how the lingo works, but that in using this style, she ends up obfuscating rather than revealing what’s being said, or what is happening. The primary point of writing is to communicate and things get a little lost in the transmission here. There’s another issue with this and it feeds directly into the second trick that Morrison deploys:

There’s a big reveal at the end of this book. In keeping this secret for as long as possible, Morrison sidles around the elements of the revelation in an effort to not let off all her fireworks in the afternoon. One way she attempts this is to mess with the chronology. From the start , we know that the main character, Sethe, committed an act that the other characters generally regard with revulsion. There are enough clues to ensure that an attentive reader will guess what it is, but it doesn’t take place on the page until well after the mid-point of the book. This is fine and is a tried and tested technique; however in tandem with the vernacular fuzziness mentioned above, the clarity of the work starts to slip.

A final issue that I have with the book is terminology, and this is probably something that is uniquely my own bedevilment. Whenever a book uses a name, or term, the pronunciation of which isn’t clear, it throws me off. Each time I run into it, I get knocked out of the narrative in an attempt to work out how that word is pronounced and, once having lost the thread, it’s hard to find it once more. A good example of this occurs in the detective fiction of Ngaio Marsh: her main sleuth is a guy called Roderick Alleyne. Throughout her novels, characters try to say his name and he corrects them; however, because it’s all happening on the page, the reader never knows how to verbalise his damned name. Best guesses were either “Allen”, “A-LAYne” or “ALL-in”. Marsh never told anyone in her lifetime how to say it either, and it has come down to her Society of acolytes to issue a statement as to how best to pronounce it. They may well be wrong also.

In Beloved my issue is with the main protagonist’s name – Sethe. Is it pronounced “seethe”? Or “Seth”? Towards the middle of the book there’s a throwaway line to the effect that her mother gave her a boy’s name before surrendering her to her owners, so I presume it’s pronounced “Seth”; however, by that point in the reading I was so annoyed with it that I couldn’t let it go. These characters are all illiterate, or semi-literate, so how did that terminal ‘e’ come to be there? What is the point of it? Adding to the confusion is Sethe’s dead husband, whose name is Halle: quite apart from thinking of Catwoman every time his name came up, I had the same issue – is it “Hall”? Is it “Hal”? Is it “Halley”? Annoying.

That concludes the list of things I took issue with in this book; the rest is amazing. The story concerns the escaped slave Sethe, her tribulations in getting out of her truly awful circumstance, her attempts to find the scattered remnants of her family and her efforts to establish a new life for them all. She locates the house where her dead husband’s freed mother - Baby Suggs – lives and moves in, with her two sons – Howard and Buglar - and her daughter, Denver. Shortly after arriving at this haven, she gives birth to a second daughter. In time, another escapee – Paul D – arrives and moves in. When he shows up, the house is being troubled by a poltergeist: Baby Suggs has retired to her bed in despair and Denver and Sethe are coping as best they can, the others having fled. Paul D takes umbrage against the spirit and banishes it, relieving the atmosphere of gloom from the house.

From here on in, the tale is laced with the memories of the former slaves as they try to adjust to their new living arrangements, eking a living from the meagre opportunities around them. Into this world suddenly appears a strange young woman who calls herself Beloved. Otherworldly and seemingly afflicted by amnesia (or a stubborn refusal to spill the beans), she affects the other household members deeply, tearing at their composure and the tentative connexions they have built with each other. The revelations she unleashes at the book’s end shatter them all.

There are definite supernatural elements within this story, but the true horror it contains are the details – sometimes mere snippets dropped by the characters – of the casual cruelty they all suffered under their former masters. Even little things like the fact that Paul D bears that name simply because he followed after Pauls A, B, and C, is a chilling thought. The fear that Sethe feels when the thug known to them all only as “schoolteacher” arrives to fetch her back is gutwrenching and leads to the central sadness that engulfs the entire family. Like I said above, this book, with all its flaws, is gruelling. But definitely worth your time.

Three-and-a-half Tentacled Horrors.