Laurence

It’s no secret that I love Margaret Laurence, particularly her novel A Jest of God, but I’ve always been a bit nervous of reading her debut novel. This Side Jordan (1960) breaks one of my cardinal rules for choosing novels. I call it ‘the Brits abroad’ rule in my head and, though Laurence is Canadian, it still stands. If I’m reading a novel set in a country other than mine, I prefer it to be by someone from that country – and that is doubly true when it’s a white person writing about an African country.

And yet – I thought I’d trust Laurence and risk this novel, set in Ghana. More particularly, it is set in 1957 on the cusp of independence, as Ghana was about to get that name after decades as a British colony called the Gold Coast. Laurence herself spent five years there as her husband, Jack, was stationed in the country as an engineer. She had a first-hand view of what life was like as a colonial immigrant (I never use the word ‘ex-pat’, which is almost always a whitewash of ‘economic migrant’) but how would that read nearly 70 years later?

I’ll be honest, the opening scene wasn’t promising. Here’s how the novel starts:

The six boys were playing the Fire Highlife, playing it with a beat urgent as love. And Johnnie Kestoe, who didn’t like Africans, was dancing the highlife with an African girl.

Charity’s scarlet smile mocked his attempts to rotate his shoulders and wriggle his European hips to the music. Her own fleshy hips and buttocks swayed easily, and her big young breasts, unspoiled by children and only lightly held by her pnik blouse, rose and fell as though the music were her breath. Johnnie grinned awkwardly at her, then he jerked his head away.

Oooof. The description of Charity seems both animalistic and overly sexualised, and the whole scene is pretty awkward. Johnnie is castigated by his fellow men for shaming himself by dancing with an African woman, and it was at this point that I googled ‘Is This Side Jordan racist?’ The answer was in the negative, for what it’s worth, so I carried on…

…and I quickly realised that Laurence is mocking the racists. She is showing us the attitudes, behaviours and (focalised through the third person) the perspectives of the sort of people who doubtless proliferated in this world. As it became clear that their time in the sun was coming to an end, they were becoming more protective, more vicious, more afraid of what would replace them.

The real hero of the novel appears in the next chapter. Nathaniel is a schoolteacher, and one of the more interesting, complex, sympathetic, flawed characters I’ve ever come across. As we meet him, he is anxious about money. As the educated member of the extended family who has left the village, he is expected to financially support a wide array of relatives. Yet his income is low, the school he teaches in is poor, and even the students who work hard have little chance of making anything of the shoddy education provided.

A slim hand flicked at the books on Nathaniel’s desk.

“You really prepare your lectures, Nathaniel? You crazy, man?”

“It’s a new course,” Nathaniel said stiffly.

Lamptey made him feel raw, a bush boy, a villager. Angery swelled again.

“What’s so terrible about preparing a lecture, anyway?” he snapped. “You ought to try it sometime.”

“What’s the use?” Lamptey said candidly. “The stuff I teach don’t make sense anyway. So I just tell them to memorize everything. Nobody do it, but that’s their business.”

The other teachers in the school, as you see, don’t worry too much about the substandard teaching they provide. They know the boys in their school won’t amount to much in the world. But, on the eve of independence, Nathaniel has ambitions and hopes: for himself, for his soon-to-be-born child, and for his class. It is his hope that leads to his unhappiness. He is not content with what he has, but is too poor, too unconnected, and too ground down by the context of colonialism to achieve all his intelligence warrants. Happier are those without his abilities.

One such is his wife – and she is only unhappy because Nathaniel is constantly trying to ‘better’ her, in ways she doesn’t understand. He wants their baby born in a hospital, rather than back in their village. He has encouraged her to attend the local church, rather than follow her ancestral faith – and her Christian faith seems genuine, but then he worries she is worshipping with too much fervour. As she sorrowfully points out, she can do nothing to please him.

Another complex, expertly drawn, relationship is between Nathaniel and Johnnie’s wife, Miranda. She is much kinder, more thoughtful than her husband. She admires Nathaniel, is interested in his work, and sees his capabilities – and he hates and despises her for it. Laurence is so clever in the way she shows that Miranda’s kind sympathy is more painful to receive than Johnnie’s ignorant unkindness.

Perhaps I’ve made Nathaniel seem unpleasant, but he is too real for that. There is a section in the novel where he is put in an impossible moral quandary, and the decision he makes – and its discovery – is scarletly shaming. And yet the reader has total sympathy with him. I think he is a staggeringly good creation. Laurence is so good at writing characters who invite both our sympathy and our pity. Characters who are trapped by their own shortcomings – who are, for want of a better word, pathetic. And all the sadder to read because we care about them.

Also pathetic, but less sympathetic, is James. He is in charge of things in this part of the Gold Coast, but there are rumours circulating of ‘Africanisation’ – that is, African people getting roles in the local governance of their own country, rather than everything being done by white immigrants. There is plenty of blather about this from the racist characters, but it also exposes how lost people like James are without these colonial structures to hold them up.

Johnnie, shocked into sharp vision by the Squire’s tears and by the pain in the old man’s voice, saw for the first time what James’s true position here had been. Bumbling and pompous, the Squire would likely have spent his life as a mole-like ledger-keeper, had he stayed in England. But here – here he had walked on Mount Olympus. He had dispensed justice as he saw it – rewards for the compliant ones, punishments for the unruly. A frail and balding Jupiter, he had paced his temple in time of riot, waving an old army rife, subduing and chastening his erring children.

The Squire had spoken as a god might speak, who had created a world only to have its creatures mock and finally destroy him by their disbelief.

It is right that a mediocre man like him be displaced, and that Ghana be truly independent. But Laurence is subtle enough a writer to make the reader feel a moment’s – perhaps irrational – sympathy for him.

She is, indeed, so subtle and clever a writer that I should never have allowed that opening chapter to put me on my guard. Of course Laurence wouldn’t write the sort of novel I’d feared I was reading. While I’d still rather read about Ghana in a novel or non-fiction by a Ghanaian, I do think This Side Jordan is excellent. It is peopled with unforgettable characters, a plot that is nuanced and a page-turner, and has challenged some of my preconceptions about what a ‘Brit Canadian abroad’ might bring to the table.

Regular visitors to StuckinaBook will know how much I adore Margaret Laurence, and particularly here Manawaka sequence of novels. They have a little overlap, though can be read independently – and it includes some of the best novels I’ve read in recent years, particularly A Jest of God. The only one of the five I hadn’t read was the penultimate in the sequence, A Bird in the House (1970), and is the only one that’s not really a novel: it’s a series of linked stories about a young girl called Vanessa.

Through her eyes, steadily growing up over the course of the stories, we see a family tied together and falling apart. She is loyally close to her father and sporadically close to her mother; a little brother is born in one story; she fears some grandparents and adores others. The patterns and habits of her family are all she knows, and she details them with the interest of an anthropologist and the familiarity of a constant observer.

The world is a kaleidoscope of people and philosophies, and Vanessa is gradually working out who she is and what she stands for. But it is a curious blend of perspectives – because it is not really through the eyes of eight-year-old Vanessa, but 40-year-old Vanessa looking back. The naivety and newness of everything is layered with the reflections of a middle-aged woman remembering them.

This blend comes most to the fore in the way Aunt Edna is depicted. She is unmarried, looking after Vanessa’s cantankerous grandfather but also dependent on him. As a child, Vanessa loves and admires Edna, accepting her role as an inevitable part of the fabric of her life. But the older Vanessa clearly feels a whole range of emotions to Edna – pities her position, hopes for her, admires her spirit, recognises the limits on it. As a narrator, she is rather older than this spinster aunt – who, to young Vanessa, of course seems old. Through the stories, Laurence masterly weaves these complexities. The last line of this paragraph is brilliant, and quintessentially Laurence:

If someone coming to the Brick House for the first time chance to light a cigarette when Grandfather was home, he gave them one chance and that was all. His warning was straightforward. He would walk to the front door, fling it open, and begin coughing. He would then say, “Smoky in here, ain’t it?” If this had no effect, he told the visitor to get out, and no two ways about it. Aunt Edna once asked me to guess how many boyfriends she had lost that way, and when I said “I give up – how many?” she said “Five, and that’s the gospel truth.” At the time I imagined, because she was laughing, that she thought it was funny.”

Another instance of her lovely turns of phrase comes in a story about Piquette Tonnerres – a character and family overlapping intriguingly with one of the major families in the next book in the Manawaka sequence, The Diviners: “I could not reach Piquette at all, and I soon lost interest in trying. But all that summer she remained as both a reproach and a mystery to me.”

Each story was published separately and can be read separately – so we see Vanessa grow up, but we are also reintroduced to the family each time. Impressively, it doesn’t feel repetitive or annoying to read so many introductions in sequence – it feels, rather, like a fresh development on each character whenever we meet them again.

I think the stories I liked most were the ones about particular people who come briefly onto the scene. The one about Piquette, ‘The Loons’, is a good example. Another is ‘The Half-Husky’, about a local boy who torments her pet dog (which is quite hard to read). Laurence is too sophisticated to give her stories a neat message, but we are pulled towards moral conclusions that never quite coalesce. Vanessa is clearly learning, though doesn’t come to any finalities. Rather, these stories show us experiences and wonderings and leave behind an impression of beauty and brutality intertwined. Nothing is sentimental in these stories, but somehow they are touching. Adult Vanessa clearly has a mix of nostalgia and sadness about her childhood – not least because of a tragedy that happens almost incidentally in one chapter, then spreads out like dye in water throughout the others.

Laurence is at her best, I think, when she can really lean into the development of a character and examine every aspect of their emotional life. It’s why A Jest of God remains her masterpiece, in my eyes. But A Bird in the House is excellent too – beautiful writing, extraordinary knowledge of human character, and moments that will certainly remain in my mind. Now I’ve finished the Manawaka sequence, the only real question is when I’ll go back and read them all again.

If you read my favourite books of 2022 list, you’ll know that Margaret Laurence came out on top – with A Jest of God, a brilliant short book about a woman called Rachel living a claustrophobic, hopeless life in a small Canadian town. I also read The Diviners last year, and read The Stone Angel many years ago – which meant that I only had two novels from Laurence’s Manawaka sequence left. One is a collection of short stories that I don’t own, and one is the book I recently finished: The Fire-Dwellers (1969).

There are a few connections between the books in the Manawaka sequence (though they can be read in any order). Perhaps the clearest link is between A Jest of God and The Fire-Dwellers – as The Fire-Dwellers is the story of Rachel’s sister, Stacey.

Stacey appears in the peripheries of A Jest of God as the sister who managed to get out of the town. Her life is only sketched in fragments, but she is held up as a contrast to Rachel’s stultifying inability to develop. In The Fire-Dwellers, we discover that her life has been far from ideal.

I’ve imagined myself getting away more times than I can tell you
Then do it.
Stacey looks at him, appalled and shaken by the suggestion of choice. Then she turns away again.
If I had two lives, I would. You think I don’t want to?

Yes, she has the husband, Mac, and the children – but she feels trapped and lost. Her marriage is hollow and sad, her children don’t bring her the fulfilment that she hoped they would, and the drudgery of daily life is overwhelming. As a theme, it is hardly unique – but Laurence brings her trademark insight to the telling. She is so good at getting beneath the skin of the everywoman. Her searing insights are remorseless. No character can hide behind pretences, even as we see their attempts at dissemblement – which might, indeed, fool the people around them, if not the reader. Her husband, for instance, is so fixated on an affair that he wrongly believes she’s had that he doesn’t notice the affair that she might have. The children are at an age where it is inconceivable that their parents might have independent personalities outside of ‘mother’ and ‘father’ – though the oldest daughter is beginning to recognise this, and clearly finds it troubling.

Several of the side characters are drawn really well. There is Thor, the head of the vitamin company for which Mac is salesman – a company that is only millimetres away from being a cult, and Thor is every bit the darkly boistrous cult leader. There is Mac’s boorish best friend – a trucker whose chief pleasure comes from playing ‘chicken’ with other truckers, both facing each other down in the middle of the road, daring the other truck to last as long as possible before pulling to the side. And then there is the enigmatic man that gives Stacey a new lease of life – a kind, clever, funny man who is not unlike the man who intervenes in Rachel’s life in A Jest of God. Across the span of Manitoba, the sisters were experiencing similar epiphanies that they never communicated about. And neither is a panacea, because Laurence is too realistic for that.

So, did I love The Fire-Dwellers as much as A Jest of God? Well, I’ve made it sound wonderful – and I know that others have found it brilliant, including Barbara’s Book Obsession recently, but I’m afraid I didn’t love it. And that’s for one reason which may or may not matter to you, and which might have been clear from the quote at the top. For some reason, Laurence decided not to use speech marks in this novel.

Normally I give up on a novel immediately if I see it doesn’t have speech marks. I only persevered because I love Laurence. Some people don’t mind this increasingly common authorial choice, but I find it maddening – an affectation that doesn’t add anything to a book, and simply makes it harder to read. They might as well leave out spaces between words. (I did, actually, find Laurence’s technique of sometimes leaving several spaces between words rather more effective.)

Here’s a section that illustrates it as well as any other bit. When she uses a dash, it is internal thought.

Duncan, for goodness sake shut up and quit making such a fuss about nothing.
Leave him, Mac. He was scared. Ian told him a rusty nail would
Scared, hell. He doesn’t need to roar like that. Shut up, Duncan, you hear me?
Duncan nods, gulps down salt from his eyes and the mucus from his nose. His chest heaves and he continues to cry, but quietly. Mac clamps a hand on his shoulder and spins him around.
Now     listen here, Duncan. I’ll give you one minute to stop.
Duncan stares with wet slit-eyes into his father’s face. Stacey clenches her hands together.
-I could kill you, Mac. I could stab you to the very heart right this minute. But how can I even argue, after last night? My bargaining power is at an all-time low. Damn you. Damn you. Take your hands off my kid.

Perhaps you think this is a silly reason not to enjoy a book as much as I’d hoped. (Someone on Twitter certainly did!) Or perhaps you’re on the same page as me. I just found it frustrating that The Fire-Dwellers could have been a brilliant novel, in my opinion, if she hadn’t tried this affected stylistic avenue. I understand that people like to play with the limits of literary form, but the absence of speech marks would have looked a little ‘done’ by the 1930s, and brought nothing to the table in 1969.

So this is comfortably my least favourite of the Manawaka sequence, though there is enough of Laurence’s brilliance to keep me going. Ultimately I found it a frustrating read, but it still hasn’t dinted my belief that Laurence is one of the best writers of the second half of the 20th century.

Wow. A Jest of God (1966) by Margaret Laurence is absolutely brilliant. I bought it in 2007, and 15 years later it has come off my shelf and been devoured in a couple of sittings. It might not quite be a novella, at 202 pages, but its scope is compact in time and space – and a spectacular success.

This is the second in Laurence’s Manawaka series of novels – I’ve now read the first, fifth, and second (in that order) – set in a fictional town in Manitoba, Canada, though with a different set of characters each time. Having read the lengthy, spacious The Diviners for ‘Tea or Books?’ and finding it astonishingly good, I wanted to see which other Laurence treasures I’d been neglecting.

They are not actually chanting my name, of course. I only hear it that way from where I am watching at the classroom window, because I remember skipping rope to that song when I was about the age of the little girls out there now. Twenty-seven years ago, which seems impossible, and myself seven, but the same brown brick building, only a new wing added and the place smartened up. It would certainly have surprised me then to know I’d end up here, in this room, no longer the one who was scared of not pleasing, but the thin giant She behind the desk at the front, the one with the power of picking any coloured chalk out of the box and writing anything at all on the blackboard. It seemed a power worth possessing then.

Rachel Cameron isn’t just living in the same small town where she grew up – she is living in the same house, and working as a second grade teacher at the same school she attended as a child. Her life has not progressed in any of the ways she’d imagined. Her days are spent at work with children who know her deeply for a year and then move on – still in the same school, the same town, but no longer part of her life. Her evenings are spent with her widowed mother, living above the funeral parlour that Rachel’s father used to run. Like some of the other books I’ve read this month, the mother/daughter relationship is too dependent, too stultifying, too thoroughly tangled with guilt and resentment, as well as love. Rachel seems to have few friends and no intimates – and she tries to avoid the closeness sought by her colleagues, such as the teacher who wants her to come along to her charismatic church.

Into this unchanging world comes Nick Kazlik. Or, rather, into it he returns.

“Hello, Rachel.”

Has someone spoken to me? A man’s voice, familiar. Who is it?

“It is Rachel, isn’t it?” he says, stopping, smiling enquiringly.

He is about the same height as myself. Not thickly built, really, but with the solidity of heavy bones. Straight hair, black. Eyes rather Slavic, slightly slanted, seemingly only friendly now, but I remember the mockery in them from years ago.

Nick was the milkman’s son, returned to stay with his elderly parents – he left; he went to teach high school in the city. He and Rachel weren’t particularly close, but now they are drawn to each other. Soon, they are spending most evenings together – clandestinely, for both know their parents wouldn’t approve of anything so sudden.

In another genre, this would be a romantic release from drudgery. But in A Jest of God, Rachel cannot get release from herself. Though there is happiness in this new fling, Rachel has the self-consciousness of an adolescent. She second guesses everything she does or says, constantly imagining how it might be interpreted, what sort of impression she is making, whether she will be accepted or rejected.

Laurence writes with astonishing psychological acuity. The Diviners was sprawling in time and space – A Jest of God takes place over just a few weeks in a town so insular that it’s hard to conceive the rest of the world exists in any meaningful way. Rachel is so detailed and complete a character that the reader loves her, wants the best for her, and knows how unlikely it is that she will get it – because of flaws in herself and her upbringing, as much as the environment in which she lives. The tension between the possibility of Rachel’s future and her own hubris is what keeps this novel pacy and compelling, even when very little is happening on the surface.

It is a fantastic success of a novel, showing how adept Laurence is at whichever scope she sets herself.