History in fiction

The Fortune Men, Light Perpetual, Where The Wild Ladies Are, The Grand Anicut & Island of Sea Women

 

Yesterday, for a few minutes in the morning, the world disappeared. For most of September, I’ve woken up to see sky, clouds and mountains; the white water trail of a faraway waterfall; a line of distant trees that make the mountain look like it’s got a buzz cut. None of this was visible yesterday. There was only descended mist and it wrapped everything in a dense, still whiteness. It was the kind of morning that should inspire an epiphany or a poem (or both). Me, I sat and stared at the mist for a few minutes (there was probably a stupid, wonder-filled grin on my face) before taking out my phone to click photos that I then put up on Instagram.  

 A couple of hours later, the incandescent Michaela Cole won an Emmy for I May Destroy You (perhaps the most brilliant show of 2020). In her acceptance speech, she said: 

“In a world that entices us to browse through the lives of others to help us better determine how we feel about ourselves and to, in turn, feel the need to be constantly visible — for visibility these days seems to somehow equate to success — do not be afraid to disappear. From it. From us. For a while. And see what comes to you in the silence.”

There’s something deeply comforting about Cole’s words, especially if you’re a creative person. Her words carry in them an assurance that if you do retreat into silence, something (and specifically, something good) will come to you. They remind you that disappearing is not an absence, but an active choice that can potentially be restorative. Even as I felt a warm rush of admiration for Cole’s whip-smart mind, a small part of my own brain frowned as I remembered how I’d found silence that morning — and abandoned it in favour of Instagram. Oops. 

Today, there doesn’t seem to be a cloud in sight; out of the corner of my eye, I can see a beautiful dog soaking up sunshine; and I’m indoors, cheerfully banging away at my keyboard so that I appear before you, in a newsletter.  

My favourite line in Cole’s speech is, “Do not be afraid to disappear” because it urges you to think about what you fear. Is it the idea of disappearing and if so, what does “disappearing” mean for you in concrete, practical terms? Do you feel anxious at the thought of not being visible to a larger world? Are you worried that the only thing that will come to you in the silence is more silence? Do you fear that disappearing won’t ‘achieve’ anything, that there won’t be an epiphany? What does it mean if you re-emerge from your disappearance none the wiser? If your work is unchanged by the changes in your life, is that good or bad?

I suspect the answers to most of these questions change for each of us, depending upon our circumstances. Whatever you come up with, it may well be worth your time to spend some time with the answers. Speaking of work and epiphanies, never forget that what you (or I) consider brain-melting nonsense may well be what someone needs at a particular time. Just recently, someone told me how a talk by Rupi Kaur helped them come out of a dark place because it felt both insightful and therapeutic. 

Anyway, as might be evident from the fact that this newsletter is in your inbox/ on your browser, I have not disappeared. 

I’m happy to report I’ve read all the Booker-longlisted books except Bewilderment. However, if you’re hoping for a prediction, I got nothing. At present, The Promise and The Great Circle are my favourites, but if The Great Circle wins, my jaw will thlump to the floor. Maggie Shipstead’s novel doesn’t have the literary pyrotechnics that tend to attract prizes. Instead, it feels deceptively simple. Then again, Shipstead’s heroine faces challenges and embarks on quests much like the heroes of the ancient Greek epic tradition, and it doesn’t get much more literary than Homer.

The only book I wish had made it to the shortlist is An Island. Karen Jennings’s novel about a man who has chosen to isolate himself has the tautness of a thriller while exploring the tangled, vicious politics of a country grappling with the legacy of colonialism. I’d pick it over A Passage North, which poignantly explores the guilt of a survivor and is particularly compelling when the protagonist goes to the parts of Sri Lanka that suffered most during the civil war. However, the woman that Anuk Arudrapragasam’s hero is pining for and their romance is a collection of clichés,  beginning with the way their eyes meet across a room to the train sex scene that is the (ahem) climax of their relationship. (To be fair, off the top of my head, I can’t remember too many books in which a couple have had sex on a train, but it feels like the desi version of the mile high club.) However, the kohl-wearing, jhola-carrying, Left-leaning, activist woman who crushes our poor male hero’s heart is perhaps more familiar as a stereotype to those who have studied/ worked in Delhi than it is to the Booker Prize’s judging panel. Context, dear reader, is everything.

I loved Nadifa Mohamed’s The Fortune Men, which is based on the real-life case of a Somali seaman who was the last man to be hanged in Cardiff prison. This is a novel about how the British justice system has failed those who put their faith in it — not in a far-off historical era, but as recently as in the 1950s. Read together, The Fortune Men, The Promise and An Island offer insightful explorations of race and class in postcolonial societies.

Most of The Fortune Men is set in Cardiff’s Tiger Bay neighbourhood, with its grimy lodging houses, seedy bars, and migrant workers from all over the world. Much of the novel is seen from the eyes of Mahmood Mattan, a petty criminal who has made his way to Wales from British Somaliland. As a child, Mattan chafed under the authority of his brothers. When he ran away from home as a teenager and eventually ended up with the merchant navy, he found himself in the lower rungs of a new hierarchy. In the United Kingdom, racism and his poverty leave him with little standing in society. Through The Fortune Men, Mohamed restores to Mattan the dignity he deserves. The novel paints a portrait of a society that is in denial of how multicultural and multiracial it is, and shows how the system fails those on the margins. The fact that Mohamed was able to write The Fortune Men, find a publisher for it and see it shortlisted for one of the most prestigious awards in Britain is perhaps the only hopeful silver lining to the story.  

While Mohamed has fleshed out a snippet of recorded history in her novel, Francis Spufford’s Light Perpetual is an alternate history. It’s beautifully written in parts, but in totality, I found it largely forgettable. In Light Perpetual Spufford sets out to answer the question of what might have been the lives of five children if they hadn’t been killed in a bombing during World War II. The novel opens powerfully, with Spufford describing a bomb blast in vivid and lyrical detail (the bombing actually happened, in a department store in 1944 and killed more than 100 people, many of whom were children). Then we see the kids’ lives over the next 65 years, witnessing everyday adventures like job interviews and catered dinners. When Spufford’s prose doesn’t feel like an overegged pudding, Light Perpetual does a great job of showing a changing British society, but it’s not particularly compelling. The novel’s most glaring flaw is that the events Spufford describes don’t feel like a divergence. There’s no other timeline against which we can compare the “what if” that Spufford is describing. We see the lives of these five people as the main narrative, but we don’t get any sense of what might have been different if the bomb blast hadn’t happened. It doesn’t help that most of the five’s lives are, well, dull.

Unrelated to prizes of any sort, I thoroughly enjoyed Aoko Matsuda’s volume of short stories, Where The Wild Ladies Are (translated by Polly Barton). Matsuda takes Japanese ghost stories and sets them in a contemporary Japan where humans and spirits live side by side. Eventually, you realise the stories are interconnected through a fictitious firm that has both mortal and spirit employees. The most fun part is reading the summaries of the original legends that Matsuda provides and seeing how she has adapted the stories to the present day. Female ghosts who are usually depicted as monstrous, frightening and tragic are transformed by Matsuda into mouthy, eccentric women. Many of Matsuda’s ladies embrace a wilder aspect of their selves and sometimes it’s quite literal, like in “A Fox’s Life”. In “Smartening Up”, a young woman who is obsessed with looking ‘perfect’ and removing every patch of body hair has to deal with an intervention from her aunt. Minor detail: the aunt is a ghost. None of the stories are scary, but they have a delicious eerie quality to them. Although there is socio-cultural critique embedded in most of the stories, there’s also a lightness to Where The Wild Ladies Are that makes it a fun read. It’s as though we’re sitting around Matsuda, with mugs of hot chocolate on a wintry night, and she’s telling us about these fantastical women who refused to be constrained by either society or the tropes of the horror genre.

Another excellent read was Veena Muthuraman’s debut novel, The Grand Anicut. By and large, I’ve been disappointed by the historical fiction that’s come out of India. Often, the writers want you to know they’ve done oodles of research and this takes away from the plot instead of adding to it. The storytelling and English feel clunky, especially when writers attempt to nonchalantly toss in a few words from an ancient language like classical Sanskrit. The Grand Anicut has none of these problems. I know only the basics of the history of this period and region, but the novel seems to be carefully researched. Fortunately, Muthuraman doesn’t make an exhibition of her scholarship, so we get a book that manages to be both informative and thoroughly entertaining. 

Set in 1st century CE, The Grand Anicut is the story of a young Roman who has come to Puhar, the capital of the Chola empire, in the hope of establishing himself as a trader. (It’s so refreshing to see Indian historical fiction that is not set in the Mughal era or north India.) As he wanders around the bustling city and starts establishing contacts with locals, it slowly becomes clear that our hero, who introduces himself as Marcellus, is guarding a secret. He’s not the only one. Secrets are dime a dozen in Puhar. From the Buddhist monk Zhang who loves fried fish and seems to know everything about everyone; to Kuzhali, the widowed daughter of a leading Puhar merchant who disguises herself as a man, everyone in Puhar is made up of parts unknown. 

On the surface, the Chola empire seems stable and flourishing, but while King Karikalan is focused upon building the grand anicut, he has no idea there are enemies plotting to overthrow him. Muthuraman shows us the vibrant Chola capital and the empire’s turbulent politics through Marcellus’s eyes. We discover a beautiful and prosperous city where no one can be trusted, where plots are being hatched by disgruntled businessmen, where kidnappers lurk in dark alley and assassins melt into shadows. 

Showing us Puhar and its neighbouring areas from Marcellus’s perspective is a clever narrative choice on Muthuraman’s part. The past is very literally another country for both the protagonist and the reader of The Grand Anicut. From Marcellus’s perspective, detailed and evocative descriptions like the ones Muthuraman gives us make sense because a local wouldn’t notice much of what seems remarkable to the Roman (and to us in the 21st century). 

Along with serving us a reminder that multiculturalism in India wasn’t born in 20th century south Delhi and Bandra, The Grand Anicut introduces us to some wonderful characters. One of my favourites is the fierce warrior Angavai, who is very different from the historical character by the same name (she was one of Vel Pari’s two daughters and we seem to know more about the gents who acted as the sisters’ guardian than the ladies themselves). I’m also very fond of Hippalus, the grumpy ship’s captain who is attempting to write a book and convinced the world is conspiring against him.

Another work of historical fiction that I read recently and loved is Island of Sea Women by Lisa See. Set on Jeju Island, the novel is about two woman divers, Young-Sook and Mi-Ja. Their relationship reminded me a little of Elena and Lila’s friendship in Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend. The friendship in both books is intimate, intense and complicated. The women love each other but also hurt each other, sometimes intentionally and sometimes unwittingly. And yet, for all the tension between them and the hurt they inflict on one another, they are also each other’s lifelines. 

Island of Sea Women spans about 70 years, starting when Young-Sook and Mi-Ja are little girls and tracing the history of Jeju Island through the prism of their lives. Part of the novel is about incidents of state violence like the Jeju Uprising in which anywhere between 14,000 and 30,000 people were killed. It took the Korean government almost 60 years to acknowledge the atrocities committed upon the islanders. During and after the uprising, data was erased, evidence was destroyed, and false testimonies were placed on record. This means that one of the ways to make sure these incidents are remembered as real is through fiction. How’s that for irony?

Island of Sea Women also reads like a repository of memories, recording the lives and practices of the divers before Jeju Island was modernised. In sharp contrast to the straightforward patriarchy of mainland Korea, the diving community on Jeju Island had a matrifocal system. Women worked outside the home — some, like Young-Sook, travelled all the way to Vladivostok to earn extra money as divers —  while men took care of domestic responsibilities like cooking and raising children. It doesn’t mean the society was less patriarchal. For instance, there’s no question in Young-Sook’s mind that daughters don’t go to school; they work so that there’s money to send the son to school.

Known in Korean as the haenyeo, the women divers of Jeju Island were Korea’s first working mothers.  One of the many charming parts of Island of Sea Women is the drivers affectionately chattering among themselves about how their husbands are sentimental little bunnies with no practical sense or understanding of the real world. The detail with which we’re shown the workings of divers’ collectives and Young-Sook’s descriptions of life in her village makes Island of Sea Women feel like an archival document, as though See has transcribed an interview with a haenyeo elder. In case you were wondering, See is an American author with no obvious connection to either Jeju Island or mainland Korea. Yet there not one sentence in this novel that feels inauthentic. You get some sense of how elaborate and intensive See’s research process was in her author’s note. It’s properly awe-inspiring. 

I know, I’ve gone on for more than a minute, but before I go, let me share the link to a short story that I thoroughly enjoyed. A friend of mine told me about the Lady Astronaut series, by Mary Robinnette Kowal who is an author and a puppeteer (aren’t you charmed already?), and it all started with this short story. I have a feeling I’m going to start bingeing on the full-length books at the first opportunity. 

And now I’ll sign off. Take care and here’s hoping any clouds that may hover on your horizon either have very shiny silver linings or look as gorgeous as these.

Thank you for reading. Dear Reader will be back soon.