BOOKER LONGLIST: ‘The unfolding continued, and he was stretched thin by it, so thin and formless that he might at any moment be taken up by the wind, removed’.[1] A reflection on An Island by Karen Jennings (2021), Newbury, Berkshire, Holland House Books.
Reviews of this brief and brutal novel have tirelessly repeated that it is an allegory. Catherine Taylor in The Guardian said it was a ‘compact allegory of postcolonialism’ but, to be honest, I barely know what such a thing might be pretend to be and remained as unenlightened by the label and the exposition of it in the review as when I started. I feel that it may well be true that the relation of the character Samuel to the island on which he lives, as his only alternative for survival, is a kind of ‘land’ of which he is the only citizen and that his actions might indicate the various means by which states become a reflection of the forces that play upon exclusive claims to ‘land’ and ‘independence’, including violent reaction to the encroachment, real or imagined, of another. In our own world that Other is too often conceived as a migrant from another place and putatively with another agenda for the future of that land. This in itself generates interaction between citizen and migrant in violent competition or in collaboration over the nature of their relative claims and needs. But, having though that, it did not help me plot the relationship of the island to the unnamed African nations in which Samuel’s recollected, fragmentary and disordered stories and histories are set or reduce them even to multiple allegoric meanings.
At the novels heart is, as Catherine Taylor says in her review in The Guardian, an ‘old vulnerable red hen’ whose fate in age is to be pecked to death by its younger rivals if it be not to be removed temporarily or permanently by a higher authority.[2] In this hen’s case that authority will be a man. Sometimes the supposed truth carried by this obvious symbol of a common fate of all individuals in history seems over-simple to us (at least to me), unless, of course, we’ve misread its meaning. The point is that in this allegoric (if you like) incident means little being a parable of a Hobbesian view of life: that life is ‘poor, nasty, brutish, and short’.
And in such a life, someone needs to be charge querying any belief in independence of being or will whether applied to a state or a Robinson-Crusoe-like individual. And although I do not read the use of black characters in a novel by a white author as necessarily a case of ‘cultural appropriation’, when the over-riding learning is that independent back states perhaps inevitably fall prey to vicious dictatorships, we need to be wary of such implications in the hands of people whose own origin is that of a colonial white culture. I am suspicious enough indeed to find the novel, like Hobbes himself, a means of undermining the aspirations of the disempowered to independence of the representatives of current holders of power and authority. Hobbes allows such people (monarchs for instance) to see themselves as an INEVITABLE representative of a process in history. The same can be said of white colonists justifying their historic role from the current mess into which independence has led many an African state – a mess comprising dictatorship, massive repression of the powerless and corruption of a major kind. Taylor tells us that:
Jennings has said she worries “very much” about cultural appropriation: “The one thing I have tried to do in my writing is to be very sensitive to whom it is that I give voice to.[3]
It remains in my view an open question however how sensitively Jennings has followed her own plea. And for this reason my view of this novel remains very ambivalent. I found the end of the novel in fact so brutal that I wonder if it is so, merely to underline a belief in human selfishness that is ideological but must pose as being a representation of nature. The winning theme is that of Samuel’s insistence that the island, the land, even the one knife in the cottage kitchen is ‘mine’. Despite the way in which the novelist is careful to show that ‘the man’ whose body Samuel takes from the sea is capable of a practical and caring love and attention to Samuel, greater priority is given to a more basic fear that gets named in one place as ‘the intimidation of fear and violence’ that is so omnipresent it cannot but make anyone ‘sick’.[4] It is this primitive fear that seems paramount in that ending and its insistent bludgeoning the kills more than the body; it kills the spirit of hope.
… with the strength of someone he had never before been, he brought the rock down on the side of the man’s head. The man was taken by surprise; his mouth became a gaping question as he fell. … The next blow came, … But he could not stop it, nor the next, nor any of the strikes that beat into him, each more crushing than the one before, until his face was all liquid and scraps. On his left hand a finger twitched, twitched again, then stopped.[5]
This writing kills hope because the violence is unexpected, over-large and overwhelming; almost that of a beating set to an insistent music that tells us of something greater than the actors and agents of what happens here. Something that represents a vast irrational fear of the claims of the other on any individual that the writer wants to show as almost transpersonal. Belief in such agencies is no more compulsory though than belief in God. For me, this is writing that serves an ideological purpose that we see too in the picture of Samuel’s attack on a soldier in the revolutionary march in which he participated. He may shout, ‘…“I fear no violence … The land is mine” but the fear that gets engages is not his of the legitimate or even illegitimate authority of the soldier by the reader’s fear of him and what he represents.[6]
Samuel could feel his mind darkening, his lungs thin with effort. The soldier would die. He would be dead; “Violence and blood!” He pushed down with his knees, held tight, until the soldier’s lips began to purple, spit to froth at the corners of his mouth.[7]
The rhythms here are the rhythms of an irrational, even satanic force, which the writer wants us to see as the risk people run who seek independence of historical constraint, even in pursuit of justice. And the writer is I think cynical about Samuel and the Revolution cadres in the novel who are not only irrational but deluded about their own effect on the norms of ordinary lives. Though the revolutionaries ‘… had felt invincible’, in fact their actions, apart from causing a number of deaths ‘had made no impact at all’.[8] Moreover I think the writer’s pull on a puppet’s strings are visible when she has Samuel say to his interrogators: “I’ve never been loyal to anyone but myself”.[9]
If anything the novel uses the island as a metaphor, rather than an allegory, of the fear of ageing, decay and death of the body and its housing. With that comes too a sense of the purposelessness of defence building. Hence the importance in this novel of all that wall-building by Samuel: he builds right round the island, and into this wall he incorporates the dead bodies of the disappeared from political and natural causes, those that, unlike him, have not survived.[10] The ‘old’ red hen is a target because she is old. In the presence of ‘the man’, Samuel senses something that causes discomfort to the decay around (in the lighthouse tower for instance) and in him: “This breath, this pulse, this youth”.[11] Against that breath of fresh air, Samuel smells his own upcoming death against which he can only irrational kill the young whom he irrationally blames for his mortality:
He was about to die. Now at the age of 70, with a stranger on his island, with everything in disarray, the scent of burning had come for him. The smell increased around him, grew thick and suffocating.[12]
I think this novel is a brilliantly written one then; a powerful but perniciously ideological novel that wants us to see set against human aspirations for empowerment, independence and freedom something like a natural barrier in the psychology of human individuals. I agree with Taylor that the novel may reference ‘and reflect the current toxic discourse around asylum seekers’ but I do not see it as liberatory in this respect or helpful.[13] It naturalises the desire to kill the Other who threatens you, however irrational the threat. However I don’t see in the brilliance of the writer’s style anything I can call with Taylor critique and allegory ‘rendered in tender prose’. I hope the samples I have shown prove a prose more merciless in its rhythms and its insistence on the triumph of irrational selfishness over fellow feeling as the ‘political critique’ itself. And the critique is from a subject position is my view that is profoundly antagonistic to social progress or hope of such.
Yet there is a sense in which it might be possible to see Jennings as antagonistic to the irrationality in her character’s story and viewpoint. The quotation I cite in my title suddenly reveals Samuel as someone who may be less embodied than he feels he is, as something as ‘thin’ and ‘formless’ as such pitiful ideas in human history that would be better off ‘removed’.All the best
Steve
[1] Jennings (2021: 17).
[2] Catherine Taylor (2021) ‘An Island by Karen Jennings review – compact allegory of postcolonialism’ in The Guardian online (Wed 18 Aug 2021 09.00 BST) Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/aug/18/an-island-by-karen-jennings-review-compact-allegory-of-postcolonialism
[3] Ibid.
[4] Jennings op.cit.: 88
[5] Ibid: 181
[6] Ibid: 144
[7] Ibid: 145
[8] Ibid: 143
[9] Ibid: 96
[10] Ibid: 7f.
[11] Ibid:15
[12] Ibid: 31
[13] Citing Taylor op.cit.
Steve_Bamlett_blog 
One thought on “BOOKER LONGLIST: ‘The unfolding continued, and he was stretched thin by it, so thin and formless that he might at any moment be taken up by the wind, removed’. A reflection on ‘An Island’ by Karen Jennings (2021).”