A young boy, Salim the narrator, grows up in Zanzibar with his mother and her brother; his father lives on his own down the road. Then uncle goes to England, gets married and begins to work for the Embassy; Salim goes to live with him to make the most of his opportunities in England. Salim's life is a serious of casual happenings, almost a picaresque, and it is not until his mother dies in Zanzibar that he begins to understand the shameful secrets at the heart of the family.
It begins and ends in Zanzibar; the middle section is in England. The first line is "My father did not want me." and the central mystery revolves around why the narrator's father left the family home to live by himself. But, perhaps, the psychological narrative explores how the narrator learned to accept the frailties and actions of his parents; this is perhaps the biggest lesson of growing up. So the events that take place in England, where the maturing narrator fails to achieve his potential, and experiences love and heartbreak, despite their seeming randomness, are key to his development.
There is a political narrative as well, which is to do with colonialism. Following the imperialistic British 'protectorate' of the island there was a revolution which led to a socialist government. These events interact strongly with the narrator's family, leading to his grandfather's exile; the subsequent corruption of the revolutionary government also has a huge influence on the family.
It is beautifully written in elegant and elegiac prose. The settings are crystal clear: "These were streets built for the shuffle and slap of human feet." (Ch 1). The characters are vividly real. It has a first person narrator and it is written in the past tense.
Selected quotes:
- "My father did not want me. I came to that knowledge when I was quite young, even before I understood what I was being deprived of and along time before I could guess the reason for it." (Ch 1; first lines)
- "Fathers, just like everyone else, have to deal with the relentless manner in which life conducts its business." (Ch 1)
- "European colonial officials ... lived in huge old Arab houses by the sea, and marked their ceremonial imperial rituals with white linen uniforms adorned with fantasy medals." (Ch 1)
- "I was fourteen years old then and a person can feel old and wise at that age even when he really had no idea, and what he took for wisdom was only a precocious intuition arrived at without humility." (Ch 2)
- "'That is not a smile, that's a grin,' Uncle Amir said. 'Next time I take a photograph of you, I want you to compose yourself so that your personality comes through, not your teeth'." (Ch 3)
- "What is the point of literature? I think that the person who asks that question will not find my answer convincing anyway." (Ch 4)
- "I did not tell him that my mother was the one who sent me here and that something broke in my father;s life a long time ago and I was the debris of their disordered lives." (Ch 4)
- "I was required to read books that opened up the world for me and made me see how much roomier it was than I had imagined." (Ch 5)
- "In repose after pleasure her face was slack-jawed with satiety." (Ch 5)
- "It seemed that human sorrow was always based on regret and pain in the past." (Ch 5)
- "She carried herself as if she was a beauty and her self-love made her provocative." (Ch 7)
- "It was pointless pedantry, like poetry, a delight in complexity, a relish for detail, a stubborn refusal to forget what was known." (Ch 9)
- "It was a conceit of the time that the existence of anything, a river, a lake, a mountain or a beast, could not be assured unless a European person had seen it and wherever possible named it." (Ch 9)
- "At a certain age you don't understand how long life is." (Ch 10)
- "Some people have a use in the world, even if it is only to swell a crowd and say yeah, and some people don't." (Ch 11; last line) There seems to be a reference to The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock by T S Eliot where the narrator, looking back at the pointlessness of his life, says "I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be; Am an attendant lord, one that will do To swell a progress, start a scene or two,"
January 2020; 261 pages
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