Well, then we can eavesdrop on their thoughts. But what if they endure such menial lives that they have no thought, only living by mechanical habit? Then, we must peer into their daydreams – and their nightmares. But, what if these dreams and nightmares are so flayed and fractured and so confused and dispiriting that they do not form a whole or easily conduct language? This is the difficulty face by artists seeking to reach society’s invisible people and it is the problem that defines Austin Clarke’s novel, More.
Clarke’s approach, like many writers before him, is to reach out to a sufferer in pique of extreme distress. He writes of four days in the life of a single mother, Idora Morrison, who is a Barbadian immigrant in Toronto. When she finds that her son has not returned home one night, Idora gives in to her fears for his descent into gang life. Under this weight of despair, she holes herself up in her basement apartment. Using the third-person narrator, Clarke writes of Idora’s outpouring of regrets and fear. Crushed hopes and simmering nightmares are revealed to the reader in a series of snapshots of memory, slipping between past and present. The result is a disorientating, strained but compassionate novel, which wrestles passionately with its Herculean task.
In 2003, Barbadian Canadian novelist, Austin Clarke, was awarded the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, for his novel, Polished Hoe. More earned Clarke further accolade in the form of the Toronto Book Award. Yet, in spite of these awards, More, like much literature concerned with the travails of the destitute immigrant life, is not a widely read book. This should not come as a surprise to anyone who has read and wondered how, for example, James Baldwin’s Harlem novel, Go Tell it on the Mountain can be so intense and beautiful and, yet, so detached and, even, unaffecting. Or how, Monica Ali’s tale, Brick Lane, can reach such heights of tragic-comedy, Crushed hopes and simmering nightmares are revealed to the reader in a series of snapshots of memory, slipping between past and present yet not strongly engage.
Capturing the voice of the invisible people of society is no easy task for a writer. Even once one has got their sufferer to open up, to cease to be a bovine striving to get through the hopelessness of day after day, there remains the problem of isolation. Clarke wants Idora Morrison to speak for herself and reveal the pain of the Caribbean immigrant in her words. Yet, Morrison, trapped in her flat has no-one to speak to. Sincere conversation is truly the portal, as well as the lungs, of the soul. When Clarke writes dialogue his novel lights with a brilliance and Idora breathes. These moments are sadly brief, for Idora is alone with her thoughts, in the dark.
Like James Baldwin in his novel, Go Tell it on the Mountain, Clarke resorts to delving into sulphurous clouds of memory to find his subject’s voice. Idora Morrison reveals her helpless rage against men; her husband has failed her and left her. Her son is being tempted, she fears, into the criminal life that cloaks their ‘ghetto’ existence. She reveals her loneliness and terrible regrets for her colourful, carefree life in Barbados; she speaks of her consolation and contradiction in her religion. Clarke is also able to find Morrison’s sense of inferiority in this alien, white land and the corresponding confusion of bitterness and aspiration.
Yet, this miasma of intense suffering tends to feel detached to a reader who has not suffered like Idora. The problem is that Clarke is already observing Idora as a third-person. Stepping back into the past with her is another step of detachment. The reader is thus two steps of detachment away from Idora’s suffering. Reading of her regrets and hopes is somewhat like watching a movie with the sound all but silent. The reader sees such extreme despondency and unfairness – but cannot truly feel it and cannot truly empathise.
The difficulty of There is little continuity to More as Clarke follows Idora’s distressed flights of fancy and fear. hearing Idora’s voice is only compounded by the natural fragmentation of the memories. There is little continuity to More as Clarke follows Idora’s distressed flights of fancy and fear. Arguably, this is yet another step of detachment away from the Idora by the reader. Idora’s voice becomes still quieter.
Admirably, Clarke tries his best to lift Idora’s cadence. He colours her recollections with figures of speech. And, roughly a third of the way into the book, he begins to record conversations that she is having with herself. Thus, he switches to the first-person to give the reader Idora’s voice unadulterated. Yet, still Idora is withdrawn from us. Clarke’s figurative language sometimes jars with the visceral intensity of Idora’s feelings. Meanwhile, Idora’s soliloquies ramble with flighty nostalgia and worry but without the necessary detail to connect meaningfully with the unfamiliar reader.
If More can be said to ‘fail’ to take Idora’s voice of suffering beyond its parochial boundaries of the wage-slave immigrant life in Toronto into the international mainstream, it fails admirably. It fails predominantly because its subject is in a place where even the vaunted reach of language struggles to go. It certainly is no shame to have fallen short where the literary brilliance of James Baldwin, also, arguably, did so. It just goes to prove that artists have to think harder, try harder, to unearth those that are buried deep and unknown in society’s rubble - our invisible neighbours.
