An Orchestra of Minorities by Chigozie Obioma

Reviewer: Catriona Troth

What We Thought:

Nonso is a Nigerian poultry farmer, living alone, still grieving the death of his father. One day, returning from market, where he has bought some new hens and a fine white cockerel, he saves the life a woman who appears on the verge of throwing herself from a bridge. Months later, he runs into her again, at a petrol station. They fall in love, but the social gulf between them places an impossible burden on his shoulders and leads him to choices that will have terrible consequences.

An Orchestra of Minorities is rooted deep in Igbo cosmology. The narrator is Nonso’s chi, or spirit – closer perhaps to what Europeans might term a guardian angel, but dwelling within the person rather than watching over them from on high. He recounts the story of Nonso’s life – testifying to the great celestial court of Bechukwu.

The chi has passed through many human lifetimes, which allows him to refer to things far beyond Nonso’s knowledge - such as slavery - and also to the values of traditional Igbo society, that are being overrun by the values of the White Man.

“It is the White Man who has trampled on your traditions. It is he who has seduced the slept with your ancestral spirits. It is to him that the gods of your land have submitted their hears, and he has shaved them clean, down to the skin of their scalps ... He has spat in the face of your wisdoms, and your valiant mythologies are silent before him.”

The Orchestra of Minorities in the title describes the mournful crying of the hens when one of their flock has been snatched by the hawk. Yet his lover, Ndali, is quick to draw parallels to how the powerful exploit the weak.

“They were the minorities of this world whose only recourse was to join this universal orchestra in which all there was to do was cry and wail.”
Nonso is a punchbag to the whole world, suffering blow after blow, indignity after indignity, until he can take no more - which is what has led his chi to plead for him in the celestial court.

Obioma’s language is full of poetic richness while at the same time being grounded in day to day realities – from Nonso’s brutal reaction to an attacking hawk to his worries about dirty clothes and dirty dishes when Ndali first comes to visit.

Shortlisted for the 2019 Man Booker Prize.

You’ll Enjoy This If You Loved: Under the Udala Trees by Chinelo Okparanta, Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki

Avoid If You Dislike: Stories with a supernatural element

Perfect Accompaniment: Ugba (traditional Igbo dish)

Genre: Literary Fiction

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This Brutal House by Niven Govinden

Reviewer: Catriona Troth

What We Thought:

Niven Govinden’s This Brutal House is set amongst the New York Drag Ball scene, where rival Houses, led by House Mothers, compete to outdo each other in costume, attitude and above all voguing.

The book opens with a group of the House Mothers staging a silent protest on the steps of City Hall to highlight the lack of response by the authorities to the disappearance of a number of their ‘children’. This section is written in an unusual first-person-plural collective stream of consciousness:

“They have used ‘no’ and ‘unfortunately’ and ‘unable’ as pacifiers, shushing us the way a nanny calms an agitated baby. We are unwanted noise, not to be seen or heard.”

Collective silence has become the most powerful voice they have.

The narrative then passes on to the novel’s main protagonist, Teddy. Teddy was once one of the House Mothers’ children, one of many who fled rejection from their own families and found a home amongst the drag queens. But though he competed for them for a time in the Drag Ball scene, he was never really comfortable as a performer. Instead, he became the devoted follower of one of them, Sherry, while the Mothers supported him in getting the education that would allow him to break free.

Sherry is now one of the missing, and though Teddy believes he knows what happened to her, he will not tell the Mothers because he cannot bring himself to crush their hope.

The education they helped him get has led him to work for City Hall and because of his known connection with the Mothers, he is charged with monitoring the protest and bringing it to a close. He does everything he can so smooth things over – but will a fatal misjudgement destroy everything he has sought to protect?

The voice of the Caller periodically breaks through the narrative, holding forth for pages at a time:

“She walks. She works. She vogues. Triple threat, bitches...”

This Brutal House shows the sadness behind the glamour and flamboyance of the Drag Ball Scene – young people rejected by their biological families and discounted by the authorities; older ‘Mothers,’ nurturing, yet ageing inevitably in a world that values youth and glamour...

Dark, disturbing and hypnotic.

You’ll Enjoy This If You Loved: The Beasts of Electra Drive by Rohan Quine, Jonny Appleseed by Joshua Whitehead, POSE (FX TV series)

Avoid If You Dislike: Passages in stream-of-consciousness style

Perfect Accompaniment: Tacos

Genre: Literary Fiction, LGBTQIA+ Fiction

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The Pact We Made by Layla AlAmmar

Reviewer: Catriona Troth

What We Thought:

“I realized a long time ago that, in a lot of ways, my body is not strictly mine. It’s a shared entity, something to be criticized, guarded, commented on, and violated.”

The Pact We Made is a stunning debut novel by UK-based, Kuwaiti-born novelist Layla AlAmmar.

AlAmmar slowly peels back the layers of Kuwaiti society – a society in which young men and women drink and take drugs and party - just so long as their parents never find out. Where women go to university and take high-powered jobs, but are not considered adults until they marry. Where the police can be called if a couple is seen embracing in public and where arranged marriage is still the default.

“We like to think of ourselves as a well-traveled, cultured and thoroughly modern people. Xenophiles who welcomed expats long before Dubai ... We’re the ones who brought cellphones and commercial airlines to the Gulf. We’re the ones in constant search for the new, the wondrous the techtastic.”

The narrator is Dahlia, one of a trio of life-long friends who, as little girls, once made a promise to get married on the same day. But now they are in their late twenties. Two of them, Mona and Zaina, are married but Dahlia continues to turn down suitor after suitor, to the fury of her increasingly desperate mother.

This might be another tale of young women negotiating modern life in a traditional society, but Dahlia, we learn, was abused through her teenage years by her mother’s cousin. And it is the lasting consequences of that abuse that reverberate throughout the book.

On the surface, all appears to be well, but underneath every day is a struggle.

“It sometimes felt like I as put my past in a hole and spent my time shoveling dirt into it, but like some cheap horror movie, it kept trying to claw its way out ... So, I sailed the world’s longest river; fake it till you make it, and all that. Normal behaviour is a language you can learn”
This balancing act cannot be sustained forever and in the end Dahlia will be driven to a devastating choice.

AlAmmar’s language is fresh and original without ever being flowery. Time and again she catches you with a phrase that takes your breath away. The constant panic Dahlia feels, for example, takes on the form of a demon – the yathoom – who “comes in the night, sits on your chest, feet splayed in a squat, growing heavier and heavier until you wake because you can no longer breathe.”

An extraordinarily powerful, gut-wrenching book that lays out in no uncertain terms the case for  women to have control of their bodies and their lives.

You’ll Enjoy This If You Loved: Celestial Bodies by Jokha Alharthi, When I Hit You by Meena Kendasamy

Avoid If You Dislike: Stories centred on the aftermath of sexual abuse

Perfect Accompaniment: Goya’s Los Caprichos and a cup of saffron tea

Genre: Literary Fiction

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The Confessions of Frannie Langton by Sara Collins

Reviewer: Catriona Troth

What We Thought:

"No doubt you think this will be one of those slave histories, all sugared over with misery and despair? But who’d want to read one of those?" 

Frannie Langton was born a slave in Jamaica, educated for his own amusement by her master, then brought to London and given by to another man. Now she is in Newgate gaol, accused of murdering that man and his wife. And she is writing her confessions. But is she really the ‘Mulatta Murderess’?

Sara Collins darkly gothic historical novel explores, among other things, the way the institution of slavery distorted every human relationship, even that between mother and child. It exposes the ugliness of the roots of 'race science' and the vile length to which some were prepared to go to disprove the humanity of black people.

While still a young child, Frannie has been compelled to act as assistant to one such ‘scientist’. Being complicit in his experiments allows her a bare edge of privilege over the other slaves, and has given her a kind of Stockholm syndrome, so much so that she is outraged when she is given away to his erstwhile colleague, Benham.

But Benham has a wife, a troubled woman in some ways as trapped in her life as Frannie herself. Their relationship – passionate, sensual but bent out of shape as much by their power-imbalance as by Madam’s opium addiction – will lead Frannie to her cell in Newgate.

As Catherine Johnson’s Freedom did for young readers, The Confessions of Frannie Langton reclaims the long history of Black people in England. It shows up the hypocrisy of some, at least, of the anti-slavers, as well as those, like Benham, who imagine it is possible to ‘reform’ the institution.

"What no one will admit about the anti-slavers is that they’ve got a slaver’s appetite for misery, even if they want to do different things with it."

Even though her life hangs in the balance, Frannie refuses to dish up suffering to satisfy the appetites of the public, or to use her thrall either to opium or to her erstwhile slavemaster as convenient excuse. Whatever she has or has not done, Frannie will own it.

Collins’ writing is rich with period detail without being weighed down by it.From the slave plantation – called, with the bleakest of irony, Paradise – to the Benhams’ London town house, to the city’s brothels and boxing rings, each time and place is vividly evoked.

A stunning debut that is an unsurprising winner of the Costa First Novel Award.

You’ll Enjoy This If You Loved: Washington Black by Esi Edugyan; The Long Song by Andrea Levy; Beloved by Toni Morrison; Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe

Avoid If You Dislike: Gothic Flavoured Historical Fiction

Perfect Accompaniment: Raisin cake, golden and sweet with sugar

Genre: Literary Fiction, Historical Fiction

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