Girl, Woman, Other, by Bernardine Evaristo
This book wasn't quite like anything I'd ever read before. One of the reviews on the inside cover (which I did skim-read before diving in, so I'd know what sort of thing to expect) said that it used the form of the novel in an innovative way. Which it certainly did. The blurb said that it presented a Britain that I would never have read about before - a bold claim, but right again. This unique book grew on me and grew on me as I whipped through the pages with increasing pace. I can see why it won the Booker Prize, and after some thought I have decided that I liked it.
'Girl, Woman, Other' is unusual because it doesn't really have a story. What it has instead is twelve characters, whom we read about one after the other. It reminded me of montage theatre, in which a series of distinct, self-contained scenes are presented in succession to the audience. While you can't necessarily draw a straight line connecting each scene to the next, you can draw a ring around them all, because they are all linked by a common theme, and their juxtaposition serves to highlight certain issues.
The issues at play here were predominantly about gender and race. All the characters were female (except one who started female and subsequently identified as non-binary) and most were black. All experienced some sort of oppression based on one or both of those things. Apart from those two features drawing them all together, Evaristo had created a fantastically diverse cast. There were so many different ages - from pre-university, through middle-age, to 93 years old and counting. The characters had different sexualities, different family set-ups, different lifestyles, jobs, ambitions, financial situations, different parts of Britain that they called home.
I really enjoyed how Evaristo created the voice of each character. All twelve chapters were distinctly different in the way they were written. She used subtle variations in tone: for example, Yazz was very sardonic and sarcastic. Sometimes she wrote in dialect: Bummi's chapter, cleverly, was written in Bummi's accent. The kinds of language used were different: Shirley utilised longer clauses and longer words. Each had their own little foibles: the speech of the narrator of the epilogue was smattered with little asides in French.
The other very clever thing about the cast (and this is where my montage-theatre analogy crumples a bit) is that they were actually all linked. Yazz was the daughter of Amma, who was friends with Shirley, who taught Carole and was a colleague of Penelope, and Carole was Bummi's daughter, and Bummi cleaned Penelope's house... The whole thing was an intricate, beautiful, delicately woven web. There were small overlaps, sometimes the characters giving different perspectives on what was actually the same event, or at times giving their thoughts about each other.
Another feature of this book that I don't feel I can ignore here is the writing style. It struck me as pretty unusual from page one: there were no full-stops, no capital letters at the start of sentences, no demarcation of speech from narration. Instead it looked more like poetry, with line-breaks. The words and phrases were set out carefully on the page, so that Evaristo's every intended emphasis could be appreciated. I found this quite unsettling at first, but as I read on, I began to enjoy its lyrical feel. It lent the whole thing a poetic, contemplative mood. It was very graceful. It was like reading thoughts.
In fact, the novel read like a series of monologues. None of it was in first person, but it evoked monologues to me. I think what this came from was the nature of the intimate insights into each person's everyday life and emotions, and the way the narrative voice changed for each person, and that style of thought-writing that glided so seamlessly between narration and speech.
Now the reason this portrayed 'Britain as you've never read it' is because Evaristo was telling the untold stories, that we've not often had the chance to read before. I had never read a book through the eyes of a Nigerian cleaner (Bummi), or a middle-aged secondary school teacher (Penelope), or the only black student in a very prestigious and mostly white university (Carole). It was eye-opening to see these stories unfold before me, to see their perspectives on the world that we all live in. Trailblazing and powerful.
I'll leave the final words to Bernardine Evaristo herself, writing in the voice of Amma. Amma is talking about films here, but I think this works perfectly as an epithet for this book, for what Evaristo was trying to achieve, and, I would say, succeeded in achieving.
'The best films [books] are about expanding our understanding of what it means to be human, they're a journey into pushing the boundaries of form, an adventure beyond the clichés of commercial cinema [literature], an expression of our deeper consciousness.'