Sheila Roberts on The New Suffolk Hymnbook
An edited version of the novelist Sheila Roberts’s review of The New Suffolk Hymnbook appeared in The Weekender on Saturday. Here’s the link:
And here’s the review in full:
Eight sections, each titled with the name of a character, plus a final “Notes toward a portrait of the district” comprise the structure of Ben Oswest’s magnificent and highly original novel. Each section or chapter could stand alone in terms of situation, characterization, and conflict. What binds them together is the District of Suffolk, a space so vividly defined that it is open to many implications: historical, social, political, and metaphoric.
The novel’s first section, “Jonah”, is a poignantly realized, richly inter-textual account of the last teaching day of a Shakespeare scholar. While the narrative is a complex one – making leaps from Jonah’s spoken lecture to his own inner debate and bitter memories, and then to his awareness of the District itself – the prose is superbly cadenced and accessible. Jonah provides his students with knowledge, through interwoven allusions to several of Shakespeare’s plays, of the convolutions of good and evil exercises of power.
Jonah is a resistance-fighter against power ploys and the use of skin colour to define character traits. His section is, as it were, a prologue to the chapters that follow, each of which dramatizes – often comically but not always – the consequences of racist thinking.
For low-grade racism smudges many sections of the novel. In “Miss V”, an otherwise kind teacher, prepared to spend time spinning yarns for her kids before setting them their maths problem, turns out to be a bigot, uncomfortable in the presence of “the darkies” in her class. And in “Piety”, the title character is daily made aware of his blackness by his secretary’s inability to call him “Mr.”, an appellation she offers to the white men in the firm.
Gender powerlessness, meanwhile, is satirically played out in a section called “Jane”. Jane has been given permission to do some research at a Catholic mission home. Her inner life, broken by marvelous patches of dialogue, is articulate, self-aware, inventive, and clear. When her research leads her to an over-large cemetery near the mission, Jane wonders whether it might contain a mass-grave. Thereafter, the priest loses interest in her work and will not converse with her. She makes a biting criticism to him, without deference to his priestly function, then tosses her notes at him and drives out of Suffolk in a kind of muted joy.
The forms of female stereotyping, and indeed women’s exposure to perverse male domination, even from strangers, comes as a disturbing and inexplicable surprise for the reader of “Jarvis”. What on the surface seems to be Ben Oswest’s variation on the theme “Love in a Railway Carriage” turns into something quite different. Two men sit with a beautiful young blonde woman in a train. Soon, a form of competition sets up between the men, each vying for some acknowledgment from the girl. Ben Oswest renders with admirable clarity and evocative images the three streams of thought. The girl is the prey; each man hopes to be chosen by her so as not to lose his very necessary sense of domination over women. When she finally speaks, asking what the next station will be, the answer comes from one of the men, and she is tempted to become sexually embroiled with him. Instead she alights and puts her fantasies aside – or so it would seem.
Jarvis, like Piety, is a man with good prospects. That very day he has a job interview at City Hall. The rest of his day is so ordinary that the appearance in his apartment of the girl from the train, trussed up in a pillory, seems to shock him when he returns home. There can be no explanation for her presence: “He studies the girl. So too he leaves her, to live in several different moments and places, pausing briefly in each, flickering before the girl like a deck of cards, shuffling through scenes until he has exhausted them and has arrived back where he started.” The girl recognizes Jarvis and “terror and hope” vie for expression upon her lips.
As Jarvis tries to attach metaphoric and even spiritual meanings to the trussed girl, he is interrupted by a boy calling himself Matthew. Matthew is a constant visitor, coming regularly to cadge a meal. Jarvis prepares a light dinner and they sit at table across from each other to eat. Jarvis wonders how the boy would react if he was shown the girl. But the boy “shoulders his bag, ducks and vanishes like a superhero into the night”.
Matthew might be the novel’s Secondo character in one of his many mysterious transformations. The three “Secondo” stories, all structured in a narrative style of co-mingling voices and interrupted thoughts, expose the black street-urchin, Secondo, to rough treatment and contempt. His is the most irrepressible character in the novel, but his courage is at times diminished. He is beaten by others, and almost burnt to death in his hut for trying to save a young girl from rape. More than being the homeless, powerless, mystery child of the community, he is given brief but significant appearances in many of the novel’s other chapters.
It is hardly possible to do justice to Ben Oswest’s immense ability to exploit different scenarios, narrative styles and preoccupations; or to his extraordinary facility with language and metaphor. With a second, even more pleasurable reading, the reader discovers the stories growing in unified and unexpected ways, and Suffolk takes on the ambiance and immediacy of a real place where people of all kinds live.
— Sheila Roberts
