Reading Group: Black Moses by Alain Mabanckou

Warning: Plot spoil

Margeret's latest suggestion was this widely acclaimed and International Booker long-listed book set in the People's Republic of Congo in the aftermath of the Marxist-Leninist Revolution of the late 1960s. In 1970 our first-person narrator is a boy in a harsh orphanage, taking succour from the pastoral approach of the visiting priest, Papa Moupelo. It is Papa Moupelo who has given him his name, a long name in  Moupelo's own language, Lingala, which means 'Thanks be to God, the black Moses is born on the earth of our ancestors' - inevitably shortened to Moses - which imbues Moses with a fundamental if primitive sense of mission and justice. His sense of injustice will lead him to avenge his bullied best friend, Bonaventure, with chilli pepper, which earns him the nickname 'Little Pepper' (the title of the original French edition). One day Papa Moupela fails to appear: the new, anti-religion regime has taken over the orphanage, and there is a suggestion that he may have been disappeared. The harshness increases. Eventually Moses escapes with two others for the metropolis of Pointe-Noire (leaving Bonaventure behind), where their only choice is to join a street gang of petty thieves. Eventually Moses finds a kind of peace with a house of prostitutes, and the madam finds him a job in the docks and a hut in which to live. But then, during a purge of 'Zairian whores', Moses turns up one day to find the brothel house razed to rubble and the prostitutes 'disappeared'. Distraught, Moses descends into madness, vainly consulting various doctors, eventually dressing himself as a latter-day Robin Hood and setting out with a knife to avenge his 'little adopted family'.

On the whole we found the book an interesting and mainly enjoyable read. It is written with a kind of naif yet skewering wit we all enjoyed - Moses refers to his 'kilometrically extended name' - and Ann commented on the skill of the translator, Helen Stevenson, in capturing it. However, we all found the book 'front-heavy', as I think Clare put it. It is divided into two Parts of equal length. Part 1 deals with the time in the orphanage, covering in some detail the few years of Moses' early adolescence and the fascist idiocies of the regime. The pace is consequently measured, and in fact Doug said he found the section repetitive. It ends with Moses's escape. Part 2 opens when Moses has already been in the street gang for three years, and goes on to cover the years right into his middle age, its narrative sweep thus pacier and more eventful.  There seems no real narratorial significance in the initial leap, and the absence of any portrayal of Moses's arrival in the city and his adjustment to life there seemed to all of us a lack after the detailed treatment in Part 1. In fact, as Doug pointed out, Moses's escape at the end of Part 1 seems rushed and inadequately explained, as if the writer was just impatient to get on with the street scenes, and it is perhaps telling that most reviews give the impression that the more eventful Part 2 constitutes the main bulk of the book.

Doug said that although Moses's mix of childish, sometimes clumsy, yet insightful vocabulary is amusing, there are sentiments and a political understanding expressed in Part 1 that wouldn't in fact have been available to a young boy, and which smacked of the author's own voice and perspective. Others agreed. I thought this could be excused to some extent by the fact that, as we discover at the end, the whole thing is a memoir written by Moses in a penitentiary for the criminally insane, and the problem perhaps was that there was no indication of this at the start to make us read the book in that context.

At the end of the book, Moses is back where he started: the penitentiary is built on the sight of the orphanage, and Bonaventure is still there (using a different name, rather than that of the father who abandoned him), still obsessed with the planes flying over and expecting one some day to take him away. That, as someone pointed out, should make for a very sad book - and on one level it does - but there is a feel of survival in the lively prose of this fictional memoir, and of course the very act of writing it constitutes for Moses a triumph.  

Our archive discussions can be found here and a list of the books we have discussed, with links to the discussions, here 

Reading group: Conversations With Friends by Sally Rooney

This book which has sold millions of copies worldwide was suggested by John as, I think, something of a provocation, since our group is deeply suspicious of hype, and several people in our group had consequently avoided reading it. Once it was suggested, however, everyone decided that we should give it objective attention and read it.

It is the first-person narration of Frances, who relates how, one summer when she and her female fellow student and ex-partner Bobbi are performing their poetry together in Dublin, they meet an older couple, the reasonably well-known and glamorous photographer Melissa and her actor husband Nick. Frances embarks on an affair with Nick, and the novel charts the push-me-pull-you course of their relationship, and the effects of it on their relationships with the other two.

Reactions to the book in the group were interesting. All but one of us who had read it found it a fairly quick, indeed compulsive read, with a smooth prose that pushes things along at pace. Margaret liked the book unequivocally, but she was the only one to do so.  Clare said she did enjoy it as she read it (others, including me, agreed) but when she got to the end she questioned whether it had amounted to very much in terms of substance and theme. Others had substantial criticisms, and Ann said she really hated the book and wouldn't have finished it had it not been for our impending discussion.

What Ann said she hated was the characters - she really disliked every one of them - and much of the discussion centred on the character of the protagonist and narrator Frances. It was generally agreed that Frances was a very damaged character - self-consciousness and vulnerability seem to be what characterise her, and she self harms, pinching herself and even cutting a hole in her leg as a way of dealing emotionally with situations. However, people pointed out that this is simply laid out for the reader and never really addressed on any deep psychological level: there is no real indication of why she should be like this, apart perhaps from the fact that her father is alcoholic, with one possible hint that she and her mother had needed sometimes to avoid her father. Introducing the book, John had said that he found it interesting for Frances's masochism. At one point, when they are in bed together, Frances asks Nick to hit her, although he refuses. Clare pointed out that that's a known pattern, that abuse in childhood can lead to masochism, but none of us felt that the book made any conscious or satisfactory connection between these things.

I said that I thought a curious thing about Frances's character was that although she seemed so vulnerable much of the time, there was in fact a certain arrogance about her, although everyone else in the group was surprised at this idea. It is Frances, after all, who first makes a move on Nick, kissing him at a party with his wife nearby, and there is surely an arrogance about the fact that when she sends off her first short story after being introduced to an editor, she doesn't even bother reading through the draft before doing so (and of course it's immediately accepted.) As a result, a lot of her self-consciousness - the constant care about what impression she is making on people, what she should wear etc - seemed to me to tip over into self-obsession. When she and Bobbi are first invited to Melissa's house, as they travel with her in the taxi, Frances's thoughts are for herself rather than their new acquaintance: 

I felt excited, ready for the challenge of visiting a stranger's home, already preparing compliments and certain facial expressions to make myself seem charming.

There's a lot of obsession with how beautiful and interesting Melissa keeps making Frances look in her photographs, however surprised Frances purports to be by this, constant stress on what she (or Nick) is wearing at each pivotal moment, and when Melissa's sponsor-publisher visits while the four are staying in her French house, her only interest for Frances, and, more importantly, for the novel, is how much attention she pays Frances (none, until she finds she is a writer). I have read quotes from reviews that call  this novel funny, and I assume those reviewers were taking the characters' self-obsession as ironically intended, but our group had read it all as deadly serious. As the novel develops, Frances suffers severe and debilitating period pain which turns out to be caused by endometriosis, which can in no way be seen as ironically intended, but which seems to me to be the novel over-egging, indeed over-dramatising her vulnerability, since it is not integrated in any deep way with theme or even in fact plot. 

Doug said, to the agreement of others, that in fact you never get to know the characters, they are cyphers. The novel is titled Conversations With Friends, but Doug said 'What conversations?' The title may be ironically intended since there is a lot not said between the characters and consequent unknowing, but it is problematic that there is little in the way of character-revealing dialogue between the characters. So little, too, is actually described, so that there is not much sense of atmosphere, and Doug and others said that as a result they just couldn't engage. Ann said she hated the way the novel simply named areas of Dublin without giving any indication of what they were like, which meant that if you didn't know them, which she didn't, you couldn't envisage them or know their atmosphere.

People said that they didn't know what the novel was supposed to be about. I said that my main problem with it is that I think a political point is intended which is not in fact fulfilled. Bobbi and Frances espouse leftwing politics, and I feel it's meant to be politically significant that Frances is relatively poor while the other characters are not: it's a fundamental part of her vulnerability. But the plot, such as it is, does nothing to promote the politics, indeed it undermines them, as it is focussed without critique on the retrograde scenario of a woman masochistically in thrall to a man. (It is true that Nick, it will turn out, has deep emotional problems of his own, but again these are not addressed.) Another problem for me, and others, was that the novel is lacking a narrative arc. Throughout, the relationship between Frances and Nick waxes and wanes and waxes once again, and there is never a sense of denouement or revelation. Everyone agreed that they thought they had got to the end of the novel at a point when the relationship finally seems over (and when we could perhaps draw a conclusion about the meaning of it all), only for the final scene to upend this, and for the last words of the novel to be Frances's phone request to a clearly compliant Nick: 'Come and get me'.

Margeret protested against our negativity, saying that the book was beautifully written. Mark, our ex-member back on a visit, pointed out that being beautifully written on the sentence level is not enough for a novel, that there are many other elements, such as structure, theme etc, that need to be successful, and Doug added, and yes, it needs to convince. Margaret laughed and said that she was convinced and she was engaged by the characters.

However, Ann asked why on earth the novel has been so very popular and successful, and others suggested that perhaps it appealed to a younger demographic than ourselves. I did wonder afterwards if it is the very self-obsession of the characters that had endeared them to a generation of TikTokers obsessed with lifestyle and image.

Finally, John noted the book's debt to Edna O'Brien's The Country Girls (which we discussed here), another novel about two young girls, an introspective narrator and her more outgoing friend, in which the narrator becomes involved with a married man - and which Ann said roundly was the far superior book.

Our archive discussions can be found here and a list of the books we have discussed, with links to the discussions, here