I think I might be the last person I know to read this. Whilst I have had it for a while I had been put off by the structure. I worried it was read as a short story collection than a proper multigenerational saga. That worry turned out to be partly justified, though not in the way I expected.
Plot in a Nutshell
The novel starts in Ghana in the 18th century with two half-sisters who do not know the other exists. One, Esi, is captured and after time in the horrific Cape Coast Castle, transported to America as a slave. Her sister Effia remains in Ghana, ‘married’ to the British governor and therefore connected to the trade in a different way. Each sister’s story is told independently and in a single section. Each section thereafter visits one of the women’s descendants offering insights into the historical periods and the impact of the slave trade.
Thoughts
My concerns about the structure held up in part. Each character gets perhaps 30 or 40 pages to tell their story and in that time you don’t always get to fully explore and understand who they are. We meet each at a moment in time. As such for many that means there is parts of the story we don’t see and not always clean resolution. This slight choppiness means it doesn’t feel like a rich immersive saga in the way that I would usually think of that genre.
Overall, though, I think Gyasi did a really good job of making each character feel fleshed out and real. Some I liked much more than others and would have liked to have seen more of, or a different part of their story. Some were enough to experience in the pages we got. Each one also functions as a way into experiencing a particular period of history. The writing is good enough to do that without flattening anyone mere ciphers of history. It’s deeper and more complex writing than that. History is after all really the story of individual people and this structure made that point subtly.
I also thought the premise of having one family line remain in Ghana and one in the US was smart. It opened up different framing and really showed the butterfly effect on the generations that follow.
Slavery was handled sensitively unflinchingly. The British and other European colonisers are shown as perpetrators of the slave trade but we also see a more complex picture of West Africa – not only victims but also participants, even as millions suffered and European control expanded. There is a respect for the horrors in the writing but it is not overtly sentimental. In so doing Gyasi makes a powerful point that not only the trade itself was abhorrent but so to is the complex legacy it has left behind in systems that control and the intergenerational trauma that remains.
“There’s more at stake here than just slavery, my brother. It’s a question of who will own the land, the people, the power.”
The impact of this is what I think also makes me challenge this being considered a traditional family saga. There is a real sadness that each generation does not truly understand the ones before. By the time we’re several generations in, the reader knows more about the family than the characters themselves. The theft of knowing who they are and where they come from is heartbreaking. A sense that personal history is forever irrevocably tainted by the shadow of slavery.
One thread that didn’t work as well for me was the strain of mysticism running through the Ghanaian chapters. There are hints of a family curse, a recurring bad luck, some heavy imagery around fire and the woman who births the two original sisters. I never quite got a handle on what it was doing, and it felt at odds with a book that otherwise handles its heaviest themes with a light, careful touch.
The ending was another weak point for me. The characterisation remains strong, but the plotting feels tidier or even a little trite compared to earlier chapters, but does offer a hint of much needed hope.
This was an incredibly ambitious book. I am glad I pulled down off the shelf and one I might keep an eye out to see if the author decides to expand any of those perspectives at a later date
A Final Note
I hadn’t realised this was a first novel until I went to find out more about the author. This short interview was interesting especially how a visit to the Cape Coast Castle inspired the book.
Whilst I didn’t quite enjoy the mysticism here, I found it worked better in The Murmur of Bees by Sofía Segovia or The Last Witch by C J Cooke