Maya Jaggi
Admiring Silence by Abdulrazak Gurnah (Hamish Hamilton, R109,95)
Following the strange enchantments of his Booker-shortlisted Paradise – set in an East Africa on the brink of World War I – Abdulrazak Gurnah’s new novel grapples with an African-English present.
In crisis, an unnamed schoolteacher in south London takes stock of his life. With only a precarious sense of belonging, he is assailed by intimations of mortality (a “buggered heart”, in his doctor’s helpful diagnosis); a crumbling relationship; and a change of leadership in Zanzibar that prompts an anxious visit “home” after 20 years.
He is Gurnah’s most unreliable narrator to date. He embroiders romanticised childhood tales to woo a fellow student, Emma Willoughby, and baits her Blimpish father with ludicrously parodic “Empire stories”. His biggest lie paves the way for abject farce.
The novel’s outrage at the “petty hardships” of Africa and its satire on obscenely self- serving leaders is uncompromising. Yet Gurnah is acutely aware of the hazards of raging against post-colonial Africa – the “overcharged ironies” in labelling those in charge “cannibal louts”.
His hero’s pandering fictions to the Willoughbys reflect the dilemma of the writer coming from what he terms with irony the “darker corners of the world”: to play up to expectations of the “exotic” with anodyne nostalgia, or risk confirming bigotry through harsh realism?
The author’s own choice is clear: “We keep silent and nod – for fear of our lives – while bloated tyrants fart and stamp on us for their petty gratification.” It is tyrants who commend muteness in their subjects, like the ayatollah with his fatwa – “another admirer of silence”.
But the hero’s stories also have a self- protective function. They shield him from guilt and recrimination and from the wounding power of words. His traumatic visit home banishes fearful silences within himself and his family, as he overcomes the obtuse resentments of childhood.
Despite its biting humour, Admiring Silence is in some ways a muted novel, an anguished meditation on home and loss that refuses the comfort of resolution. While it eloquently charts the cumulative changes wrought by geographical displacement, it also reveals the loss of love as a kind of exile.