The Darling CD

Rating:
Summary: Caution: Russell Banks is my favorite!
Review: Russell Banks is a master at evoking a time and place. In his latest novel, The Darling, the reader is in Africa. It is the mid-1970s. We can see the Liberian coastline, smell the palm oil mingled with sweat, hear the screech of the chimpanzees and feel the claustrophobic heat. More importantly, we experience western Africa through the lens of a privileged, white American woman, Hannah Musgrove who is "the darling" of the title. Banks tells this historical and political story, most of it in flashbacks, skillfully and successfully through the point of view of this woman.
Hannah is a fascinating character, full of tensions and contradictions. She has lead a sheltered life of wealth as the daughter of a famous and intellectual man, yet her politically liberal parents have instilled in her (sometimes seemingly in spite of themselves) a sincere empathy for the poor and oppressed. She is cold and calculating in her relationships with others yet has an almost mystical connection with the chimpanzees she comes to know and love and is passionate about her politics. Hannah makes some decisions, which she feels she needs to contextualize and explain herself to the reader in order not to seem "scary". To dwell on the plot, however, does this gem of a novel a disservice. Banks is simply a genius at conveying a difficult story and doing it so well that we care deeply about it.


Rating:
Summary: Story of a self-absorbed woman going with the flow
Review: Hannah Musgrave is a narcissist. Since her youth, she has been entirely absorbed with herself. In college, like many true believers described by Eric Hoffer, the emptiness of her own mind and life is filled by devotion to a cause. In Hannah's case, it is the SDS and Weathermen. Definitely not a leader and not a well-disciplined follower, Hannah plays a small role in the Weater underground's assault on democracy. For this she is indicted and, too cowardly to face the consequences of her actions, hides out.

On a lark, she and a fellow-traveler take off for Africa. Since Hannah is incapable of forming real relationships with other people, she splits from her comrade Zack and winds up in Liberia - where the real story begins.

Hannah meets a minor functionary in the Liberian government, weds him, bears him three children and, coincidentally, works for a sleazy project using chimpanzees for ersatz medical research.

Banks paints a chilling portrait of Liberia and its repulsive politics. There's the usual anti-American, anti-capitalist rant, but Banks fails to convince that these are the causes of Liberia's ruthless dictatorships, poverty and mass mayhem.

Through it all, Hannah remains blissfully self-absorbed. Love her husband? Well, not really. Love her children? Sort of, in a kind of detached way. Hannah returns to the US just in time to see that her mother - in Hannah's eyes - is a total ditz and watch her father die. Does she feel devestated? Well, not really: you see, she really wasn't close to her father.

Zack, her fellow escapee, shows up again at the apartment of Hannah's previous woman lover. Together they help a jailed Liberian opposition politician escape from a US prison. Hannah, of course, believes he will bring socialism to Liberia.

Hannah returns to Africa, her exile rescinded by Liberia's current leader. She is liberated now and tells her husband that she doesn't want the housemaid/mistress living with them any longer; tells her three boys that they must wash their own clothes and announces that she is founding a chimpanzee sanctuary.

Needless to say, reality closes in with Liberia's civil war. Well, one of Liberia's many civil wars. Hannah's husband is beheaded before the family's eyes; the three boys run off and Hannah is told by the CIA that she was duped into helping the Liberian rebel escape from prison and must flee.

Hannah ends up owning an upstate New York farm and, once more, returns to Africa, seeking her sons and herself. She finds neither.

Hannah, frankly, is one of the most selfish people I've encountered in fiction. She makes Scarlett O'Hara look like Mother Theresa.

Banks, however, weaves a thoroughly engrossing story. His depiction of the pure ugliness of life in Liberia is chilling. Hannah, though repugnant to me, becomes interesting in Banks' prose, though never appealing.

Jerry

Rating:
Summary: "In the game of life, all I expected was to come out even"
Review: Having just seen and reviewed Hotel Rwanda, I come to Russell Banks' The Darling with the troubles of Africa visually etched in my mind like never before. There are many similarities with the stories, and although they may be set in different countries, the political and war torn strife that has affected both countries over the years is totally analogous. Whereas, Hotel Rwanda tells of the civil war in Rwanda over a period of days and months, The Darling's canvas is much broader, and provides a sweeping picture of Liberia from the mid 1970's to the early 1990's.

The story is not just of one woman's journey of self-discovery, but of a country undergoing profound turmoil where corrupt politicians rule, where exploitation of the poor is de-rigor and where Western Governments, particularly the government of the United States - constantly meddle and manipulate installing puppet rulers to achieve their own ends. War and civil unrest is never far from boiling over in this desperate, distraught country that was founded by ex American slaves.

The Darling is a terrific novel, even of some of the plot twists stretches the realm of possibility. Grand and epic, it's not just an astute character study of a flawed woman but also a political type espionage thriller, which is, at once, beautifully written and also totally complex in theme and tone. Hannah Musgrove Sundiata is fifty-eight and runs a farm in Upper New York State. One day she decides to go to back to Liberia to find the three sons she'd left behind in the civil wars 11 years before. Her husband was Liberian and a minister in the Government of Samuel Doe back in the 1970's, but he was brutally murdered after the overthrow of Doe's government by the rebel forces of Charles Taylor and Prince Johnson.

Told in the first person, Hannah narrates the story with the events totally filtered through her eyes, and much of the narrative is an extended flashback into Hannah's past. The reader soon learns of her eccentric youth - "an idealistic girl with a passion for justice." Her parents were politically left of center and contributed to Hannah's radicalization. She marched in the civil rights movement, then the Vietnam War protests. She became a semi-notorious fugitive, producing fake IDs, bombs, and Molotov cocktails for revolutionary acts that never get committed. Hannah became a part of the Weather Underground.

Escaping to Liberia, Hannah finds solitude and a sense of worth when she marries Woodrow Sundiata, and has three boys with him. She also finds purpose in running a sanctuary for orphaned chimpanzees, which she nicknames "the dreamers." Much of the book involves Hannah's self reflective analysis of why she went to Liberia in the first place, and why she decided to return. Hannah freely admits "we return to the place in order to learn why we left" and she often feels that she is "a river running through the lifeless, soundless landscape of her dry little family."

Hannah's thoughts anchor the novel - she's portrayed as often weak and selfish, and only interested in people who can help her achieve her own ends. Whilst trying to survive amongst the war torn streets of Monrovia " a white American woman married to a Liberian" she stays inside her bubble, staying deliberately detached, rigorously uninvolved, all the way through a series of cascading events, one falling hard upon the next. The Darling is an ambitious novel that is less affective when it comes across as an essay on historical discourse. The reader, through Hannah's eyes, learns much about the history of Liberia, but sometimes it all reads more like a university thesis than a bonafide work of literary fiction. Mike Leonard January 05.


Rating:
Summary: Can't wait for his next book!
Review: If you liked CloudSplitter you will love this one as well. I know I really enjoyed it, every single page! Like the earlier tale of John Brown, this one give us a lesson in history in a captivating fictional format. I wish he would turn out books a little more frequently!

Rating:
Summary: No One Ever Said Banks was Fun
Review: No one ever said Russell Bank's novels were fun or optimistic. This one follows the negative suit. Don't read it if you are looking for giggles.

The narrator is an old radical now in her fifties. She returns to Liberia where she spent several years after being a rather small time operative in the Weathermen radical underground. She tells her story of leaving America one step in front of the FBI and fleeing to Liberia where she marries, has children and is in the epicenter of revolutions and coups. She (the pronoun is easiest to use because she uses three names during her story) is brutally honest about herself and her relationships. This is about her only endearing quality. Other than that minimal quality, she is not a likeable character at all.

Truly self-centered, she constantly puts herself on a pedestal as a big-time radical, someone important to Liberian revolutionaries, attractive to diplomats, etc. As the yarn unwinds, the reader begins to realize that she is not the big-time actor she thinks. At times this realisation seems to touch her surface, but she quickly submerges it. Her rants about her mother may be most telling. Her own self-analyses at times gets tedious, however.

Along the way there is some great insight into the Liberian revolutions/coups/civil wars and the corruption of puppet governments. I found these aspects of the book - the historical notes and insights to be the exceptional. There is also an ironical twist at the end of the book that is very satisfying.

Although I found the book to drag a bit in the middle, it progressively got better and the last fifth or so was by far the best. Again, this is not beach reading, but a well-written look at radicalism in its forms from the somewhat delusional American form to the concrete killing in the streets radicalism of twentieth centruy Africa.



Rating:
Summary: A Gripping Tale of Africa
Review: Once started, I could not put this book down and flew through it in a few days of spare-time reading. Written in the first person by the character Hannah, it is both an engrossing study of an extremely complex personality (her) as well as a mini-education in the history of Liberia. The character of Hannah is not a likeable one but I found her story to be facinating, and, unfortunately perhaps, I did see some of my own detachment from relationships reflected in hers. This is not a book for the faint of heart as it contains some explicit sexual situations as well as graphic violence. This was the first book I have read by this author and it certainly has sparked my interest in reading more of his books.

Rating:
Summary: Out of Africa ... a tale of dislocation
Review: Russell Banks has made his mark writing about mad people in significantly unsettled worlds, from the Pulitzer Prize-finalist "Cloudsplitter" (about violent abolitionist John Brown) to "Affliction" (about an alcoholic's insidious effect on his circle of dysfunction.)

But in his newest novel, "The Darling," he subtly reverses his field with provocative results: His heroine is a significantly unsettled character in a mad world. What might seem a nuance is actually quite startlingly different.

Africa has popped up in the well-traveled Banks' stories before. The setting for some of the storytelling in his 2001 short-story collection, "Angel on the Roof," it provides an atmospheric context for complex exploration of black and white, head and heart, man and beast, love and survival ... sanity and madness.

Banks' themes of terror, self-doubt, the collision of races (if not worlds), the relentless passage of time, and political violence are not the stuff of modern commercial book-publishing, but he keeps coming back to them with incisive style.

Banks remains one of America's most readable literary authors. He's always tackled grand issues with grand prose, and his muscular narrative generally wins. Often compared to Graham Greene, Joseph Conrad or William Faulkner -- not the most accessible trio of literary writers ever assembled -- Banks sets himself apart as more clear, if not more relevant, for today's readers. Readers who fell headlong into "The Sweet Hereafter" or "Continental Drift" will not be disabused by "The Darling."


Rating:
Summary: The Darling by Russell Banks: A caricture of Liberia
Review: The Darling is a pot-boiler which caricatures young people who are trying to make a better world and the nation of Liberia which has suffered at the hands of Americans since its founding in 1822 (sic! this is just one of Banks' many errors and misconceptions about the country). The only thing Banks gets right is the evil of the major players in the civil war (US government, Doe, Prince Johnson and Taylor). A decent people trying to overcome a heritage of exploitation deserve better than a sensationalist novel using their plight to make a buck.

Rating:
Summary: A trip to Africa
Review: This book is an amazing and educational journey. Russell Banks takes us on a sumptuous and thrilling trip of perfect prose into Africa, through dreams, nightmares and through the life of Hannah Musgrave Sundiata. The characters in this book are so vividly depicted, so tangible that for the five days that I read this book, I became Hannah. I walked with her, felt her pain, saw things from her eyes and lived her amazing life. She will stay with me forever. Mr. Banks is a maestro with a pen. Bravo!

Rating:
Summary: A masterpiece
Review: This books enters the soul and mind of a woman like no other I have ever read, and is set in a fascinating political-social context. I could not put it down.