Certain subjects may feel daunting for even the most ambitious novelists: the Holocaust is one of them, slavery surely another. But Esi Edugyan’s ambition is extraordinary. Her 2011 novel Half Blood Blues centred on a black musician incarcerated in Sachsenhausen concentration camp; her new one, longlisted for the Man Booker prize, is narrated by the eponymous Washington Black, who starts his life as a slave on a plantation in Barbados.
Many writers and film-makers are delving into the subject of slavery, and each one has to find their own way through a thicket of moral choices. Edugyan has clearly thought about the importance of showing how victims of brutality remain human in the face of constant inhumanity. Big Kit, for instance, a mother figure to Black, is the object of the most vicious violence and yet tries to protect him. After they are separated on the whim of the slave owners, Black witnesses her protecting another boy in a similar way: “How solicitous she was with the boy. I saw how she kept a careful eye on his posture, his manners. I knew instinctively what this meant, the great angry love she held that boy inside, like a fist.”
This is not to say that Edugyan sidesteps the brutality. Black is set to work from the age of two and is tormented by fellow slaves: “Two little girls spat on me. Their ancient grandmother held me down … and cut my sandals from my feet for the leather.” Later, he witnesses the decapitation of a dead slave by the overseer. Then Big Kit’s nose is broken in front of him. Then, unexpectedly, he remembers how Big Kit once kicked out at him and broke his ribs. In the background of these incidents we are reminded of the fate of runaway slaves, held openly in town in large wooden cages, and of newborn babies, brought to the fields with their mothers and left to die.
All these scenes are just a precursor to Black’s terrible maiming – when he is badly burned in an accident – and to his horror when a white man kills himself in front of his eyes. These events unfold with a Tarantino-esque savagery, our narrator staggering through each awful moment.
Yet Edugyan’s prose wraps elegantly over each blow. She has a taste for incessant similes, some of which are memorable, while others reduce rather than increase the immediacy of experiences. Rags blown from the body of a dead man are “like the radiance of some terrible star”, people walk “like shadows” in the field, a scar on a woman’s face is “like a line of paint”, a man whose strength is noted on one page, on another has a body “as ethereal as sea foam, as if it might break apart”.
Black tells his story in the first person, and initially I found it rather hard to believe in his slightly finicky voice. But we learn quickly that he has been chosen by a white scientist and explorer – Titch, the brother of his cruel owner – as his assistant, and part of his education consists of reading classics aloud. That makes his cool diction more convincing, as we see how his journey away from slavery leads him to reframe his own experiences.
Black’s real gift, we discover, is not in language but in art. Inspired by the scientific illustrations that Titch shows him, he quickly becomes a brilliant artist himself. Black practises his drawing in secret at first, but the very first time Titch sees it, he is “almost stricken”. “You are a wonder, truly,” he says to Black, and the next day informs him: “You will be the chief illustrator from now on.”
Genius, like happiness, is tricky to capture on the page, and this is not the first time that Edugyan has attempted it. One of the great achievements of Half Blood Blues was its portrayal of a wildly gifted young trumpeter. Somehow in that book Edugyan managed to get across the effect of a great artistic gift. She approached the talent from an angle – not from the point of view of the genius himself, but from that of his jealous and admiring bandmate.
Here, instead, we are looking at the art directly from the point of view of the artist, and although Edugyan tries to give the flavour of the art Black creates, it is almost too exquisite to be imaginable. At one point he is sketching a narwhal tusk, and the “image seemed less a drawing than a haunting, a vision of the specimen’s afterlife, set down in a ghostly lustre of ink”.
That Black’s talent seems almost magical is echoed by the way the novel’s plot develops once we leave the plantation. Black and Titch do not embark on an ordinary journey; they take off one stormy night in a hot air balloon, crash land on a ship helmed by secretive twin brothers, and arrive in Virginia, at which point Black embarks on some utterly incredible adventures that take him from the Canadian Arctic to north Africa, by way of London and Amsterdam.
As his adventures become increasingly far-fetched, so his language becomes more and more rhetorical. In one typical passage, Black is presented with two unlikely choices for the next stage of his voyage: “Would I choose so again? Well, now that is a question. I will only say that if I have acquired any wisdom from Big Kit, it is to live always with your eyes cast forward, to seek what will be, for the path behind can never be retaken.”
As the book develops, its coincidences and denouements appear to suggest something more like myth than realism. Characters are thought to be dead and then reappear; a man sent to murder Black is killed in front of him. There is a fairytale atmosphere to the novel once we leave Barbados.
The increasingly magical tone is jarring, given the dark realities confronted in the beginning of the book. Now and again Edugyan returns to more grounded discussions of Black’s in-between life, as a slave and a freed man, as a marginalised man in a racist world, and as an artist and scientist whose gifts demand respect even from the white upper classes. She interrogates the impact of slavery not only on the slaves themselves, but also on the white perpetrators. In Barbados, she is good at showing how the white people normalise brutality among themselves, and once the novel leaves the plantation it explores how those who think of themselves as saviours remain complicit in oppression. I found myself wishing she had spent more time examining the repercussions of such complex realities on the inner lives of her characters, and less time on the mazes of her narrative.
By the time we come to the grand denouement, in which Black meets up with one of the key characters who has shaped his life, I was unsure what to expect. Could one look for convincing emotional outcomes, or only another loop of this intricate plot? In the end, I was left uncertain, adrift between the different registers of this complex world. The journey that Edugyan takes us on is fascinating and enjoyable, but rather like the hot air balloon that took Black from Barbados, it sometimes drifts off course.
• Washington Black is published by Serpent’s Tail. To order a copy for £12.74 (RRP £14.99) go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
