In other countries, Alice Munro’s book Who Do You Think You Are? was published under the title The Beggar Maid, which is unfortunate – it sucks something essential from the book – since ‘who do you think you are?’ must be the most Canadian title, the most Canadian question. ‘Who do you think you are?’ we used to say when I was growing up, sometimes followed by, ‘the Queen of England?’ A demand posed of those who dared to express desire, pride or some other innocent form of self-determination. The royal reference is at once scornful and reverent – colonial jokes, with their complex subtexts and subjects.
‘Who does she think she is?’ or ‘She really thinks she’s something, doesn’t she?’. It’s usually a she – a particular, subtle yet existential kind of shaming – a diffuse embarrassment, for an ambiguous wanting. And, in fact, an unanswerable question. What would one say?
Munro’s book of linked stories, about a girl and then woman named Rose, begins and ends with this question. ‘Royal Beatings’ is a story about Rose’s childhood in Hanratty, a small town in Southern Ontario – West Hanratty, is where they live, the ‘poor part of town’ that runs from ‘factory workers and foundry workers down to large improvident families of casual bootleggers and prostitutes and unsuccessful thieves.’ Flo, Rose’s stepmother who runs a general store, is irritated with Rose, and says she’ll get her father to give her a ‘royal beating’: ‘Oh, don’t you think you’re somebody, says Flo, and a moment later, Who do you think you are?’ Rose protests, as she does in the final titular story of the book, recalling a teacher who asked her the same thing after she stands in front of the class and flawlessly recites a poem. ‘The lesson she was trying to teach her was more important than any poem,’ Rose later understands, ‘and one she truly believed Rose needed. It seemed that many other people believed she needed it too’.
The lesson is never entirely clear, but it has something to do with wordless prohibition and shame – a feeling, texture, substance, a character in itself that runs through all the stories in the book. Rose is always a fish out of water, always wondering if she has managed to finally become someone else, or if people can still see something true, fated, unbearable, shamefully hopeful at her centre. Munro’s subtle brilliance in rendering Rose’s life – from childhood poverty to scholarship girl to marriage, mother, divorce, to TV interviewer, university lecturer, primetime actor – is that each story proceeds with self-aware, sometimes pastiche and parodic prose. The narrative wrestles with itself to find a different language in which Rose might live, hoping, like Rose, that if it performs with enough commitment and brio, a new character, a new life will come into being.
I was disturbed, several years ago, to read a review of a new Munro book in which the critic described her entire oeuvre as depressing, shabby, grubby, filled with poverty and dull lives that inevitably descend into interminable sadness; as well as an obsession with a kind of ‘realism’, by way of her obsessive interest in domestic interiors. Which, of course, is actually an interest in class and the social, material, cultural forces that shape an individual and how she experiences the world. Could he not see how funny the books were? Or that the characters themselves do not believe their lives poor or sad, but rather simply their lives: complex, disappointing, bizarre, stupid, radiant, just like anyone else?
Rose is deeply comedic, awkward, hopeful, full of accident, bad jokes, transparent attempts at cleverness and sophistication, of which she is intensely aware. Munro’s narrative tone is at once immersive and retrospective, rueful – a version of what it’s like to remember one’s past. ‘The thing she was ashamed of, in acting, was that she might have been paying attention to the wrong things, reporting antics, when there was always something further, a tone, a depth, a light, that she couldn’t get and wouldn’t get,’ Rose realises, in the final story of the collection. ‘And it wasn’t just about acting she suspected this. Everything she had done could sometimes be seen as a mistake.’
My mother, also a writer, gave me Munro to read as a young person – a gift, a treasure – and also an insight into her own work, her own past and identifications. I have sometimes thought of these stories as stories about my mother – who was born, like Munro, in Seaforth, Huron County, Ontario – although they are not. I have read them so often that sometimes I cannot remember what is mine and what is hers – Munro’s, Rose’s, my mother’s. Did I go to that party in Kingston, with pretentious staff and students from Queen’s University? Did I tell the off-colour joke that fell flat and offended other guests? Was it me who wore those embarrassing clothes, too much eyeshadow, laughed too loudly? Did I want love, to distraction? Do I believe that a story can be found anywhere, hidden in the barest folds of any moment? And who, after all, do I think I am?
There is an anecdote that Munro initially wrote the stories in Who Do You Think You Are? as separate, each a different woman, but woke one morning with the idea that they were in fact all the same woman, and so she became. How time passes, what makes a person. The simple, extraordinary idea that the woman in these stories is and is not the same Rose is a Rose is a Rose is a Rose.
WD editor Moriah Richard outlines the short short form and answers the question, “What is flash fiction?”
“For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”
You may have heard of this six-word short short story; it’s often attributed to Ernest Hemmingway, though his authorship of the piece has never been confirmed.
Six words. So many emotions.
This is the goal of flash fiction—also referred to as micro-fiction, short short stories, or sudden fiction. Instead of focusing on plot or character development, the writer instead focuses on the narrative’s movement. Every sentence, every word, should reveal something to the reader that we did not know before. It should also hint at a larger backstory than what’s revealed on the page.
While flash fiction has been around for centuries (think of Aesop’s Fables or other collections of folk tales), it has recently garnered a lot of attention from writers and publishers. Despite this, the form itself isn’t well-defined. The general consensus among writers and publishers is that anything between 5 and 1,500 words is flash fiction.
Beyond that, flash fiction is employed by writers of all genres; horror, science fiction, fantasy, thriller/suspense, literary, YA, and even romance writers have all produced some excellent work in under 1,500 words.
To help you better understand the form, here are some excellent articles by flash authors on the WD site:
Last year was a difficult one, but there were at least 40 up sides: debut authors, with fresh voices and viewpoints, whose work offered us perspective or escape. As the calendar turns over, the problems we faced last year still linger, but a new group of writers are set to introduce their work to readers across the globe.
Whether you’re seeking a revealing memoir about family secrets or a short story collection about women all named Sarah, the first half of 2021 offers something new for everyone.
Robert Jones, Jr.’s debut novel is about a forbidden romantic relationship between two Black men enslaved on a Mississipi plantation during the Antebellum. Jones explores queerness through a new lens that has rarely been explored in literature. The Prophets is one of the most powerful Black queer historical novels ever written.
Torrey Peters’s first full-length novel is about searching for connection and family while navigating the challenges of gender. Ames thought detransitioning would give him a happy, unremarkable life, but it may have wrecked his relationship. His partner Reese wants a child, but doesn’t know how to have the family with Ames that she envisioned with Amy. The result is a domestic drama filled with tangled lives for modern times.
A decade after leaving Argentina, a man returns home under less-than-ideal circumstances: the first woman he loved is dying. His return isn’t a rosy homecoming, but one where he must confront the ghosts of his past while grappling with the man he has become in America.
Set in present-day Los Angeles and a 1990s British boarding school, Ellie Eaton’s book carefully examines the destructive relationships of teenage girls. At the center is Josephine, a freelance writer who was one of the private school’s biggest bullies. Revisiting the shuttered school in her 30s, she begins to dig into her own past and grapple with the decisions she made decades ago.
In her debut memoir, Nadia Owusu invites readers into her globe-spanning childhood and young adulthood. After her mother abandoned her as a toddler, Owusu’s father, a U.N. official, brought his children and his new wife from continent to continent, until his death when the author was 13. This memoir follows her to Rome, Dar-es-Salaam, London, Kampala, New York, and elsewhere as she comes to term with her family tragedies and her own identity.
After her mother dies during alcohol treatment, Geller returns to the Florida Navajo reservation where she grew up and finds a suitcase packed with photos, diaries, letters, and personal ephemera. Using her experience as a librarian and archivist, Geller digs into her family history, mixingher own narrative with the story she derives from her mother’s documents.
Throughout these sublime stories, Dantiel W. Moniz explores love and loss with grace. The stories center on Floridian women and girls trying to find their place in the world—from a teenager resisting her restrictive church to two sisters transporting their father’s ashes.
Just after the 2016 election, a woman’s relationship falls apart when she discovers her boyfriend is an anonymous online conspiracy theorist. Her own truths and beliefs begin to unravel after she flees to Berlin and catches herself becoming more secretive and manipulative with those around her.
Te-Ping Chen’s story collection is an expansive look at modern China, as it struggles with the influence of the past and envisions a new future. Chen offers both realism and magical realism throughout the collection, which allows her to tackle her vision of Chinese culture with both clear-eyed practicality and dreamlike allegory—for instance, a strange new fruit that brings on troubling memories of the Cultural Revolution when eaten.
Novelist David Tromblay’s debut memoir investigates his relationship with his alcoholic father, and the long shadow cast on his family by the boarding schools in which Native American children like his grandmother were indoctrinated and abused. He explores his family legacy of anger and trauma to figure out how he survived to become the man he is.
Sebastian Mote is a 35-year-old gay high school teacher who just wants to settle down and have kids and maybe a white picket fence. Why is that so hard? At a wedding, he runs into his childhood friend Oscar Burnham, also a proud gay man, who dismisses Sebastian’s yearnings for a marriage and babies as heteronormative. Oscar is upset at the rise of bachelorette parties at gay bars and the mainstreaming of queer culture. Sebastian and Oscar are both attracted and repelled by each other’s life choices, both struggling to find their place and to envision a meaningful future for themselves. Set in the weeks after the Supreme Court ruling legalizing same-sex marriage, Let’s Get Back to the Party is an insightful novel about what it means to be a gay man in a rapidly-changing America.
Jakob Guanzon’s novel follows a down-in-their-luck father and son who are evicted from their trailer and living in a truck. Abundance takes a critical and unsentimental look at the harsh effects of poverty in a country that’s seemingly teeming with abundance.
A brother and sister come together in their childhood home after their mother passes away to pack things up and move on with their lives. The brother is on a self-destructive path and the sister tries everything in her power to save him, including coming up with a bet that may save his life.
The Recent East is a multigenerational story that starts with a family who escapes East Germany for upstate New York. After the Berlin Wall falls, their daughter Beate Haas is told that she can reclaim her parents’ abandoned house in their hometown of Kritzhagen.
In this essay collection, for readers of Ta-Nehisi Coates and Jia Tolentino, Jesse McCarthy covers topics ranging from trap music to Kehinde Wiley’s paintings. Who Will Pay Reparations on My Soul? highlights his keen eye as he observes the intersection between art, race, literature, and politics.
“Beware their ambition, their ugliness, their insatiable hunger, their ferocious rage.”What does it mean to be a monstrous woman? To be a woman who is too ambitious, too hungry, too angry, too ugly to fit into the societal norms dictated by our patriarchal society? In her book, Electric Literature’s editor-in-chief Jess Zimmerman analyzes feminism through eleven female monsters from Greek legends to build a new mythology: one where the hero is a monstrous woman with power and agency.
Sarahland is a queer experimental reimagining of selfhood; nearly every story in this collection is about a woman named Sarah. Sam Cohen tackles so much in this wide ranging book of Sarah origin stories, as one Sarah plays dead for a wealthy necrophiliac while another uses her Buffy fan-fiction to process her emotions.
Set mainly in present-day Miami, Gabriela Garcia’s novel is about Carmen who harbors ghosts from her past and her daughter Jeanette who is struggling with addiction. The two make decisions—including taking in the daughter of a neighbor who was detained by ICE—that begin to tear their relationship apart. Their relationship implodes when Jeanette travels to Cuba and learns unforgivable truths about her mother from her grandmother who stayed behind.
Pitched as The Glass Castle meets Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, this Southern memoir follows J. Nicole Jones as she grows up in a family that swings from extreme wealth to extreme poverty in South Carolina. On the outside, their family is perfect, but behind closed doors, violence and anger erupt.
The sudden death of two teenagers reverberates through a small town in Washington State. The mystery deepens with the arrival of a pregnant 16-year-old stranger who might be the key in solving what happened.
A multigenerational novel that spans decades and continents, The Parted Earth looks at how the Partition of India and Pakistan left an indelible mark on three generations of women. Enjeti crafts a compelling story about the search to uncover ancestral secrets and the quest for belonging.
In their satire about social media, Alex McElroy provides a darkly humorous dissection into public personas. The novel follows a failed social media influencer and a struggling actor who create The Atmosphere, a cult-like rehabilitation center for toxic white men hoping for absolution. However, like their careers, things don’t go as planned and take a turn for the worse almost immediately.
We all have mythologies that we build around our parents. Lilly Dancyger (editor of the anthology Burn it Down: Women Writing About Anger)worshiped her father Joe, a brilliant East Village sculptor in the grip of a heroin addiction. After her father’s sudden death when she was a young girl, Lilly becomes self-destructive. Years later, she uses his artwork to reexamine the mythology she built about her father and to understand who exactly was Joe Schactman.
Zakiya Dalila Harris tackles #PublishingSoWhite in her novel about two Black women working in book publishing. Editorial assistant Nella, the only Black employee at Wagner Books, is thrilled at the prospect of finally having a kinship with a fellow Black colleague when Hazel is hired and becomes her cubicle-mate. But not long after Hazel’s arrival, threatening notes start appearing on Nella’s desk.
In this introspective Hong Kong-Canadian novel about grieving and difficult familial relationships, an unnamed narrator examines the ramifications of growing up in an “astronaut” family with a father who stayed in Hong Kong as a breadwinner while his wife and children moved permanently to Canada.
Bewilderness follows Irene and Lucy, coworkers in a pool hall in rural North Carolina. The two young women, already magnetically attracted to each other, form a bond after an impulsive plot to exact revenge on a customer who was being a creep to them. Their codependent friendship intensifies over the highs of popping opioid pills and scamming drug dealers to fuel their growing addiction. But what happens when the person who has been enabling your addiction wants to get clean and leaves you behind?
Struggling playwright Jonah Keller is living in a shitty Bushwick apartment and barely getting by on his menial restaurant pay. Buteverything seems finally to be going his way after Jonah carefully crafts a “chance” meeting with a Pulitzer prize-winning writer so he can further his ambitions. As their torrid affair spills over into the summer in the Hamptons, Jonah begins to notice all might not be what it seems with his older lover. The predator quickly becomes the prey in this tense page-turner. A riveting queer novel, Yes, Daddy takes a critical look at the way power imbalances play out in relationships.
Hannah Cryan waited in the Transit van up in the Curlews. Setanta Bromell had parked so that the van was secreted in the shade of the Forestry pines and could not easily be seen from the road. He had taken the dirtbike from the back of the van then and headed down to Castlebaldwin pissing smoke. His morning’s ambition was to rob the petrol station there with a claw hammer. Setanta was her fiancé of these recent times and, despite it all, the word still rolled glamorously to her lips.
It was the second Monday of May. She was a little more than four months pregnant. The whitethorn blossom was decked over the high fields as if for the staging of a witch’s wedding. Already the morning was humid and warm, and snaps of wind cut from the hillsides and sent the blossom everywhere in vague, drifting clouds. Even with the windows shut, her eyes streamed, and she could feel sore pulses in her throat like slow, angry worms. Setanta was thirty-two years old to her seventeen and it was not long at all since he had been her mother’s fiancé.
That’s the way it goes sometimes with close-knit families, he said.
Don’t even fucken joke about it, she said.
Setanta’s plan—if it could be held up to the light as such—was to get into the petrol station just after it opened, show the claw hammer and start roaring out of himself. As she waited on the mountain, Hannah jawed helplessly on her gums and tapped her phone for the time—it showed 7:17 a.m. and then died.
Fuckwad, she said, and threw the phone to the dash.
Castlebaldwin was a ten-minute scramble away and he’d been gone for more than twice that. The van had laboured to climb even the low mountains of the Curlews and she tried not to think deeply about its viability for escape. The drone from the N4 down below was becoming more steady, the morning traffic thickening to a stream. It was difficult to believe that just last night she had laughed with excitement as she took the first baby bump photo for her Insta and Setanta’s needle buzzed jauntily as he tattooed a lizard on his left calf. He told her in a voice scratchy with emotion that he loved her and that their souls were made of the same kind of stuff. She licked his earlobe and showed him the selfie and he cried in hard, gulpy jags. She did not remark that the lizard looked more like it had frog dimensions, really, nor that the rapid blinking effect had returned to Setanta’s left eye.
She had asked him to leave the keys of the van but he would not. When he had a plan worked out his mouth fixed into a tight hard rim like a steel toecap. In truth, she knew well that Setanta Bromell of Frenchpark was not making solid decisions lately. She sneezed and reflexively laid a hand to her belly to reassure the visitor. High slants of sunlight now breached the top of the Forestry pines and showed a stretch of scarred hillside rising to Aghanagh bog. The gorse on the higher hills was lit from the inside out an electric living yellow. Dead for half a year the Curlews were like some casual miracle reviving. Setanta Bromell said that May, always, was the number one month of the year for going mad.
Passing through the narrow kitchen of her mother’s house, four and a half months previously, he had placed a hand to her skinny hip and turned on the cow eyes and that was enough. Her mother when she’d been drinking slept like the dead. By night, it had become the custom that Setanta and Hannah would talk. She liked to listen to his stories about work. He told her about the man with the huge swastika on his back that Setanta had remodelled into the ancient flag that showed in quadrants the symbols of the four proud provinces of Ireland: the red hand, the triple crown, the hawk and dagger, the harp.
Better a “Ra head than a nazi he said.
There was a quick russety shimmer athrough the yellow gorse as a fox moved for her den. Hannah’s lip moved softly at the sight and made a wordless murmuring. Now the birds were going dipshit unseen in the hedges, in the pines. Setanta Bromell owed her mother, like, four grand? His eyes rolled up as if to see the stars when he came.
She waited. The Transit van smelled like a stale morning mouth. She listened for the growls of the dirtbike climbing the backroad but no sound rose above the birds, above the N4’s sea-like drone, above the hot wind in gusty snaps from the hillside.
Her hands lay folded loosely across her belly. She tried to do what the lady doctor at the clinic had told her to do in the panic times—she felt out her breaths on an individual basis. You had to get yourself on intimate terms with every breath that passed through your body. You had to listen to each breath as it travelled and smooth out its journey. In the Transit she sat and concentrated as well as she could but still her breaths came short and wildly.
Now the sunlight broke fully across the canopy of pines and came starkly through the van. Hannah closed her eyes against it to see dreamy pink fields on the back of her lids. She clawed at the greasy vinyl of the seat. She listened, and in the gaps between the wind it was just the birds in conference, in the high springtime excitedly, a vast and unpredictable family.
Still on the air there was not a whisper of Setanta Bromell’s dirtbike.
He did not drink much. She’d say that for him. He would sit up late while her mother slept. For a long while, they had sat at opposite ends of the L-shaped sofa, as far apart from each other as they could get, which in itself had signaled a situation. He said that particular stretches of ground had for him a lucky vibration. He said the Curlews most of all. Once a prime buck had skittered from the ditch and lurched into the side of the van and dropped stone dead of the shock and all Setanta had to do was haul it home and hang it to be skinned.
These are the type days I get in the Curlews all the time, he said.
He spoke often of fatedness and of meant-to-be’s. Then came the 3 a.m. of his soft, slow hand in the kitchen, and it was a case of smoochy-smoochy and throwing each other up against the walls before anyone knew the fuck what was going on.
She pulled down the sun visor for its mirror. She had a face on her like a scorched budgie. She detested her new self. By nature like a stick, she was taking on weight with the pregnancy. Beneath her breath, she made the words of a Taylor Swift song for distraction but the song did not take.
News headline: there was no sign of Setanta Bromell on no fucking dirtbike.
She saw him with his limbs splayed on the petrol station floor. She heard the ratchety cruel tightening of the cuffs. Or maybe the Belarussian who worked the morning shift had just hopped the counter and grabbed the hammer and laid Setanta out flat with a single bop to the broadside of the head. The Belarussian was a massive fuck who must have weighed about as much as a cement mixer. Setanta’s plan had gaps and weak spots.
Hannah Cryan climbed from the van and walked from the Forestry pines onto the backroad. By now the morning had clouded over and the vast spread of the whitethorn blossom across the hillsides and the high fields and the ditches made an ominous aura as it moved in the wind. Once, as a child, she had been slapped across the face by her mother for bringing an armful of the blossom into the house. The whitethorn flowers so much as passing the threshold was a harbinger of certain death in the family. By about the Tuesday of the next week. She had meant it as a gift for her lovely young mother.
As she sat on a five-bar gate up in the Curlew mountains the great meanness of the morning descended on her. She hummed a string of four or five notes against the meanness, not knowing where they came from nor how.
The plan was that they would drive through the day and the north to the ferry at Larne for Stranraer, and from there descend through Scotland and the Borders— she watched his lips move as he recited solemnly the steps of it—through Cumbria to Yorkshire and to his cousins in the city of Wakefield. Over the nights, as they conspired, the word “Wakefield” had taken on the burnish of legend. She saw the city lights spread out. She imagined a child with a North of England accent and a neat little flat in a tower block. She saw herself and Setanta in the bed eating toast and taking photos of each other—his muscles flexed; her eyelashes fitted— and the toddler gurgling along in pure happiness on the rug on the floor. Setanta Bromell might soften his cough in Wakefield, she believed, and think harder about his decisions, and forget all the nonsense with the lizards and the claw hammers.
The day was up and about itself. The fields trembled.
Catastrophe was a low-slung animal creeping darkly over the ditches, across the hills.
Her mother had found her one careless morning under the throw on the sofa, topless and asleep in the hot, emotional clutches of Setanta Bromell. That had made it a morning for the annals. Since then, they had slept in two sleeping bags zipped together at his King Ink studio. The studio was located over a butcher’s shop in Boyle. It reeked of their wild love and animal death. Setanta was 18 months behind on the rent and had a notice to quit and lately this involuntary blinking in the left eye.
But desperate times, he said, very often turned out to be disguised opportunities.
Wakefield, as a shimmering prospect, was held aloft before her like a priest’s chalice.
By now she knew that he would not come back from Castlebaldwin. On the five-bar gate of a tiny farm high in the Curlew mountains she again closed her eyes for the pink fields. She went into a dream. If the moment was never-ending it might not even exist. She felt the presence of something very old and uncaring on the air. An insect’s steady keening from the ditch was incessant like a hopeless prayer or the workings of his needle. He had tattooed on her inner thigh a swallow in flight.
In the black times make you think of summer, he said.
In the black times, she thought, it’d take more than a badly-drawn swallow aiming for my fucken gash.
He was probably in the holding cell at Ballymote already. He was already on first name terms with every guard in the vicinity. Setanta Bromell was—and here the words came unbidden, as if from an old ballad recalled—already in chains. The new life within twitched with nervous expectancy. As if it knew already of all the disasters to come.
Hannah Cryan came to ascend from herself. Above the green fields and the whitethorn blossom moving in the morning wind, above the stone walls and the Forestry pines, above the inland sea of the grasses, above the broken drone of the motorway, above all of this she measured out the stretch of her seventeen years. They had been mean and slow-feeling years. She was almost as old as the century and felt it. Her man in jail and a child at the breast—it was all playing out by the chorus and verse.
Her legs weak, her step uncertain, feeling lightheaded and frightful, she trailed back to the van and climbed into it. She sucked the last warm dregs from a bottle of water on the dash but her thirst was not sated. Often he kept six-packs of sparkling water from Aldi in back of the van. For his digestion, he said, which was at the best of times troublesome.
They had been mean and slow-feeling years. She was almost as old as the century and felt it.
She got out and opened the back doors and rooted around among her fiancé’s astonishing detritus. She found no water but she did find the ten euro claw hammer from Simons Brothers hardware.
The scales of the morning fell away.
She stood by the side of the van with the claw in her hand.
She swung it hard and precisely to extract the eyes from the brute, lying face of Setanta Bromell. That the sockets might dangle and his lively tongue loll.
She hadn’t the strength to climb back in the van. She sat on the ground on the pine kernels and cried for a short while. A few months ago she had been skin and flint and edges and points—she had been hard—but now she was softened and plush like a lazy old cat. It was foreign to her. She felt slowed and mawkish with it. He had softened her merely with glances, his touch and words. More than softened, she had been opened.
On the mountain time loosened, unspooled. The fields blinked.
The gorse whispered. Morning?
It must have been coming by now for noon. If she had the legs to carry her, they might take her the five miles down to Boyle. But if she did not get past this moment, she would not have to face the next.
She looked out across the high fields. Just now as the cloudbank shifted to let the sun break through the whitethorn blossom was tipping; the strange vibrancy of its bloom would not tomorrow be so ghostly nor at the same time so vivid; by tacit agreement with our mountain the year already was turning. The strongest impulse she had was not towards love but towards that old burning loneliness, and she knew by nature the old tune’s circle and turn—it’s the way the wound wants the knife wants the wound wants the knife.
Now she heard before its sound even broke on the air the scratch and meek resolve of her mother’s Corolla. It was neither taxed nor insured. It was taken out only at moments of high emergency. These were not yet so few as her poor mother might have hoped.
And yes, here it came, inevitably, around the bend from the backroad into the Forestry pines, and Hannah felt a volley of tiny kicks within.
Lou-Lou Cryan was a hollowed woman now. She was like a reed from the drink and the nerves. She stepped from the Corolla and came soft-footed and stoically through the gloom of the pine trees to take her daughter in her arms.
Oh you poor fool, she said. Oh you poor sweet fucking fool.
Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient is a famous novel, one turned into a famous film. Published in 1992, the novel co-won the Booker Prize with Barry Unsworth’s Sacred Hunger. The English Patient is so famous, it barely requires a summary here: its settings are among the finest in the literature of the past fifty years – the Sahara, the bombed-out villa hiding in the Tuscan hills, and some of its vignettes (faithfully recreated in the film) are iconic: who can forget the penis sleeping ‘like a seahorse’ on the very first page, or the young nurse feeding her patient a plum she has chewed for him? Or the lonely game of hopscotch late at night, or the piano being played on its side in the rain-damaged library, or the Cave of Swimmers, found under a rock shaped like a woman’s back? I first read it when I was fourteen. I had been in England, a semi-foreign country, for a few months, and when I was asked where I was from, I had no easy answer, and found the question daunting. It was a narrow box I could not fit my family into. The English Patient helped me to reject the premise implicit in the question. It lifted the lid off my understanding of the world, and showed me what else a novel, and indeed a person, could be, and the metrics by which they might exist.
The patient of the title is a man whose organs are shutting down one by one after suffering full-body burns which have left him purple and featureless. He fell from a plane in flames into the Sahara. He was rescued by Bedouins, smoothed with a salve of the ash from peacock bones, and carried through the desert on a makeshift palanquin. His presumed nationality is down to him speaking English at a triage station.
He is cared for by a young Canadian nurse, barely twenty, who has effectively deserted her unit as they carry on north through Italy – she could not bear to see him moved, and the two of them are waiting for him to die. They are joined by a thumbless thief-cum-spy and fellow Canadian, Caravaggio, and, later, a Sikh sapper by the name of Kip, tasked with clearing the surrounding area. It is the spring, then the summer, of 1945.
Morphine injections are a formal device, allowing us to slip back to before the war, to a desert exploration expedition in North Africa, which flickers and pools silverly as a mirage. It is the prose’s pellucid sparseness that I love, its taut aridity and economy, its gorgeous soft-spokenness, the sense one gets that each word was weighed in the hand before it was placed on the page. Ondaatje once revealed in an interview that he still writes with pen and ink, and you can tell; you can feel the movement of nib on paper, its slow scratch and smudge. His novels remind me of Walker Evans’s photographs of tools, how they ennoble their subjects and impress their handfeel upon on the viewer. Ondaatje does such this with the smell of a dog’s paw, the defusing of a bomb, a blowjob.
The film, directed by Anthony Minghella, appeared in 1996, and is responsible for the plot being recast mainly as the love story between Katharine Clifton (Kristin Scott Thomas) and Count László Almásy (Ralph Fiennes), which takes place on the eve of World War II, against the backdrop of the Sahara and the souks of Cairo. It is an emphasis which has carried back across to perceptions to the novel, but to do so is to sell it short. Yes, The English Patient is a love story, and a war novel, among the finest examples of either, but it is also one of the best and most beautiful disquisitions to be found on the nature of belonging.
The novel is composed of texts which trouble their own reading, make us question the very aims and conventions of reading: the cipher of the patient’s burnt body; the desert, considered void according to European epistemologies; and the patient’s sole possession: a copy of Herodotus’s Histories. The latter is something between a commonplace book and a scrapbook: he has ‘taken cigarette papers and glued them over passages that were of no interest’, he has added notes, written in the margins, he has even pasted in ‘a small fern’. This is perhaps the text of canonical history, into which the minutiae and ephemera of an individual life have been inserted. It is the interface where different historical scales collide and interrupt one another. It offers a historiography for the postcolonial, though the term ‘postcolonial’ has suffered something of the same fate as the Argonauts’ ship according to Roland Barthes’s observation: an overly capacious term, ever-modifying while staying somehow the same, the best thing we’ve got for now.
The narrative’s presumed thrust is to solve the mystery of the patient’s identity – is he the Count Almásy, desert explorer and perhaps spy? But this teleology loosens, unravels, and ultimately defers itself. The world that Almásy yearns for is one without nations, where many different histories are allowed to intermingle; where provenance is of little importance.
Hana and Caravaggio have reappeared from The English Patient’s most immediate predecessor, In the Skin of a Lion (1987), a novel like a mural – or a fresco – of the immigrant lives and labour which built Toronto. The English Patient is not a sequel, per se, to In the Skin of a Lion, more like a pendent piece, or the second of two hinged and painted panels. In the Skin’s epigraph offers a clue for The English Patient and the modes it models: ‘Never again will a single story be told as if it is the only one’, a quote from John Berger’s novel G. (It is also the epigraph of Arundathi Roy’s The God of Small Things, and reappears in a different guise in Ondaatje’s latest, Warlight (2018): ‘Your own story is just one, and perhaps not the important one. The self is not the principal thing.’).
The angrily anti-imperial ending of The English Patient, in which the A-bombs are dropped on Japan, and Kip levels his rifle at the patient, shouting ‘When you start bombing the brown races of the world, you’re an Englishman’, has been a bone of contention since the novel’s publication. Many saw it as an unnecessary politicisation, inelegantly tacked on to an evocative love story. But this, I think, is to miss the power of the novel entirely. While it is tempting to think of the novel’s North African settings as being staged for the white gaze – little more than the exotic mise en scène for an illicit love affair between two white Europeans – it also follows that the faded frescoes of the Villa San Girolamo are a backdrop from which the three non-Europeans turn away. Hana, Kip, and Caravaggio may revolve around the patient’s diminishing imperial body for a time, but then they scatter, to a world which has decreasing need of the English. They trouble England’s centring of itself in the history, now myth, of the Second World War. This may be the story told at home, but England no longer controls the narrative elsewhere.
The end that Fukuyama foresaw (The End of History was published in the same year as The English Patient) may well have ended up being not of history itself, but of a certain kind of history, the long drawl of a lone voice, history as monolithic myth, as nation-building force. History could be shattered, speaking in many different voices at once, simultaneously large and small, and its traditional teleologies could be renounced: no more lists of battles fought and won, but the anecdotal and incidental, the uncredited labour, the softer stuff which never makes it into the records, the ‘bodies we have swum in like so many rivers, manner of kiss’. These histories possess insurrectionary strength. They can topple nations, and the nations know it, which is why Ondaatje presented his treatise cloaked in a novel about love and war.
‘When Shall We Three Meet Again’ is the opening line of William Shakespeare’s great tragedy, Macbeth. Spoken by the First Witch, the line immediately ushers us into a world of witches, prophecy, and black magic, elements which Shakespeare probably chose to include because the new King of England, James I, […]
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