This might be a spoilerish review, better read after the book. As we meet Hannah Musgrave, she's an organic farmer in her fifties; a woman haunted by a past that she is finally willing to confront. In a first-person, confessional tone, Musgrave brings the reader along as she returns to Africa; revisiting the climax of her early life. Along the way, we learn that Musgrave was the privileged daughter of a semi-famous liberal activist father and a Junior League/charity works mother; a civil rights agitator in college; a fugitive member of the Weather Underground during the 70's; and after finding herself in Liberia, the wife of a mid-ranking minister in the corrupt government of William R. Tolbert, Jr. It is from that last pampered position that Musgrave has a front row seat to the coups and countercoups that led to the grisly Liberian Civil War of the 1980's. After visiting Liberia once again -- ostensibly to find traces of the three sons she left behind when she first fled the country (even though she had known at the time that they had become child soldiers in the revolution) -- Musgrave flies back to NYC on September 11, 2001. (I) made my way home to a nation terrorized and grieving on a scale that no American had imagined before, a nation whose entire history was being rapidly rewritten. In the months that followed, I saw that the story of my life could have no significance in the larger world. In the new history of America, mine was merely the story of an American darling, and had been from the beginning.Reading The Darling, I thought the book was about one thing (the life story of a former hippy and how her idealism had no practical effect in the real world), but by having the story end on 9/11, it became something different (a record of a time when people could be idealists and protest against their own government without violating the Patriot Act). This turnabout was so extreme that I needed to find out more about Russell Banks and his motivation, and after learning that this was his first post-9/11 book, I found this interview: For me the central theme, and it's one I've gone back to in other books in other ways, is the unintended consequences of good intentions. She is in many ways emblematic even of American foreign policy if you want. Today in other areas of the world, especially in a post-9/11 world, we are suddenly filled with good intentions and are killing people as a result and probably radically altering our society in the process in a very dangerous way. You can look at the history of Liberia for instance: the creation of Liberia. In its conception there were good intentions lying behind it. There was a nefarious and a dark side to those good intentions as there almost inevitably are because pure motives don't exist. The bloody civil war that started in 1980 is in fact the unintended consequence of good intentions, which started in the 1820s. Let's send them back to Africa, make the world safe and pretty, make it civilized and Christianized, and at the same time solve our race problem here in the United States with all those free blacks appearing in the streets of Philadelphia or New York. That to me is the central theme running through the book. I like to think of Hannah as emblematic of that; her life is that, the good intentions of the 1960s and 1970s, and the unintended consequences of it that she experiences very directly.If the good intentions (and their unintended consequences) of the 60's and 70's was the main point of The Darling, it's frustrating that the character of Hannah Musgrave is so unlikeable. Even though she has the full support of her parents, Musgrave is rather cruel and dismissive of them in her years underground; she is blasé about who might get hurt during her Weathermen years of making pipebombs and false passports; she's a sexual user who admits that her attraction to black men is probably a form of reverse racism; she is repulsed by the traditional-living Africans that she had a vague intention of helping; she's fine working in a medical lab that does experiments on chimps for the enrichment of some big American Pharmaceutical company; she feels no attachment to her husband and children; and she realises too late that during all of the years she spent as the wife of a health minister, she could have been improving the lives of the urban Liberians by teaching them hygiene, or reading, or other important life skills. Essentially, Musgrave is a narcissist, and every "good intention" has herself as the intended recipient, dismissing the whole hippy-movement thus: When you abandon and betray those with whom you empathize, you're not abandoning or betraying anyone or anything that's as real as yourself. Taken to its extreme, perhaps even pathological, form, empathy is narcissism. Despite not liking her, I did buy the character of Hannah Musgrave. It's not often that I find female protagonists as written by male authors believable, but Musgrave was plausible because she had so many masculine traits (sexual exploitation, a non-nurturing nature, swaggering self-confidence). And although it's meant to explain Musgrave's own diffidence, I think most young mothers have experienced the following to some degree (even if we're not supposed to admit it):First you think, This is what my life is now. This is who I am. My life is this endless grinding and thumping, being ground and thumped. Then you think, no, my life now will be spent floundering clumsily inside and around the thick waters of my own strangely misshapen body. No, it's shitting red-hot coals to give birth. Turning myself into an inverted volcano. Then you think, no, I'm the leaking person who gives her sore breasts over to another creature's sucking mouth, and when the baby is filled, cleans up its vomit, piss, and shit.Over and over, the same cycle, month after month. This is what my life is now, you think. This is who I am. And everyone, especially if she's a woman, assures you that you will love all the stages of this life, that each stage will make you feel for the first time increasingly like a fully realized woman, an expanded and deepened version of your old self.So, I did believe Hannah, was intrigued by the revelation of Liberia's sad history, and enjoyed the format of skipping back and forth through time (so that, as Hannah explains, we can get to know her and not judge her too harshly when we get to her major failings). I liked everything to do with the chimpanzee sanctuary that Musgrave oversaw (and could almost understand why she preferred her "dreamers" to actual people). But I don't know if I loved this book -- there may have been just too many things going on: too much about her parents; too much about chimps (that could have been its own book); too much about her life today; all of these could have been cut out without losing anything. And there were just too many coincidences (and these are really spoilers): Hannah finally reuniting with her parents a week before her father dies; dropping in on Carol and finding Zack living there; Zack having been in federal prison with Charles Taylor; Hannah acting as a useful dupe for the CIA when she jailbreaks Taylor; flying into NYC on 9/11. And, while I understand that part of the theme of this book is America's interventions abroad and their unintended consequences, there was something uncomfortable (more reverse racism?) about the fate of an entire African nation being affected by the naive actions of one white American.I can appreciate what went into The Darling: it's sweeping and smart and very well-constructed, but it totally lacked heart. I couldn't truly identify with or root for the narcissistic protagonist, and if she was supposed to represent the regretfully lost idealism of an earlier generation, it's not shown to be something to lament passing. It wasn't the hippies who led the Civil Rights Movement (although I'd imagine Black America appreciated what support they received); it wasn't the hippies who ended the Vietnam War; hippies never changed the world one bit; were they all darlings; dilettantes? In the end, hippies feel like they've done pretty well if they end up wearing silver ponytails and granny glasses on their organic farms in upstate New York (this is Banks' evaluation from the above interview), but I have to wonder if that was worth it (and especially for the Weathermen). I did not love this book but I'm giving it four stars because it's so much better than most of my three star reads.
Who is the protagonist of Russell Banks’s 2004 novel The Darling? Is it Hannah Musgrave, the privileged daughter of a famous New England child-rearing expert? Perhaps Dawn Carrington, the political radical and member of the Weather Underground---a woman who forges passports, builds bombs, and is ultimately forced to flee America to avoid imprisonment? Maybe the novel’s protagonist/anti-heroine is Mrs. Woodrow Sundiata, the wife of Liberia’s Assistant Minister of Public Health? Hannah/Dawn/Mrs. Sundiata is the same person, and she is one of the most compelling, contradictory, and complex female characters in post-9/11 American literature. tHannah is a first-person narrator, who in the present day is a fifty-nine year- old woman telling her life story directly to the reader. Banks often uses the word “ghost” to describe Hannah; she is a woman who drifts in and out of others’ lives. She is a woman who abandons, often repeatedly, her parents; Carol, her female lover and Bettina Carol’s young daughter; the Liberian chimpanzees for whom she was caretaker; Woodrow Sundiata, her African husband, and their three African children. The list continues. Hannah is a practical, astute, cold woman. Hannah’s actions often place the burden of judgment with readers. We find ourselves assigning moral codes to Hannah’s actions, and our sympathies often, until the novel’s heartbreaking conclusion, rest with the aforementioned family and lovers. tWhen Hannah moves to Liberia she gets a job caring for chimpanzees that are used in medical experiments, and she later makes it her goal to rescue these chimpanzees. Hannah’s feelings of connection and love reside much more closely with the chimpanzees---her dreamers, as she calls them---than with her own three children. As Hannah states halfway through the novel, “And my sons---I did love them, but I was not a woman for whom motherhood was a fulfilling, natural role. I’m still not. It’s always been an act. It was only with the chimps that I felt like a natural mother.” tOne of the reasons Hannah is such a fascinating character is because Banks chooses to write her from a first-person point of view. She is an extremely unreliable narrator, and it is only in the last third of this eloquently crafted novel when I felt as if Hannah were telling me a story I could believe. By that, I mean a story she wasn’t manipulating and constructing so that readers would see her character only as she wished. Toward the end of the novel Hannah claims she was a “bad” mother but not a “neglectful” one. The former adjective places judgment on her character, but her actions show her as neglectful. She abandons her children in Liberia after Samuel Doe, one of a handful of dictators to overthrow the Liberian government, exiles her from the country. Six months later Hannah returns, but when the political turmoil worsens she once again neglects her sons. Liberian extremists, many of whom are boy-soldier guerrillas, behead Sundiata in front of Hannah and their three children. Hannah and her children are spared, and once again Hannah is ordered to flee Liberia. She turns her back on her children only for a few minutes, and when she returns to the car they have vanished. They have spilled into the Liberian night to join opposing political factions and seek revenge on their father’s murder. This is the last time Hannah sees her children alive, and when she hears reports about the children afterward they have transformed into unrecognizable, crazed killers. They have taken the names “Worse Than Death,” “Fly,” and “Demonology.” So when Hannah claims a difference between a “bad” and “neglectful” mother readers question whether this distinction is necessary. Earlier, she states, “I had no choice but to alter, delete, revise, and invent whole chapters of my story. Just as, for the same reasons, I am doing here, telling it to you.”tBanks masterfully captures the connection between narrative reliability and identity. Hannah/Dawn reinvents her identities to suit her specific context. This relates back to my original query: Who is Hannah Musgrave? Hannah herself often questions this: “My time with the dreamers was the most peaceful, restorative two hours of the day for me…Without it, I feared I would come undone…and at any moment I would be exposed as a fraud, a counterfeit wife and mother, not at all who I seemed or claimed to be. And not anyone whom I knew, either. It was only when alone with the dreamers that I knew myself.” With Hannah, Banks has created a character who is simultaneously self-aware but not always conscious about why she lies, cheats, and abandons. tThe Darling ends on September 10, 2001. Hannah/Dawn can be seen as a petty terrorist and counterfeiter, but September 11 witnesses the end of a specific type of political revolutionary/anarchist. As Hannah states, “one dark era was about to end and another, darker era to begin, one in which my story could never have happened, my life not possibly been lived.” tBanks’s novel is a devastating, character-driven, political thriller, and it’s an important book to read for complexity of protagonist, plot, and point of view. Hannah confronts her numerous sins, as she often refers to her actions, at the novel’s haunting conclusion, and readers experience a narrative that is moving but never sentimental---a story that is both intensely personal but also set within a violent, rapidly shifting political landscape.
What do You think about The Darling (2005)?
The story is of this only child that has a father that is a famous pediatrician that writes child rearing books. She has been his social experience. She has grown up to be a rebel and join the Weather underground. She is a bit player but must (or so it seems) escape the country. She escapes to Africa and makes a life there.I did not like this character. She was not at all sympathetic. Her maternal instincts (if she had any) were glossed over. Her focus was her chimpanzees (her dreamers) but even that was not dealt with in a very realistic manner. What I did like was how Russell Banks dreamed up this story. A bit far fetched but interesting in that I knew very little about Liberia's history.
—Jan
Banks does an extremely convincing female voice as narrator, not just in the good ways. It can be a little scatter brained- wandering off on every emotional tangent on every detail in every scene. Be prepared for a pound of philosophizing, psychological introspection, social responsibility/awareness, and flowery metaphor for each tsp. of plot or setting. Not only is it flowery in its language, metaphors, and symbolism, but even its logistics. Much of it is a credit to the author, but it may be just a little too much gravy on the plate, so to speak. The time line is way out of whack, the metaphors for her introspection are hard to tell from reality; its very confusing. Don't get me wrong, much of it is touching and effective, there's just SOO much. The author walks a fine line between beautifully elaborate- and overwrought- he often enough slips to the later that at times I struggled to pick it up again. In addition, be prepared for a narrator who is joyless, judgmental, resentful, arrogant and hateful; an over privileged finger pointing militant Marxist and feminist hypocrite of the highest order. She claims to be both victim and oppressor; brave hero and unwilling villan, when in reality she is simply pathetic. If you can't enjoy a book where the main character is a total jerk, don't try this one. Her thin excuses and demands for sympathy for her glaring failures of action and character stand in stark contrast with her vitriolic and constant indictment of everyone around her for the slightest perceived flaw. Its a worthwhile read, but you will work for it.
—Paula
I found The Darling to be a political-historical narrative of great scope and range. The "darling" of the story is Dawn Carrington, neé Hannah Musgrave, a political radical and member of the Weather Underground forced to flee America to avoid arrest. At the time of the novel, she is 59, living on her working farm in upstate New York with four younger women, recalling her life in Liberia and her recent return to that country to look for her sons (Amazon).I listened to this book on audio and was captivated by the story and the narration.
—Renee
