girl, woman, other (bernadine evaristo)

The novel opens at the National Theatre, where Amma is about to have her play, The Last Amazon of Dahomey staged. This is such an engaging idea. It sets up the requisite skewering of the system, one which, as has been much noted over recent weeks, retains its historical prejudices, for all the lip-service paid to change and ‘inclusion’. No wonder people are excited by Evaristo’s novel, which appears to hone in on the pressure points of contemporary London life. Race, gender, ambition all cooking up together in an of-the-moment novel which resonates just as strongly as Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities, back in the eighties. However, rather like Wolfe’s novel, Girl, Woman, Other, doesn’t quite succeed in skewering the apparent targets. Instead it becomes a gentle, affectionate collection of portraits of various characters whose lives barely overlap. Twelve women have a chapter each, which is supposed to capture their lives, loves, hopes and fears These women are diverse, of different social, racial and intellectual heritages. However, this is not a structure that lends itself to a profound investigation of their lives. Instead we are offered snapshots of contemporary society. Another novel which might be a point of reference is Jonathan Coe’s Brexit fable, Middle England. Similarly to Coe’s book, it feels as though the novel struggles to get beneath the surface of the characters and the issues it broaches. The reader, understanding the structural form of the novel, knows they will be moving on shortly, that their engagement with these characters will never be expected to be overly profound. As such it almost feels at times as though it is bolstering a system as much as questioning it. A perfect candidate for the Booker Prize, one which allows middle class England to be tourists in the more marginal corners of its empire, without really compelling the reader to feel the need to call for any kind of radical change. Amma’s play goes on at the National and it’s a success. Evaristo’s novel is feted. Things can’t be that bad, can they, if the greatest controversy is whether it should have won the prize outright or not? Woman, Girl, Other is an enjoyable read, a welcome window into underrepresented corners of modern UK, but it’s frothiness, which makes it bestseller material, also restricts its potency.