The daughter of one tribal leader marries a British man for financial expediency, then learns that the “castle” he governs is a holding dungeon for slaves.
Gyasi’s debut novel opens in the mid-1700s in what is now Ghana, as tribal rivalries are exploited by British and Dutch colonists and slave traders. The repose, however pleasant, becomes a kind of narcosis.Ī novel of sharply drawn character studies immersed in more than 250 hard, transformative years in the African-American diaspora. It was always for her an "exile" and except for the terminal incidents ( a muted love affair which resulted in the accidental death of a child, her lover's suicide and permanent separation from her husband) there is almost no narrative incentive. Much as one respects the amplitude of this novel and its sincerity, it all goes on and on (except for occasional present day interruptions) and one is never really very interested in Susan Burling Ward and her deracination from the cultured East to the uncivilized West in the 1870's by her husband, an engineer. in values, but only as data" (the schism of his last book, All the Little Live Things). This in partial contrast to and rebuttal of his son at Berkeley "interested in change but only as a process. A late autumn retrospective, accomplished with a long lens, in which Lyman Ward, retired, ill and wheelchair-bound, attempts to affirm the continuity of the past and the "Doppler effect" of time by reconstructing his grandparents' lives.
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