Washington Black

"Shortlist"

"This is a very distinctive piece of writing. The main character, Washington Black, begins his life enslaved in the Caribbean under a very cruel master and cruel regime. We modern people know slavery was bad, but we forget just quite how bad it was. It very much evokes that. It’s quite painful to read that part, I think. He’s raised thinking he’s an orphan, but in fact—spoiler alert—it turns out the woman he’s looking after is actually his mother (though, for some reason, she doesn’t want him to know that.) She’s a very powerful character, because she was born in Africa and brings something of Africa with her. The other main character is the younger brother of the plantation owner. He’s a quiet abolitionist who doesn’t really approve of slavery. He’s also one of those aristocratic European amateur scientists. Part of what he’s doing on the island visiting his brother is finding a place where he can test out a balloon that he’s made which is supposed to carry people off into the air. After a series of complicated events, he takes Washington with him to escape from the island. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter From now on, it’s partly a picaresque adventure story. They’re going from the Caribbean to North America to the Arctic to London, and he ends up in Morocco. It’s an adventure story; it’s also a love story. It’s also a story about that 19th-century period when this man Titch, the brother of the plantation owner, experiences conflicted feelings about the fact that they’ve developed a rather intimate relationship. He pulls out of it at a certain point, and then most of the remaining novel is about life in London as a free man with a woman he loves and who loves him, despite the fact that he’s badly mutilated as the result of an accident. It’s written looking backwards. What you see is that the result of the education of this young man by an older Englishman is ultimately developing quite a sophisticated understanding of the world, one which he clearly didn’t have at the start. You might wonder how an illiterate slave could have an interesting point of view, and he starts out that way, but by the end he becomes a sophisticated person. He learns a lot of the science that Titch is doing. Titch also allows him to draw, and he discovers he has capacity as an artist. Its range is astonishing. It’s an adventure story, so it’s beautifully written, but a lot of the time—and this is why it was good to read it more than once—you rush through because it’s so exciting. You’re in the Arctic, and somebody’s disappeared into the snow and you’re wondering whether they’re going to survive. Or they’re in the balloon, and you don’t know what’s going to happen. They’re being chased by someone who’s trying to recover him as a slave, who’s a slave-chaser—is he going to find him? What’s going to happen when they meet? There’s a lot of excitement. It’s a rather odd test, the Booker. To survive it, you have to be read by some fairly attentive readers several times over. Though I’m sure most writers would love to be read more than once, most books are meant to be read by most readers once . Part of the interest of a book like this is that you discover new things each time you read it. There’s so much in there. Washington Black has an enormous range: a geographical range, a range of emotions, a range of kinds of people. It has a Javert-like character trying to find him because there’s a huge bounty on his head. It’s fun. Yes. You might think it’s an odd way to evaluate things, but I’m extremely fond of the books that got that far, in part because we got to know them quite well."

"Washington Black, by Esi Edugyan — to my dad."