Hannah Darling

There is a certain amount of danger in my picking up a book. I often know in the first page whether I should plan times to read, as the danger is for me to get swept away and ignore all other demands on my time. The Darling was just such a book… for the first while.

I came to this book without expectations, as I didn’t even know of the author, Russell Banks, beforehand. Now I know that he is a writer who has a lot to say. My one major quibble with this work is its lacking good stopping points, making it terribly difficult to put down. Having lengthy sections coupled with tight time constraints (to finish by my discussion group) gave me ample opportunity to look ahead in the book. I could hardly read one section before I was cutting the remainder like a deck of cards and seeing what came later. Since the work jumps around a lot, this didn’t ruin the story at all. I just got to the point where I lost track of what I knew, what had been told, and what I moved ahead to learn. If there had been chapters this would not have happened.

But our character, Hannah Musgrove, aka Dawn Carrington, aka Missus Sundiata spent the majority of her story trying to figure out where the breaks and stops and pauses in her life were, so it makes a certain amount of sense that the telling of her story would take the reader here and there, even beyond the writer’s imagined ‘missequence.’ As Hannah tells the ‘truth’ of her life and decisions I felt very strangely drawn in, noticing that many of her frustrations both internally and politically made some sense to me. However, the actual life she led couldn’t be further from mine, either its location on the East coast of the US, living in various a-typical relationships and communities, to her life underground, and, maybe even least, the world she experienced in Liberia. This character and I never made a single choice in common (phew!).

That’s because I make pastries and enjoy visiting France. She works with chimpanzees, her dreamers, and can handle not being in relationships with her family. I came away knowing that a darling, of which America is chock full, can be right where everything is happening and shut her ears and eyes to it all. Whether that is good or bad, Hannah is unable to address. But she accepts that she was never more than the darling.

There are two interesting people in The Darling, well, more than two, but two whose presence in the novel stick out. They walked according to the script Hannah imagined they would. The first, her father, is a very successful, fairly influential, and somewhat ideological man who dies pretty late in the book. It was no surprise. Death in this book is not a surprise, although sometimes it is nauseating. As he lies dying he repeats, ‘my name’ which Hannah has difficulty responding to, so she just listens. This is a well-done section of the book, which will stick longer than most. Incidentally, his name dies with him.

The second intriguing character is nearly Dickensian, our dear American friend, Samuel Clement. He is in the novel representing Uncle Sam’s interests in Liberia, and occasionally elsewhere. He takes an interest in Hannah’s welfare and shows up like a kindly uncle when her African family is gone. We also understand that his interest in Hannah’s being kept alive is part of the downfall of her family, but it was all very likely anyhow. The fact that he gains Hannah clemency for her previous life just fills things out.

Chances are I'll look for more information about Liberia, but won't choose another Banks book, mainly because of the structure, sadly!