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Sheffield Book Club6.30pm, Sunday 12 September 2004 Cafe No 9
Reviewed by Martin Kelner Slave fiction has more or less become a genre in its own right in recent years, but it is still a novelty to find a story of racism and casual cruelty in America’s deep South in the 19th Century being told from the slave-owner’s point of view. The narrator – I hesitate to say heroine – of Valerie Martin’s brave and unusual novel is Manon, wife of Gaudet, a wicked, humourless, and perverted gentleman farmer, the owner of a sugar cane plantation north of New Orleans. Her marriage is a sham, and even without the external circumstances – the political dimension, if you like – of the story, the picture Manon’s unrelenting monologue builds up of a marriage that is not so much loveless as hate-filled, would make Property a compelling read. The title of the book is, of course, meant in two ways. While Manon is the property of Gaudet, who controls her and her fortune - about which she complains endlessly - Manon herself exerts similar control over her maidservant Sarah. Sarah was a gift to Manon, but has become part of the property expropriated by the noxious Gaudet. The planter’s sexual abuse of Sarah has resulted in the birth of two children, the older of whom, Walter, is mentally retarded, and since Manon herself is childless this is an understandable source of tension in the novel. Despite this, though, Manon still fails to grasp why Sarah is secretive and apparently resentful. While the beautiful and self-possessed servant will brush her mistress’s hair and wash her body with care and attention, she seems ungrateful simply to be Manon’s prized possession, appreciated for her housekeeping and hairdressing skills. Most of Manon’s waking moments seem dominated by thoughts of Sarah, understandably since the two women exist in an almost claustrophobic closeness. What clever thoughts, schemes and intrigues, Manon wonders, are concealed by the slave’s placid exterior? The only relief from this troubling contemplation is Manon’s unsatisfactory and unconsummated flirtation with a New Orleans dandy, Joel Borden, a one-time suitor. Manon is a thoughtless, self-regarding, and thoroughly dislikeable narrator, which is what makes her take on the bloody insurrection for which her husband waits and watches particularly interesting. She is such a product of her environment, where slavery and racism have existed for years as the norm, that she utterly fails to comprehend the significance of the gathering storm. This is a bleak tale, elegantly told, carrying the message that slavery debases and dehumanises the owners just as surely as it does the slaves. |
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Property