Towards the end of 2020, two news stories from literary circles emerged within a week of each other. One was writer John Banville's comments about despising a perceived "woke movement" in publishing, which he made when questioned about the subject during an online interview for the Hay Festival. The other was a New York Times article, Just How White Is the Book Industry?, written by Richard Jean So and Gus Wezerek to document their analysis of about 8,000 English-language books issued by mainstream publishers since 1950.
“Black people or transgender people should not be given a special place,” Banville said in reference to the publishing world. “They should be given the same treatment as the rest of us.” Compare this with the stark findings of So and Wezerek, whose data showed that of the 7,124 books for which they were able to identify the author’s race, 95 per cent were written by white people.
The article noted a recent shift in the public mindset towards black authors – during last summer’s Black Lives Matter protests, books written by people of colour featured prominently on bestseller lists – and the corresponding push by publishers to publish such books.
Against this backdrop, Caleb Azumah Nelson's debut novel makes for an interesting study. As a piece of work that seeks to make clear the experiences of a young black man in contemporary London, the culture of ingrained and pervasive racism that he endures on a daily basis, Open Water is a resounding success. There are many moving and insightful passages that relay with devastating accuracy on how systemic violence negatively affects the life of Azumah Nelson's protagonist and the relationship he tries to build with a new girlfriend over the course of the novel:
“To be you is to apologise and often that apology comes in the form of suppression … Walking towards the cinema, you pass a police van. They aren’t questioning you or her but glance in your direction. With this act, they confirm what you already know: that your bodies are not your own.”
Brutal anecdotes
Elsewhere, the racial strains are shown in short, brutal anecdotes about friends and family: segregation in the schoolyard, tables in restaurants that stay mysteriously reserved all night, an almost-fatal incident related as an aside: “On the same day, your mother was on the top deck of a bus, cowering as a man waved a gun, and she emerged unscathed.”
Azumah Nelson is a 26-year-old British-Ghanaian writer and award-winning photographer living in southeast London. The impulse in his writing calls to mind Steve McQueen’s excellent Small Axe series of films that aired on the BBC late last year. In Open Water we also get a window into a world that is too often ignored or marginalised. Paul Mendez’ debut, Rainbow Milk, is another touchstone, though Open Water is more PG in its depiction of love and sex.
For all its important messages, however, Open Water falters somewhat on fictional merit. Azumah Nelson’s use of the second-person voice gets the reader close to the experience of his character but the style is less than seamless, which sometimes holds up his narrative.
Stylistically, the book is also problematic. The lyricism of the prose and the use of rhetorical devices are more suited to poetry or polemic than to fiction. At times the insights feel trite, the language hokey, like fortune cookie advice: “To love is to trust, to trust is to have faith. How else are you meant to love?”
Short on action
For the Banvilles of this world, there will be too much in the way of woke language – “performing their truths for each other … your bodies are confessing their truths out loud … whisper your truths to her” – and the author’s deliberate use of repetition can grate: “What is a joint? What is a fracture? What is a break?” These repeated questions aim for a poetic grandeur that doesn’t quite land.
The biggest issue with Open Water is that it is too short on action for a novel. Most of the book sees the character reflecting in his head. It is a shame, as the small number of given scenes work really well to open up the book and let the reader dive into water along with the characters. Azumah Nelson is clearly a talented writer who may need further time to perfect the form.
In the meantime, we have a worthy book, one that is both political and personal, that speaks its important message out to the world: “How strange a life you and other Black people lead, forever seen and unseen, forever heard and silenced. And how strange a life it is to have to carve out small freedoms, to have to tell yourself that you can breathe.”
