Fiction: How many times can a life change direction? More than once, and perhaps further twists may be added - or taken. Hannah Musgrave, only child of privileged New England parents, was first drawn to self-invention as a small girl and proceeded to make it her life's course. Radical or misfit rebel, a bit of both, now approaching the age of 60, she knows she has accumulated a personal narrative of which she is not the heroine.
The Darling, the new novel from US master novelist and short story writer Russell Banks, is magnificent. There is no surprise in that; he is one of the finest storytellers at work in the world today. Banks is incapable of writing a false word. His all-seeing fiction triumphs because it possesses truth.
Finally Hannah, long self-protected by secrets but newly prompted by dreams and unhappy memories, decides to tell her story. "When you have kept as many secrets as I have for as long as I have, you end up keeping them from yourself as well."
The genius of this novel, with its telling of horrific events, lies in the voice of Hannah - a sharp, cold, clever, remote character with no talent for intimacy. Here is an individual honest enough to admit to feeling very little. As the novel opens, she is settled in a working farm in upstate New York. Manned by her small team of working women, Hannah may be the oldest but she is also the owner - and the boss.
Against the comfort of her busy little farm, with its efficient organic chicken business, are her memories of her years in Africa, a place she had wanted to distance herself from. From the opening sentences, it is clear that the narrator has long been on the run from her past and, more than likely, herself as well. Banks catches a tone of edgy regret and sustains it throughout the novel. In Hannah he has created an intelligent, tough narrator with no illusions left who is all too aware of somehow having become old during the course of a life of bizarre choices.
Most interestingly, we may not much like Hannah, who after all admits to never having been all that interested in love and affection, but it is impossible not to listen to her. Like many a rich kid before her, Hannah, the daughter of a well-known and ambitious doctor father, had dropped out of college to join a terrorist group. In her case it was the Weather Underground, and vague memories of Patty Hearst types come to mind. Banks sets her youth firmly in the 1960s generation of US socio-political revolution. Having earned her place on the FBI's "most wanted" list, Hannah knows she has made a point while also losing out on a normal life, identity and relationships.
What makes Hannah so believable is her candour as well as her grasp, with hindsight, of all that happened to her and, more pertinently, around her. Reviewing her life is the task she is about. She has had time to consider everything. Banks succeeds in making his narrative a compelling study of a woman who is seeking neither forgiveness, nor understanding, just the presenting of facts. It is as if Hannah, having spent so many years living separate sections of lives independently of each other, is now interested in achieving a sense of cohesion. "My story in all its versions is only a tale of too-late. Maybe at best it's a cautionary tale," she remarks.
Aware she also has her share of ghosts, there are echoes of Conrad's Mr Kurtz in Hannah. She may not actually utter his famous lament, "The horror! The horror!", yet she appears to echo it.
Aside from this being a splendid novel, it is also an important book, similar to Timothy Mo's The Redundancy of Courage, which exposed the horrors of East Timor through a narrative that also balanced polemic with story. As Banks has often previously demonstrated, there is usually a deeper intent behind his observed fiction. In The Darling, there are Hannah's experiences in Africa, especially in Liberia, created by colonial cynicism and sustained by colonial opportunism. Through Hannah's eyes, Banks explores US involvement in the history of a country invented to deal with US political embarrassment. Shaped by exploitation, Liberia had its internal wars manipulated by Washington.
Wary of real intimacy, Hannah instead experiences emotion through witnessing the plight of chimps used in a bogus science programme devised to justify funding. It was Hannah's murky past that initially led her to Liberia, and her relationship with a politician and eventual marriage to him further compromise her .
Having been present in Liberia and its devastated capital, Monrovia, at the close of the 1991 civil war and famine, I can recognise the portrait of the country Banks has drawn. It is staggering in its claustrophobic accuracy. As a novel, The Darling is more potent than even the best of Paul Theroux; as reportage, Banks, through Hannah's voice, catches the particular paranoia which was Liberia in 1991 and apparently still is. At no time does Banks indulge in special pleading for Hannah, either as a daughter or as a mother. Banks makes effective use of the historical facts, particularly the bizarre power struggle between President Doe, Charles Taylor and Prince Johnson, but these facts are also part of Hannah's narrative. The novel never falters into well-intentioned polemic; it remains Hannah's story as she recalls it, such is the strength of the narrative voice.
This could well be the finest novel about Africa, about colonial corruption and its disgusting legacy, yet written by a US writer. By the close of the book, the remote, detached Hannah, the erstwhile young rebel, has grown old and wise. We believe her strange, terrifying story, because, as is true of the art of Russell Banks, every word, every gesture, every nuance achieves the resonance of truth.
The Darling By Russell BanksBloomsbury, 393pp. £17.99
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
