More: A Novel [Hardcover]

GLOBE & MAIL Toronto the black SONNET L'ABBÉ September 27, 2008 MORE By Austin Clarke Thomas Allen, 356 pages, $29.95 When he took the Giller, Commonwealth and Trillium prizes with his 2002 novel, The Polished Hoe, Austin Clarke assumed a place in the Canadian and international literary stratosphere that many who had long enjoyed his earlier works felt he had earned decades earlier. It took 40 years for early predictions of his future literary stature to come true - perhaps because it took the reading public that long to understand, or to want to hear, the force of his social critiques. Canadian book buyers of the late 1960s and early '70s were not quick to reward Clarke's vivid evocations of the experience of Caribbean Canadians in a racist, WASP Toronto. And frankly, when they did reward Clarke six years ago, it was for a story that safely set racism and colonial exploitation on an island far away, in the distant past. But now things are different for Clarke: He has the public's rapt attention, and international literary taste is currently craving "minority" perspectives on Canadian experience. It is particularly satisfying, then, to see Clarke follow up his 2002 success with More, a forceful book that reignites our sense of Clarke's deeply complicated love affair with Toronto, the city he calls home. More, which has been already long-listed for the 2008 Scotiabank Giller Prize, is in many ways "more" of what we've come to expect from Austin Clarke: sensuous immersion in the rhythms of Caribbean vernacular, bold layers of memory and history into the novel's present moment, and a harsh yet spiritually generous take on black experience. It's also yet another incarnation of Clarke's fascination with the pace of lived time, such as readers experienced in The Origin of Waves' 250-page conversation and in The Polished Hoe's all-night confession, spanning nearly 500 pages. More steps up the pace, but still pulls off, at a new level, the Clarkean feat of sustaining the barest of tensions over an extended period. More covers four days and nights in the basement apartment life of Idora Morrison, who for most of its 300 pages lacks an interlocutor. Idora wakes on a Thursday morning, unable to muster the will to get up and go to work. She cocoons in her bed, but her mind swims as she tries to make sense of the hardships she fights each day: the daily aversion white people show her as she makes her way through the city; her abandonment by her deadbeat husband; the media's unrelenting portrayal of black men as responsible for violent gun crime in the city; the frightening proximity of that gun crime in her own neighbourhood, and the heart-wrenching possibility that her son might be involved in it. In her collapse, Idora crumbles under the weight of much that Toronto as a community struggles with: a consciousness unable to rest, troubled by the visible, deep social divisions along racial lines that Canadians wish were the stuff of history, but which we still confront. In our shared isolation with Idora, we begin to experience her Toronto: a fearful place where shut-in days of paranoiac self-questioning and prayer are somehow preferable to the world outside her door, where, at Trinity College, she serves privileged young people as they dress up in robes for dinner; where her white, female graduate-student friend can rationalize being in love with a cop boyfriend who likes to beat up black boys for fun; and where black boys on the subway talk openly of offing one another. It is in Clarke's ability to capture the interior tumult of a strong mind alone, alive, grasping at threads of sanity and virtue when all other resources of cultural and social capital are closed to her, that we feel the powerful fit of Clarke's poetic monologue to the mundane reality of racialized urban existence. In the midst of her waking nightmare, Idora steers herself again and again toward her desire to speak at her church and her moments of satisfaction in sensual pleasures. Her Thursday-to-Sunday journey is an internal, personal Triduum, beginning with betrayal and agony in her little garden, to walks through Toronto bearing her many crosses, to a bloody, strangely joyful resurrection. Reading More, I sometimes felt, as I did reading The Polished Hoe, an exasperation at the author's "old colonial" imagining of a black woman's sense of her own body, with its emphasis on sexuality as her realm of power and motherhood as her realm of victimization. I'm also not sure what to make of the novel's limit of its representation of black boys to those involved in youth violence. Clarke has made a difficult choice that risks enacting the very complications that make the media the target of Idora's rage. Still, Clarke's shift in focus to the complexity of race and poverty in present-day Canada makes More a perfect follow-up to The Polished Hoe's poetic historicism. His compelling evocation of the city blocks stretching from Cabbagetown to Kensington also adds another black voice's powerful marking of the Toronto geography on the international literary landscape, as Nalo Hopkinson did with Brown Girl in the Ring and Dionne Brand did with What We All Long For. But most important, Clarke brings into the light the dignity and strength with which our mothers and grandmothers have borne their daily exclusions from the more genteel spaces of Canadian identity. By choosing to write Idora's story as Toronto's story, at the height of his literary power, Clarke boldly challenges, and transforms, Canadian sense and sensibility. (Globe & Mail, September 27, 2008 )

From the winner of the 2002 Giller Prize comes Austin Clarke's much anticipated new novel, "More". At the news of her son's involvement in gang crime, Idora Morrison collapses in her rented basement apartment. For four days and nights, she retreats into a vortex of memory, pain, and disappointment that unravels a riveting dissection of her life as a black immigrant to Toronto. Idora has lived in Canada for 25 years. She has struggled to make ends meet and her deadbeat husband Bertram has abandoned her for a better life in America. Left alone to raise her son BJ, Idora does her best to survive against very difficult odds. Now that BJ has disappeared into a life of crime and gang warfare, she recoils from this loss and tries to understand how her life has spiraled into this tragic place. In spite of her circumstances, Idora finds her way back into the light with a courage that is both remarkable and unforgettable. Perhaps the most political of all of Austin Clarke's novels, "More" is a powerful indictment of the iniquities of racial discrimination and the crime of poverty. It is in many ways a companion volume to the award-winning "The Polished Hoe.” While his previous novel was a metaphorical history of slavery, "More" is an allegorical story about the complexities of race in modern western culture. "More" is an extraordinary story about oppression and redemption and hope. From one of our masters of the novel form, this is very much a book for our times.