Hangman by Maya Binyam: A strange, surreal and disquieting debut novel

The narrator of Maya Binyam’s strange, surreal debut novel Hangman finds himself on a flight he has not booked, with a suitcase he has not packed, on his way back to the country he is from but has not set foot in for 26 years. He wonders why he has been made to embark on this journey, eventually concluding that his brother, who has for many years requested from him money, medication and help with a visa, must be on his death bed, and that he himself is returning for the funeral.

What follows is a trip through a bizarre and abstracted landscape, where outside is sometimes “barely outside, just a tiny strip of backyard” and inside, on one farcical occasion, doesn’t exist at all. Our narrator’s journey is punctuated with encounters with relatives whom he hardly recognises, and strangers whom he would prefer to avoid yet cannot seem to get away from. But, akin to Faye, the protagonist of Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy, Hangman’s narrator operates as something of a cipher, a reluctant receptacle for the accounts that those he comes across on his travel seem eager to share with him.

We are never told which country the narrator is travelling to – it seems, in a sense, almost radically irrelevant

If with Outline Cusk was concerned with rejecting the primacy of a protagonist’s own subjectivity, the anonymity that shrouds Hangman seems to reject a different narrative expectation sometimes placed upon fictions concerning rootlessness, that asks for a specificity of experience to which the pain of said rootlessness might be attributed. Binyam denies her narrator and the reader such specificity, producing a novel more fable-like in quality; characters are not given proper names, nicknamed instead according to perceived occupation or by their relation to the narrator.

[ Second Place by Rachel Cusk: A good novel by a great novelist ]

Though the novel’s synopsis states that the narrator is returning to “sub-Saharan Africa”, the words “sub-Saharan Africa” never appear in the text. Indeed, we are never told which country the narrator is travelling to – it seems, in a sense, almost radically irrelevant. Hangman is, on the whole, a committed, inventive and often comedic exercise in abstraction that by its disquieting final pages has moved beyond themes of exile and return to depict something more tragic: a man who has finally come to know what he doesn’t want to know.