Since the publication of her fiction debut The Bluest Eye in 1970 and on through Sula (1974) and Song of Solomon (1977), Toni Morrison has been concerned with two major subjects: race and gender. But it was not until the publication of Be- loved (1987), her fifth novel and possibly her finest work to date, that Morrison began chronicling the Black American experience. Beloved is a daring book, not just because of its surrealistic flourishes, but because of its courageous exploration of slavery, one of the most shameful and overlooked episodes in American history.
Set in 1873, Beloved, a book haunted by the spiteful spirit of a dead baby, is concerned with the tragic aftermath of slavery, which continued to haunt the Southern states long after its abolition. Sethe kills her infant daughter in order to save her from a life of humiliation. Just as Sethe's mother, Baby Suggs, feels "suspended between the nastiness of life and the meanness of the dead", so is this superb novel. Be- loved won the Pulitzer Prize. Five years later Morrison followed it with Jazz, which continued the story of Black America. Here again the story is violent and this time the crime is complicated - even to the point of being condoned - by passion.
She is an urgent, dramatic, powerfully theatrical writer, whose prose has the force and urgency of common speech. In her work there is always the sense of a storyteller burdened by a tale which must betold. In her new novel, Paradise, (Chatto & Windus, £16.99 in UK), her first since she won the 1993 Nobel Prize, Morrison uses a device she has often employed before, by telling her story in the opening sentences of the book. Again the story is violent and this time the crime is complicated - even to the point of being condoned - by passion, and motivated by Morrison's twin preoccupations of race and gender. "They shot the white girl first. With the rest they can take their time. No need to hurry out here." By the sixth sentence the storyteller has presented the facts, reporter-like. "They are nine, over twice the number of the women they are obliged to stampede or kill . . ."
Life and its various sub-plots has driven a group of women to seek sanctuary in a deserted former convent, originally built as a rich man's mansion. The convent is on the outskirts of a town called Ruby, Oklahoma. Morrison's history of black America here reaches the 1970s; Martin Luther King has already been sacrificed and Civil Rights has triumphed and failed to such an extent that the new freedom has sustained old hatreds. A community has emerged in Ruby established by Blacks who had nowhere else to go. The marginalised have become central, and this makes them all the more determined to wipe out anyone living on the margin.
Paradise, for all its stylistic grace and magic realist whimsy, is a brutal book. True, Morrison's prose remains full-blooded, lyrical and rooted in the vernacular. But in writing her most overtly political book yet, in which the divisions between men and women are harsh and love has been reduced to mere sex, she has created a world of victims, few of whom engage our sympathies. The narrative is also divided, not entirely successfully, between the town's history and that of the various families who live there, as well as by the individual stories of the women living at the convent. Bad men, sexual betrayal, dead babies, unwanted pregnancies and more bad luck than one might have deemed possible, stalk them all.
Even more unsettling is the communal ill-will which shapes the book, in which fear and cruelty are the most palpable emotions. Mavis, one of the main characters, has become an outcast when her twin children die, left in her car will she went shopping. "The neighbours seemed pleased when the babies smothered. Probably because the mint green Cadillac in which they had died had annoyed them for a long time. They did all the right things, of course: bought food, telephoned their sorrow, got up a collection; but the shine of excitement in their eyes was clear." In time her dead babies, less vengeful than Sethe's, come with her to the convent.
Another character, Gigi, both mesmerises and threatens the men with her deranged, obsessive sexuality. Most of the women and girls who arrive at the convent are drifters and misfits. At the heart of this bizarre, informal community is Connie, a dedicated cook and eccentrically heroic provider who has entered a twilight world of her own. Her grief may be traced to a late passion as well as to her early rescue by an old nun whose care permits Connie to live on in an extended childhood. When her romance ends in betrayal, Connie reverts to being a demon worker. Eventually her despair of life leads her to wake "to the wrenching disappointment of not having died the night before". Throughout the novel there is a tangling of lives, of family histories. Indeed, very early in the book the reader is already alert, possibly too alert, to seeking clues and matching characters and events with facts which initially seemed random.
Morrison the storyteller, ever fond of myth and magic, has also consciously embraced the role of seer. She has always been determined that no one will be able to plead ignorance of the brutalities perpetrated by men against women, by whites against blacks and, most importantly in this book, by black against black. Though Morrison's characteristically punchy, authentic dialogue is grounded in earthy speech rhythms, she does favour big statements. "Born out of an old hatred, one that began when one kind of black man scorned another kind and that kind took the hatred to another level, their selfishness had trashed two hundred years of suffering and triumph in a moment of such pomposity and error and callousness it froze the mind." Politics and polemic are vital to her vision and this tendency towards big statements often shows as weakness.
Ultimately the existence of the wild collection of warring women living free of menfolk becomes too much for the citizens of Ruby. Convinced that all upheaval in the town - "a woman was knocked down the stairs by her cold-eyed daughter. Four damaged infants were born in one family. Daughters refused to get out of bed. Brides disappeared on their honeymoons. Two brothers shot each other on New Year's Day" - is the women's fault, the men act. Are the women furies, witches, or truth tellers? Morrison sustains several ambiguities. Who is white? Who is black? Who is alive, who is dead?
This novel of moments and insight, pain and humanity, is dogged by weighty profundities. Beloved and Jazz achieve a balance between art and intent, unlike this urgent, predictable work which fails to match their emotional power.