Home [Hardcover]

Toni Morrison's "Home" is simply a beautifully crafted novella. Set in post Korean war America, it features some familiar Morrison characteristics. Veteran Frank is suffering from what we would now call post-traumatic stress disorder, but is released from service with no treatment as so many were, especially if they were black no doubt. But at least he has survived unlike his two friends who he grew up with. Frank is troubled and has his flaws, but also has dignity. He finds himself returning to the Georgia home, Lotus, he longed to escape from as a child, another typical Morrison settlement with nothing going for it apart from the goodness and dignity of the people who live there. What draws him back is the news that his younger sister, Cee, is suffering from the aftermath of some medical experimentation. It sounds grim stuff, but while life is hard, it's not a traumatically difficult read.

Much gets written about Morrison's themes and socio-political messages. What they often fail to mention is that she is simply a beautiful story-teller. You could comfortably read this in one sitting, although I didn't purely because I wanted it to last. There is political comment there, of course. She notes that war veterans of the two World Wars tended to ignore the Korean war because no one knew what the point of it was.

Another word often associated with Morrison's work is "poetic". That might conjure up images of flowery or stylishly sparse language, and neither apply here. It is poetic in the sense that every word has to earn its place and once selected you feel no other word could possibly do, but it's easy reading in the way that prose described as poetic often isn't.

Despite its brevity, she crams a lot in to the story. This is achieved by telling things from differing points of view. There's Frank's own words interspersed with narrative about in turn, Frank, Cee, their loveless step-grandmother and Frank's brief partner. My only regret is that there was no explanation of the doctor whose experimentation with Cee remains largely unexplained. Each subtly moves the story along to a moving climax as Frank and Cee re-discover their self worth in the place they tried so hard to escape from in their youth.

Talking of the ending, "Home" is dedicated to Morrison's younger son, Slade, who died in December 2010 and there is at least one image late on in the book that is particularly poignant with this in mind. In fact, without that knowledge the ending may seem a little unsatisfactory to some.

There's no denying the tough conditions of the lives of Morrison's protagonists. As she says of the ladies of Lotus who "practiced what they had been taught by their mothers during the period the rich people called the Depression and they called life". You can almost hear Morgan Freeman in his best "The Shawshank Redemption" voice saying that. It's a brutal world but there's an earthy quality to her characters and their story. It's a stunning piece of writing.

I really loved the premise of this novel. The trauma suffered by men who have returned from war is something that, especially in the 1950's, was a taboo. Men had a masculinity to uphold and were required to repress the memories of the brutal acts they committed during the war when they got back home to their roles playing husband/father/son. The displacement they felt and how fractured they became, body and mind, was such a hard thing to address. In this novel, Toni Morrison attempts to portray a man who is doing just that. He is displaced in time, with a fractured voice and a sense of isolation and loneliness surrounding and suffocating him.

However, I found it really hard to connect with, or sympathise with, Frank, which really surprised me. If there's one thing that Morrison has always done it is make me care so much about the characters that I feel PAIN BUTTERFLIES. I have already read 'Beloved' and 'The Bluest Eye' and I ached for the characters and their pain until my eyes produced copious amounts of water. In 'Home', Frank didn't have that effect on me. For the first part of the novel I wasn't entirely sure what he was doing or where he was going...or why so many people were helping him no questions asked. He escapes a mental health clinic and then drifts from one stranger to another who give him money and clothes. I didn't understand this and, please, if I'm being really stupid and blind to something really obvious please enlighten me!

I also felt very geographically ignorant while reading this book, which spoilt the story for me a bit. I live in the UK not the US and there are lots of assumptions in this book that everyone knows where states are in relation to each other and that the reader will know what kind of places they are in terms of climate/ attitudes/ customs etc. I did not so I constantly felt like I was missing something. This is probably my own fault but I got very confused about where Frank was actually going and where he was at different points; all the locations blurred into one!

However, I did really love some aspects of this book. I loved Frank's relationship with his girlfriend and how real and lonely it felt. Although she wanted to sympathise with his trauma, she found it difficult to be the only person in the relationship who could take care of them. I like the way he loves the back of her knees.

I think my favourite part of this book was Frank's sister Cee's subplot and how uplifting I found her story to be. As always with a Morrison book, women are used and abused and so very disposable. Violence against black women is always a theme and Cee's story is no different. Cee is not a victim though because she doesn't allow herself to be.

Overall, I didn't find this book as moving as Morrison's other novels. Don't get me wrong; she writes about pain better than anyone I know, but this one lacked the memorable images and magical-realist edge that I felt in her other novels. As Sarah Churchwell points out in her review in 'The Guardian', with this novel it does feel a little as though Morrison has put her hand into the grab bag of painful black history and pulled out something else she can write her themes on to; in this case, the Korean war. Then, just as the story kicks in, she seems to lose interest and things are over much too quickly with no clear resolutions. Nevertheless, she does it with beautiful style as always.

From this intriguing setting, Toni Morrison produced a compelling and brilliant story of on the aftermath of war, especially on those who carried it out, depicting Franck's life and world in ways I can not describe. Her setting is wide, varied, rich and colourful; something that is expected for a story with such a bearing. The characters are engaging and insightful and the unfolding plot is compelling. This is a rich theme. I first hard my insight into it from reading Flash of the Sun, and later from watching Legends of the Fall. I got to understand why those some people who experienced war's ugliness, and come out more humane, end up loathing it or the world that encourages it.