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9 of 33 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Notes for a novel, 18 Jan 2004
Toni Morrison is by no means a writer of enormous repute in the UK and her status as Queen of the Novel in the US is largely unrecognised here. I'm not going to suggest that she is the Emperor's New Clothes, because there's much more to her than that. But this novel is little more than notes for a novel shuffled together and given a hard cover.And that cover needs mention. One is reminded of the allegorical maze of association woven into portraits of Queen Elizabeth I. Morrison's bizarre photo on the back seems fraught with overworked imagery, designed to irritate and repel. Why the tasteless display of bejewelled accessories? Why does she lean in, face frozen in a stern, graceless half-smile? A game is being played with the reader before the book is even opened. But inside is the disappointment. Unshuffle the chapters, write the vague, unfocused notes up into a story, or a novel, and you'd have something that really did talk to us of Love. She knows what she wants to say, certainly. Yes, there is race and gender for the zealots to get their teeth into and feel self-righteous about. But there is Love, too, and it's the sort of love that does not live within the boundaries that are acceptable to the more ferocious liberals who lionize Toni Morrison in America. There is an importantly non-judgemental air about the portrayal of relationships of all kinds lurking in here somewhere. But Morrison seems preoccupied. She won't tell us the story straight out. She pussyfoots around, using silly devices from a bygone age of experimentalism (and more William S Burroughs than Virginia Woolf, more's the pity). We drift in and out of interior monologues, cut from past to present, sample communications with ghostly presences and so on. Occasionally, we get narrative, and character, and events. Sometimes it does even make sense. Sure, it's a sweeping saga of three generations of a family bla bla bla: the stuff of the 2-part TV movie. But it's there. So why soes Morrison not write this story, instead of just publishing the notes? This would be a much better novel if she had.
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