Reviews of Glory inevitably discuss it in relation to Orwell’s Animal Farm, eagerly engaging with the question of how the novel functions as a political allegory of Mugabe’s downfall. Predictably, I am far more interested in the various other formal experiments that Bulawayo engages in, many of which continue the kinds of things she does in her previous novel (which I love), We Need New Names. I love that novel for what it does with perspective — both the way it uses a child’s viewpoint that gradually matures, and its fascinating shifts in narrative voice, from singular to plural. Glory is similarly fascinating in its play with different voices and perspectives. It’s an ambitious novel; one that engages in a variety of formal experiments as a way of trying out ideas. They don’t always work, but you can’t help but appreciate the effort. And meanwhile, it’s a compulsively readable book — I was surprised at how eagerly I tore through it.
Bulawayo was famously criticized for writing poverty porn and pandering to a white western audience, and I wouldn’t be surprised if this novel elicits a similar response, focusing as it does on political turmoil and corruption and violence. Its satire is incredibly uneven in tone, as Farah Bakaari notes, which I recognize could be considered a flaw, or a formal problem, but which somehow seemed organic to me (maybe because I read the book in two long sittings); a natural response to the insanity of the historical moment. It is true that there is a section of what is, essentially, witness testimony of genocide, that appears in the text and really cannot be incorporated smoothly. This doesn’t, to me, feel like some kind of gimmicky ‘eruption of the real,’ or sensationalizing spectacle, but like a confrontation with the problem of putting horror into words. I don’t say that to minimize or normalize — the point is, it can’t be. I’m thinking of a line from Lauren Berlant’s On the Inconvenience of Other People (which I just finished) — “That is the paradox: to call a thing unbearable is to admit that it must be borne. It cannot be other than it is.” (152) Berlant writes about the effort to write about and be with unbearable things, “not by becoming hard like them or soft in empathic compensation, but by loosening them up and becoming loose with them, if not like them.” (150). I don’t know, but I wonder if one could say that this is what Bulawayo is doing in this book. Not playing, exactly, with historical tragedy, but being with it, trying to loosen it. That is how I find myself thinking about the various formal experiments of this novel — as trying something out, both formally and affectively. I guess this is me acknowledging that I think the novel is fundamentally interested in representing, albeit fictively, something about our world first and foremost, which is an area of interest I am normally a little leery of, but there you have it.
Unexpectedly, I loved the animal allegory — I marveled at how a so obviously abstract device nonetheless felt astonishingly vivid and concrete. Animals have a physicality that humans often don’t, and it’s wonderful. The twitter segments, however, seemed like a total failure to me, a cringe-y caricature of twitter (though admittedly, twitter can seem like a caricature of itself). But in the most blatant example of the kind of search for form that I’m describing, the novel also includes a few interludes of what are essentially reaction quotes from anonymous members of a crowd, like snippets of ‘passer-by on the street’ interviews. You mean, like…twitter? Well, no, is the thing. For one, these are far more effective, or at least, they sound much more like an actual person talking. But precisely because they are so much more persuasive, you notice the amorphousness of them, and how you recognize exactly what they are supposed to be doing, even though the formal conceit is utterly artificial. It’s hilarious, and ironic. I don’t think that was intentional, frankly, but it’s awesome, and it makes me glad that the bad twitter parts were there, because it doesn’t work without their failure. And this weirdness gels beautifully with what I do think is quite intentional, namely, the slightly unhinged nature of the parody, as when the president talks to Siri.
This is probably a good final thing to say about the novel, returning to the earlier point about its engrossing quality: that is that it is often quite funny. And sometimes joyful, and sometimes inspiring, and sometimes devastating. Again, maybe I was especially primed for it, because I read most of it on a flight, but for all its unevenness, this was a novel that had me in the palm of its hand, emotionally, throughout — a rare quality.
Kasia Reads 