This book has been lurking in my brain for YEARS. I’ve been wanting to write something about it since I first read it in grad school — it’s been part of this shadow project that I keep thinking I’ll get to, sometime, and I think I even have some old fellowship applications talking about it. What a surprise to come back to the novel and realize that I had totally misremembered it! In my recollection, what made the book so fascinating was that the reader didn’t know who the informer was until the very end, when, in a shocking twist, you learn that it’s the protagonist you’ve been following all along. Turns out, you know from the FIRST CHAPTER that he’s the informer. Ooops.
But I wasn’t totally wrong in my sense of the book, either, because half the point is that the informer doesn’t really understand that he is one. Or, as I suggested to my students, that the novel really probes the relationship between action and identity (does informing make you an informer?). And this is genuinely fascinating, as are the really complex politics of the novel. It’s a messy, grim portrayal of a post-independence milieu, rife with suspicion, domination, violence.
Meanwhile, though, the novel is also quite off-putting in its clear racist undertones, and continuous moralizing about the sinful poor. I was also really hard-pressed to say whether it was successful as a noir thriller, or really just kind of trashy and convoluted. Sometimes it’s hard to tell with genre fiction, for me anyways. I still think this is just a brilliant finale to the opening sequence, where a man is running down the street in the rain, and stops to look back: “He wanted to find out whether anybody was following him. He was a murderer.” Like, come on, that’s just awesome.
I guess I might still want to write about it, eventually. Not in a hurry to teach it again though 😆
Kasia Reads 