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A review by carduelia_carduelis
Happiness by Aminatta Forna
5.0
I picked this up in spite of the terrible title. I typically leave it long enough, after buying a book, that I can't remember what it was about in the first place and so it was with this one. And I have to say that for the first hundred or so pages, I still wasn't sure I'd recovered the plot.
There are two central characters: Attila who is a Ghanian psychiatrist specialising in hostage situations, war-zones, and other traumatic incidents and Jean, an American urban-canine specialist who moonlights as a green-spaces designer/gardener for hire. Attila is by far the more interesting of the two for most of the first half of the book. The way he moves through London, through places familiar to me, and both treats and experiences them in a way that entirely different to how I would is something that I found very refreshing. In some ways, though, he is too noble a character - never angering, taking a mis-step or making a mistake, always patient. The trials and conflicts he encounters in this book are never, even remotely, his doing, but he bears them and and fights on with good grace and humour. I'm not quite sure he's a real person.
Jean is a little more balanced in that some of her issues stem from her personality, see her relationship with her family for example. Even so, she's never really wrong, rather she's sometimes out of step with those around her. Her back story is really great, she's a behavioural zoologist and her dedication to her work has put up a lot of boundaries between her and her ex-husband and, for some reason, her son. In particular, this conflict between professional and personal life is something that we don't see Attila experience which is a very familiar gendered bias.
Despite my preference for Attila's story, it's Jean's narrative that really ties this book together.
As she talks about the language people use to describe urban canines like foxes and coyotes, how a rare interaction with a human is played up by the media, how people speak of being displaced from their homes, living in fear, 'think of the children', I was instantly thrown back to Yorkshire in the mid-2000's.
I'd heard this rhetoric before, but not about the fox hunting ban. When I heard it, as a young teen on the radio on my walk to school, it was about muslims. Muslims infiltrating the country and bringing bad ideas and bad crowds with them.
And instantly the whole book came together for me. This is an incredibly clever framing of US and UK culture (and probably much of Western Europe) right now. It perfectly captures the paranoia of how traditional cultures are changing from an influx of people escaping terrors we can't fathom. And how, in fact, immigrants have been here for a long time and they will keep coming - that conservative values have no place in nature. It's told from so many points of view that I only saw it a third of the way in. The book isn't preaching or unpleasant, which is maybe why it hits so hard.
On top of all of this the writing is really beautiful. Forna is dealing with two, quite reserved, people and she captures their thoughts in the quiet moments between plot, where they watch birds or wind or water and think. These parts of the book are what really pushed this up to a 5-star read for me.
I don't want to say any more because the beauty of this one is really in all the supporting stories and characters. Highly recommended.
There are two central characters: Attila who is a Ghanian psychiatrist specialising in hostage situations, war-zones, and other traumatic incidents and Jean, an American urban-canine specialist who moonlights as a green-spaces designer/gardener for hire. Attila is by far the more interesting of the two for most of the first half of the book. The way he moves through London, through places familiar to me, and both treats and experiences them in a way that entirely different to how I would is something that I found very refreshing. In some ways, though, he is too noble a character - never angering, taking a mis-step or making a mistake, always patient. The trials and conflicts he encounters in this book are never, even remotely, his doing, but he bears them and and fights on with good grace and humour. I'm not quite sure he's a real person.
Jean is a little more balanced in that some of her issues stem from her personality, see her relationship with her family for example. Even so, she's never really wrong, rather she's sometimes out of step with those around her. Her back story is really great, she's a behavioural zoologist and her dedication to her work has put up a lot of boundaries between her and her ex-husband and, for some reason, her son. In particular, this conflict between professional and personal life is something that we don't see Attila experience which is a very familiar gendered bias.
Despite my preference for Attila's story, it's Jean's narrative that really ties this book together.
As she talks about the language people use to describe urban canines like foxes and coyotes, how a rare interaction with a human is played up by the media, how people speak of being displaced from their homes, living in fear, 'think of the children', I was instantly thrown back to Yorkshire in the mid-2000's.
I'd heard this rhetoric before, but not about the fox hunting ban. When I heard it, as a young teen on the radio on my walk to school, it was about muslims. Muslims infiltrating the country and bringing bad ideas and bad crowds with them.
And instantly the whole book came together for me. This is an incredibly clever framing of US and UK culture (and probably much of Western Europe) right now. It perfectly captures the paranoia of how traditional cultures are changing from an influx of people escaping terrors we can't fathom. And how, in fact, immigrants have been here for a long time and they will keep coming - that conservative values have no place in nature. It's told from so many points of view that I only saw it a third of the way in. The book isn't preaching or unpleasant, which is maybe why it hits so hard.
On top of all of this the writing is really beautiful. Forna is dealing with two, quite reserved, people and she captures their thoughts in the quiet moments between plot, where they watch birds or wind or water and think. These parts of the book are what really pushed this up to a 5-star read for me.
I don't want to say any more because the beauty of this one is really in all the supporting stories and characters. Highly recommended.