The Darling - Hardcover

Banks, Russell

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0060197358 ISBN 13: 9780060197353

Publisher: Ecco, 2004

Synopsis

A New York Times Notable Book • National Bestseller

“Russell Banks’s work presents without falsehood and with tough affection the uncompromising moral voice of our time. You find the craziness of false dreams, the political inequalities, and somehow the sliver of redemption.”—Michael Ondaatje

Set in Liberia and the United States from 1975 through 1991, The Darling, from acclaimed author Russell Banks, is the story of Hannah Musgrave, a political radical and member of the Weather Underground.

Hannah flees America for West Africa, where she and her Liberian husband become friends of the notorious warlord and ex-president, Charles Taylor. Hannah's encounter with Taylor ultimately triggers a series of events whose momentum catches Hannah's family in its grip and forces her to make a heartrending choice.

About this title

About the Author

Russell Banks, twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, was one of America’s most prestigious fiction writers, a past president of the International Parliament of Writers, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His work has been translated into twenty languages and he received numerous prizes and awards, including the Common Wealth Award for Literature. He died in January 2023 at the age of eighty-two.

 

From the Back Cover

Russell Banks has exhibited an astonishingly imaginative range throughout his distinguished career as a novelist, and his uniquely realistic American voice, on display in such modern classics as Rule of the Bone and Continental Drift, continues to shine in this latest effort. Fans and newcomers alike will be rewarded by his incisive eye for character and his ability to deliver a relentless and engaging narrative -- always in the service of his inimitable style.

The Darling is Hannah Musgrave's story, told emotionally and convincingly years later by Hannah herself. A political radical and member of the Weather Underground, Hannah has fled America to West Africa, where she and her Liberian husband become friends and colleagues of Charles Taylor, the notorious warlord and now ex-president of Liberia. When Taylor leaves for the United States in an effort to escape embezzlement charges, he's immediately placed in prison. Hannah's encounter with Taylor in America ultimately triggers a series of events whose momentum catches Hannah's family in its grip and forces her to make a heartrending choice.

Set in Liberia and the United States from 1975 through 1991, The Darling is a political-historical thriller -- reminiscent of Greene and Conrad -- that explodes the genre, raising serious philosophical questions about terrorism, political violence, and the clash of races and cultures.

Reviews

Hannah Musgrave, the protagonist of this novel about naïve political idealism, is something of a guerrilla Zelig, reliably popping up at crucial moments of radical political history—marching for civil rights in the South, protesting at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, making bombs for the Weathermen. Hannah narrates the story of her underground life, first in hiding in Massachusetts, then working as a lab technician in Liberia, where she later marries a cabinet minister. Despite husband, lovers, and children, her emotional life centers on her lab animals, chimpanzees that she preciously calls "dreamers." Although the story is exciting, and the evocation of Liberia lush and menacing, the novel is burdened by Hannah's protracted disquisitions on such matters as the folly of self-righteousness. Banks also has a weakness for coy prescience; Hannah's mother, in an encounter with John Kerry in the late nineteen-seventies, notes his "presidential potential."
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

It is a wonder that more American novelists don't set their works on the African continent. The backdrop is rich, such a potent character in its own right, provided, of course, it is captured right, without condescension. Hemingway's shadow might indeed loom large, but his novels and stories set there were not really about Africa but about Americans in Africa, distressed lovers, with his males engaging in too much macho posturing. Among our contemporary novelists, there are Barbara Kingsolver and Norman Rush, but the list thins quickly from there.

Now comes Russell Banks and his novel The Darling. It is about a disillusioned and seemingly doomed woman, Hannah Musgrave, and her travails in Liberia. Yes, Hannah is white -- a point she often remarks upon -- but her Liberian world is honestly African. Which is to say it is somewhat romantic, brutal, black and quite deadly.

Hannah tells this story from the sweep of memory, a woman in her late fifties looking back on an unimaginable life -- and the losses that mounted. Her past has, of course, anchored itself inside her, despite her efforts to run from it: "After many years of believing that I never dream of anything, I dreamed of Africa."

But first, Hannah's stateside history: New England-born, she was selfish and impecunious in her youth. At Brandeis, where she listened to jazz and dated black men, she was seduced into radicalism. Her ideology stamped upon her, she set off and joined the Weather Underground. Dynamite was rigged; people, we are to assume, died. Hannah fled overseas with Zack, one of her slippery cohorts. Zack settles in Ghana; Hannah, long on fearlessness, moves on, in 1976, to Liberia. "Years ago," she remarks, "when I was in my early thirties and living underground in the States, moving from safe house to safe house, I was taught by comrades more experienced at flight than I that if a person, especially a woman, travels in fear, she is never safe."

Liberia, in reality, is not just any African country, and Banks takes full and knowledgeable advantage of its old and modern history. It has a magnetic link to America: It was established by freed American slaves, and English remains widely spoken. The descendants of those early slaves came to be known as Americo-Liberians, distinguishing themselves from the native-born Liberians. It is in this mix of tribal warfare -- native-born against non-native-born -- that the fuse of Liberia's present-day conflict was lit.

This reviewer covered the Liberian civil war in the 1990s and can attest that Banks gets the sweaty trickery of the land, the deceptions that must be played out by almost everyone, just right. Tribal factions might have smiled during the day at one another, sitting inside dilapidated office buildings, but at night, under darkness, they allowed the decades-old tensions to flourish. The gun battles began anew in the darkness. I heard gunfire nightly; then next morning, remarkably, life resumed -- particularly in the capital of Monrovia -- as if a different script must be adhered to. Rebels I'd seen walking with guns at night walked hallways the next morning, smiles upon their faces.

Liberia kept reminding me of my grandmother's Alabama. Hannah Musgrave quickly realizes she's landed in a place as mystifying as Oz. "Oddly, the streets and buildings of Monrovia and the overall ambience of the city, despite its size and sprawl and mix of architectural styles, didn't so much suggest late-twentieth-century West Africa as it did a 1940s sleepy Southern county seat; and the city might have been a set for a sentimental movie about postwar Dixie, To Kill a Mockingbird maybe -- except that all of the actors in the movie, even the extras, were black."

In Africa, then, Hannah could hide. She could be born again. Above ground.

Into her life walks Woodrow Sundiata, a government official. Woodrow is one of those descendants of exiled American slaves. Hannah and Woodrow marry. She doubts she loves him, but compromises must be made, out in the open. The CIA (why of course!) takes note of Hannah's presence in Liberia. Hannah, her antennae sharp, recognizes the effect of being married to Woodrow. "With me as his wife, however, Woodrow was exotic, a little sexy, and possibly dangerous, as if his newly consecrated American connection gave him access to power and information that were unavailable to other Liberians, even among the elite."

In time Hannah becomes enamored of chimpanzees -- "dreamers," she calls them. She nurses the desperate and starving animals back to health. She also gives birth to three sons and admits she has no passion for motherhood.

Meanwhile, Hannah's Liberia slowly becomes unglued. At the center of that unraveling is Charles Taylor, himself an Americo-Liberian who had fled the country and been imprisoned in Massachusetts for embezzling money from the Liberian government. Banks -- wonderful at melding fact and fiction -- hews close to Taylor's true-life criminal past. His escape remains unsolved to this day. In the novel, Hannah will have more than a little to say about the dramatic turn of events.

Charles Taylor's dream of liberating Liberia from its autocratic and unschooled president, Samuel Doe, had played shrewdly into Hannah's tattered idealism. "And Charles had a plan, he wanted to break out of prison, make his way to Libya, raise a guerrilla army there and return to Liberia and overthrow Samuel Doe; and he had a place, Liberia, that I had come to know better than any other place; and he had a dream: to establish in his country and, as I was beginning to think of it, mine, a socialist democracy that could by its very existence renew the dream of my youth."

But soon enough Taylor, back in Liberia, sets loose upon murderous rampages, blood and bones everywhere. He aims a part of his revenge at Woodrow himself, which means that Woodrow's family is in danger. No need to detail their fates here.

Hannah, daring and brave when she needs to be, soon comes to grips with the fact that there is a price for running, for depositing one's dreams in strange lands. "Everything that lives in Liberia and that you kill will eventually kill you for it," Hannah realizes. "Something rots beneath the soil and taints the air above it."

But, living on a farm back in the states after having fled Liberia and its dangers, leaving behind family and friends, Hannah dreams of Africa and grapples with the emotions that have long bothered her: "When you part with someone you love, there's usually an aura of grief attached. But saying goodbye has never been difficult for me. I do it quickly and with little felt emotion, until afterwards, when I'm by myself and it's done and it's too late for any feelings that might slow or clog my departure. I sat at the foot of my eldest son's rumpled, empty bed alongside the two empty beds of his brothers and saw that for the first time in nearly eight years I was alone again. And for the first time since the day I went underground, I felt strong and free."

For years now, Russell Banks has explored race, political dramas, migrations. As our best novelists must do, he creates multidimensional characters, stories that make you think how life really must be, or once happened to be. It is not for Banks -- whose last novel, Cloudsplitter, told of John Brown's messianic odyssey during America's era of slavery -- to offer the thin novella that so often passes these days for literature. His are big novels, with daring, sweep and depth. In The Darling, he is working at full strength, and readers are in his debt.

In the end, you might well not love Hannah Musgrave, might even revile her, but you won't forget her honesty and the bravery in it: "I was a bad mother, yes, but not a neglectful one. And I was an inattentive, detached wife, but not a cruel or malicious one." Her wrongs are hardly on the level of the warlords, but they prey on the mind nevertheless.

"Liberia," concludes Banks's unforgettable Hannah, "is a permanently haunted land filled with vengeful ghosts, and I had committed many sins there."

Reviewed by Wil Haygood
Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

Six years after the publication of his much-lauded novel Cloudsplitter, Banks returns with a portrayal of personal and political turmoil in West Africa and the U.S. The darling of the title is narrator Hannah Musgrave, a privileged child of the turbulent 1960s and '70s, who now, at 59, reflects on her life. After participating in freewheeling sexual experimentation and radical politics, Hannah is wanted by the FBI for her involvement in the Weather Underground. Under an assumed name, she flees the U.S. for Africa, traveling first to Ghana, then Liberia, where in 1976 she meets and marries Woodrow Sundiata, a government official. Taking on another identity—that of foreign wife, and eventually mother to three sons—Hannah finds herself increasingly involved with the highest members of Liberia's government as Woodrow's political star rises. She also finds purpose in establishing a sanctuary for endangered chimpanzees. When Liberia explodes into civil war, Hannah's life and the lives of her family are in danger. Readers will be stunned by the gut-wrenching (and often foolish) decisions she makes—and by the horrifying outcome of her association with key figures such as Liberian president Samuel Doe and insurgent Charles Taylor. An articulate and keenly observant narrator, Hannah explains Liberia's history and U.S. connections as smoothly as she reflects on tribal practices, the fate of chimpanzees and her own misguidedness. Better yet, for the purposes of good storytelling, she is conflicted and selfish, and often naïve despite her wide experience. She emerges as a fascinating figure, striking universal chords in her search for identity and home, though her life may ultimately be a study in futility. A rich and complex look at the searing connections between the personal and the political, this is one of Banks's most powerful novels yet.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

*Starred Review* American Hannah Musgrave, aka Dawn Carrington after her radical politics necessitated her going underground, ends up in Liberia in the 1980s, a struggling country once conceived as the promised land for freed African American slaves. She finds work in a shabby medical lab that houses a group of traumatized chimpanzees, and forms a deep bond with them that is more meaningful to her than relationships with humans. Even so, she is grateful enough for the protection of Liberia's minister of public health, Woodrow Sundiata, to marry him. She and he are essentially unknowable to each other--Hannah's visit to Woodrow's village is a brilliant rendition of culture shock--but their marriage is mutually beneficial, and Hannah quickly produces three sons. But not even chameleon-like Hannah and Woodrow can steer clear of the bloodshed that erupts when corrupt and vicious Samuel Doe comes to power and is, in turn, challenged by the equally ruthless Charles Taylor. Clearly smitten with his thorny narrator, Banks brings the full weight of his storytelling genius and psychological perceptiveness to a novel as compulsively readable as it is eviscerating in its dramatization of cultural divides, political mayhem, psychotic violence, and profound alienation. Banks' dramatic interpretation of Liberia's real-life tragedies brilliantly extends the vital inquiry into the consequences of slavery found in Cloudsplitter (1997), and his meditation on our close ties to other species poses urgent questions about how our greed and cruelty result in the endangerment of not only animals but also human kindness, empathy, and peace. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Darling

By Banks, Russell

HarperCollins Publishers

ISBN: 0060197358

Chapter One

After many years of believing that I never dream of anything,I dreamed of Africa. It happened on a late-August night here at thefarm in Keene Valley, about as far from Africa as I have been able to situatemyself. I couldn't recall the dream's story, although I knew that itwas in Africa, the country of Liberia, and my home in Monrovia, andthat somehow the chimps had played a role, for there were round,brown, masklike faces still afloat in my mind when I awoke, safe in mybed in this old house in the middle of the Adirondack Mountains, andfound myself overflowing with the knowledge that I would soon returnthere.

It wasn't a conscious decision to return. More a presentiment is allit was, a foreboding perhaps, advancing from the blackest part of mymind at the same rate as the images of Liberia drifted there and brokeand dissolved in those dark waters where I've stored most of my memoriesof Africa. Memories of Africa and of the terrible years before.When you have kept as many secrets as I have for as long as I have, youend up keeping them from yourself as well. So, yes, into my cache offorgotten memories of Liberia and the years that led me there -- that'swhere the dream went. As if it were someone else's secret and weremeant to be kept from me, especially.

And in its place was this knowledge that I would soon be goingback -- foreknowledge, really, because I didn't make the decision untillater that day, when Anthea and I had finished killing the chickens andwere wrapping them in paper and plastic bags for delivery and pickup.

It was at the end of summer, the beginning of an early autumn, andthough barely a year ago, it feels like a decade, so much was altered inthat year. The decade here: now, that seems like a few days and nights is all, because nothing except the same thing has happened here day after day, season after season, year after year.No new or old returning lovers, no marriages or divorces, no births or deaths, at least among thehumans. Just the farm and the world that nourishes and sustains it.Timeless, it has seemed.

The farm is a commercial operation, inasmuch as I sell most of whatI grow, but in truth it's more like an old-fashioned family farm, and torun it I've had to give over my personal clock. I've had to abandon all myurban ways of measuring time and replace them with the farm's clock,which is marked off by the needs and demands of livestock and thecrops, by the requirements of soil and the surge and flux of weather. It'sno wonder that farmers in the old days were obsessed with the motionsof the planets and the waxing and waning of the moon, as if their farmswere the bodies of women. I sometimes think it's because I am awoman -- or maybe it's merely because I lived all those years in Liberia,adapted to African time -- that I was able to adapt so easily to the paceand patterns and rhythmic repetitions of nature's clock and calendar.

It was as usual, then, on that August morning, with the darkness justbeginning to pull back from the broad river valley to the forests and themountains looming behind the house, that I woke at five-thirty andcame downstairs wearing my flannel nightgown and slippers against thepre-dawn chill, with the dogs clattering behind me, checked the temperatureby the moon-faced thermometer outside the kitchen window(still no frost,which was good, because we'd neglected to cover the tomatoes),and put the dogs out.I made coffee for Anthea, who comes in at six and says she can't do a thing until after her second cup, and the other girls, who come in atseven. I lingered for a few moments in the kitchen while the coffeebrewed, enjoying the dark smell of it. I never drink coffee, having beenraised on tea, a habit I took from my father as soon as he'd let me, but Ido love the smell of it when it's brewing and buy organic Colombianbeans from a mail-order catalogue and grind them freshly for each pot,just for the aroma.

For a few moments, as I always do, I stood by the window andwatched the dogs.They are Border collies, father and daughter, Baylorand Winnie, and when they have done their business, the first thing theydo every morning is patrol the property, reclaiming their territory andmaking sure that during the night nothing untoward has happened.Usually I watch them work and think of them as working for me. Butthis morning they looked weirdly different to me, as if during the nightone of us, they or I, had changed allegiances. They looked like ghostdogs,moving swiftly across the side yard in the gray pre-dawn light, disappearinginto shadows cast by the house and oak trees, darting low tothe ground into the garage, then reappearing and moving on.Today theyworked for no one but themselves; that's how I saw them.Their gait washalfway between a trot and a run -- fast, effortless, smooth, and silent,their ears cocked forward, plumed tails straight back -- and they seemedmore like small wolves than carefully trained and utterly domesticatedherding animals.

For a moment they scared me. I saw the primeval wildness in them,their radical independence and selfishness, the ferocity of their strictlycanine needs. Perhaps it was the thin, silvery half-light and that Iviewed them mostly in silhouette as they zigged and zagged across theyard, and when they'd checked the garage, an open shed, actually, whereI park the pickup truck and my Honda ...

Continues...

Excerpted from The Darlingby Banks, Russell Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Edition details

• Publisher: Ecco
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0060197358
• ISBN 13: 9780060197353
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 400