Ode to nature pure magic throughout
HAPPINESS Aminatta Forna Loot.co.za (R293) Bloomsbury
IN GREENHAMPTON, Massachusetts in 1834 or thereabout, the last wolves in the area were killed by a wolf trapper. And so begins Aminatta Forna’s book Happiness. It’s a gripping start to the story that follows.
Forna strikes a poignant note from the start of this rather startling novel with her opening chapter.
A battle has been waged probably ever since sentient beings started to create homes. A pitting of humans against nature and her creatures.
Fast-forward to this century and Attila, a psychiatrist from Ghana, but really a citizen of the world, and Jean from America, who is studying foxes in London, collide on Waterloo Bridge. Attila is in London as the keynote speaker on post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and has just enjoyed an evening at the theatre and dinner.
London has become a home from home when he is between travelling to war-torn parts of the world.
Both Jean and Attila are in a sense displaced. Jean has left her home and her ex-husband and son behind in America, and Attila has not returned to Ghana since the death of his wife.
London forms a semi-neutral space for their story to play out, if indeed any place can be deemed as neutral. In this city Jean has started a garden on the roof of the small flat she rents. It’s a place that delights and allows her to watch out for the foxes she is monitoring for a study that doesn’t pay the rent.
To augment her stipend, she has started her own business making gardens in the sky for clients. Attila has two jobs to do in London, one to deliver his speech to hundreds of delegates, the other to find his niece Ama and her son, who seem to have vanished.
Happiness has as its bones the story of two people, but there is a far more complex tale that hums along beneath it. It’s a story about urbanisation and how people fear the wild coming into what they imagine is a safe space. To put it mildly, Jean is fighting a battle for the foxes, and to make people really understand why it is that wild creatures return to spaces they have vacated. Through a network of street sweepers, taxi drivers and doormen at hotels she tallies up the foxes she has named and collared to map their movements. Forna does a wonderful job of telling the “story” of the life of wild creatures in cities without becoming sentimental, but that does not mean that she fails to pay tribute to the beauty of the wild in the supposedly tamed territory of London. She watches one fox, Light Bright, with interest as the young vixen begins to map a territory to entice a mate into.
She battles popular sentiment and ignorance imperfectly at times and becomes the barb of jokes and social media bullying.
Attila in the meanwhile is on a journey into the past of his own. One of his oldest friends, Rosie, is living with early onset dementia and he is there to visit her and to make plans for her future. The author catches the terrible aloneness of a brilliant woman who can no longer access her memories and the grief that Attila suffers as he watches her decline in the home she is living in.
Wrapped around these stories is the story of Ama, who lives in London legally but has been picked up by the authorities for no reason other than her landlord’s greed. Race is one of the issues in the book, and the author has chosen to represent it as the way it plays out in areas of privilege. At a function, Attila is addressed by a fellow guest in a manner that demonstrates the combination of delicacy and a deep perception of society that Forna weaves through her novel, “So, where are you from?” the man commanded from below. “From Accra,” said Attila. “Ah, Africa! And do you go back often?” “I live there,” replied Attila. “Oh!… Never mind,” he said. He introduced himself.
“Attila,” said Attila. And waited for the inevitable.
“Good God,” said the man with all the impertinence of one whose confidence survives on the safety of the herd.
“I expect because they liked it,” replied Attila, “with the tact of those who lack quorum.”
As Jean and Attila meet again in a search for a missing child, they are faced with the everyday cruelty that happens in big cities, and I suppose in any community. The author deals with these interactions with great depth in the most readable of manners. There is no preaching in this book, but there are massive lessons to be learnt.
I found it interesting that much of Attila’s professional questioning has been around the popular diagnosis of PTSD among first responders in the field of counselling. It coincides with many of the conclusions in Lynne Jones’ non-fiction work Outside the Asylum (Weidenfeld & Nicolson). Attila has come to conclusions, much as Jones does, that PTSD is a convenient bandage to pop on in traumatic circumstances.
A way to feel good about fixing people by giving them drugs or pathologising traumatic change. It is one of the big questions raised in the book.
Happiness is a delight of a novel that often feels like a philosophy lecture given by someone who understands our humanity and love and how we are all tied together in some way.
The plot of the book is a quiet and personal account of people’s lives, but the magic of it lies in how Forna has her characters relate to each other and in a sense save each other. It’s also about the way humans have appropriated nature for their own comfort with little thought of the value of the creatures and plants. Pure magic from start to finish.
She battles popular sentiment and barbs and bullying on social media