Survivors’ story
Stern lessons and a beautiful friendship lie at the heart of this London-based tale. By Melanie Finn
On London’s Waterloo Bridge, Dr Attila Asare, a Ghanaian psychiatrist who specializes in the treatment of “post-traumatic stress disorder in noncombatant populations,” collides with Jean Turane, an American wildlife biologist studying the city’s foxes. These central figures in Aminatta Forna’s fourth novel, Happiness, have come to middle age – and London – as worldly, selfsufficient individuals, albeit grieving private losses. Their friendship will deepen when Attila’s niece is rounded up by the immigration authorities and the niece’s young son goes missing. To find him, Jean enlists the help of her ragtag team of wildlife sighters — the immigrant street cleaners, traffic wardens and hotel staff who move stealthily, like hunted animals, in the shadows of the city, inhabiting the crepuscular seams of urban life.
The foxes are seen as outsiders, scavengers, carriers of violence and disease. When one apparently bites a child, there is an uproar. Caring liberals merely want these animals relocated to the country where they “belong.” But others, like London’s mayor, intend to extirpate them by whatever means necessary.
Attila, watching the mayor on TV in full rhetorical throttle, pronounces him a hypomaniac. And Jean’s evidence-based science is no match for the facile hysteria he whips up. Nature – trees, birds, wild animals – has no right to interfere with the lazy Western narcissism of this man’s political base. “There’s nothing that complicated in getting rid of a pest,” he declares. To which Jean retorts, “It’s not a problem unless you call it one.” The bitten child is “recovering” in the hospital, having received six stitches. Jean’s perceived lack of empathy, coupled with what is seen as her disdain for the need to keep all children safe from everything, make her the object of a bitter social media storm.
Her predicament parallels Attila’s growing sense that much of his own work is pusillanimous and dangerously indulgent. Asked to give expert evidence in the case of a woman from Sierra Leone who set fire to her apartment after the sudden death of her husband, he struggles to find evidence of the PTSD her lawyers say will keep her from deportation. Instead, he identifies the cause of her anxiety as something perhaps even more insidious: “the monstrous absence of empathy” of the white neighbours who avoided her after the tragedy, as if her grief were somehow contagious.
At its weakest, Happiness devolves into a stern lecture, delivered through Attila, arguing that our avoidance of discomfort has become a pathology, one that supports an ever-expanding therapeutic industry. As Attila excoriates our childish pursuit of wrinkle-free lives, Forna even gives him a phrase to describe it: “prelapsarian innocence.” In opposition, Forna offers the examples of certain resilient survivors of war zones and of Jean’s foxes, who outwit the humans intent on annihilating them. Yet I found this dichotomy unconvincing. After all, we lack the resources to identify and treat most psychological victims of war; for the
most part, they simply vanish into obscurity.
Forna’s finely structured novel powerfully succeeds on a more intimate scale, however, as its humane characters try to navigate scorching everyday cruelties. Pausing to watch immigrant jugglers, Jean finds a bag hidden in the bushes containing worn trainers and a school exercise book: “Something about it, this pitiful collection of belongings, the ambitions encompassed by the study notes in the exercise book, the men performing for an uninterested public; watching them brought Jean a feeling of pity and strange protectiveness.”
Like Jean, we can only guess at the horrors these jugglers have fled, only imagine the terrors of their journey and how much they have endured to come here, to the West, to perform for us, the “uninterested public.”