Rachel Seiffert's first book, The Dark Room , shortlisted for the Booker Prize, announced the arrival of a major writer; Afterwards fulfills that promise with a stunning novel about war and its brutal after-effect. Alice is the protagonist of Afterwards, but this book is about the guilt harboured by people around her. There are two men in her life: her maternal grandfather, David, recently widowed, and her boyfriend, Joseph, each of whom keeps his past from his loved ones. David served in Kenya during the Mau Mau ...
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Rachel Seiffert's first book, The Dark Room , shortlisted for the Booker Prize, announced the arrival of a major writer; Afterwards fulfills that promise with a stunning novel about war and its brutal after-effect. Alice is the protagonist of Afterwards, but this book is about the guilt harboured by people around her. There are two men in her life: her maternal grandfather, David, recently widowed, and her boyfriend, Joseph, each of whom keeps his past from his loved ones. David served in Kenya during the Mau Mau rebellion; Joseph, during a stint in the British army, served in Northern Ireland. Both, we learn, live with the memory of having killed in the line of duty. As Alice's relationship with Joseph develops, she senses there is something about his past that he keeps hidden. This is particularly galling given the personal and emotional details she has revealed to him (namely, that Alice has never met her father, and her attempts to establish an epistolary relationship with him in adulthood foundered). After her grandmother's death, Alice finds the time spent with her grandfather awkward. She doesn't know him the way she did her grandmother, but feels obliged to visit and offer support. Gradually, it emerges that David's cold manner is traceable to events in Kenya, where he and his wife met. And as Alice tries to get to the bottom of Joseph's reticence, a series of heated family discussions brushes ever closer to David's secrets. From the Hardcover edition.
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quietly stunning novel. The point of view shifts between Alice and Joseph, the new man in her life. Alice's past--a father she never knew in childhood and who rejected her again later, a self-absorbed stepfather, a grandfather who was civil but detached--has made her long even more than most of us for an intimate relationship. Things seem to be moving along swimmingly until Alice intuits that Joseph is hiding something about his stint as a soldier in Northern Ireland. And when her grandfather begins to open up to Joseph, the novel--and Joseph--explodes.
Seiffert's spare, clean style is perfectly suited to her subject matter. She gets relationships and the way they work just right and makes her points about war through them instead of through polemic. Best novel I've read so far this year, and it will be hard to beat.
