Some war veterans slip back into civilian life with reasonable ease, stiff of limb, stiff of upper lip. If at first it’s a case of concealment and self-restraint, there’s at least some chance that play-acting can infiltrate reality. The protagonist of Toni Morrison’s new novel, Home, is called Frank Money. He has just returned to his native town in Georgia from fighting in the Korean War, and discovered that he has no true home. He’s always known he has no money. He tries to overcome the wartime memories he’s carried with him from Korea, but when does a coping mechanism become just a lie? And a lie yet another thing to cope with?
Morrison’s book becomes, in part, a document for Frank Money’s thoughts and confessions. Her third person is interjected with his first person, stream of consciousness, diary-type
entries. The result is a highly fractured tale intended to resemble the crumbling nature of Money’s existence post war. It is interjected with some moving, often disturbing passages of
description:
‘Now he was reckless, lunatic, firing, dodging the scattered parts of men. The begging, the howling for help he could not hear clearly until an F-51 dropped its load on the enemies’
nest. In the post-blast silence the pleas wafted like the sound of a cheap cello coming from a chute of cattle smelling their blood-soaked future.’
But just as often there isn’t a lot to distinguish Morrison’s voice from that of her protagonist. The similarity makes the book all the more unnerving. Whose is this authorial voice,
and what part has it in Frank Money’s tale?
As the story flashes back and forward one is left even further adrift for pages at a time. 1950’s Korea doesn’t seem so very far away from America in the era of the Civil Rights Movement. There’s blood, and it’s everywhere. But it’s the sense of disorientation that makes this book. It may take quite a few pages to hit home (which is surprising considering its brevity – it’s just 145 pages), but the disrupted and entangled lines are the very things that draw out the parallels between Korea and the deep South, between the past and the present. These parallels are mainly personal to Money’s tale, since Morrison is admirably subtle in her contextualization.
Much of the focus of this action is on Money’s attempt to rescue his ailing sister Ycidra, whom he calls Cee, from a plight she’s too young to understand. The veteran may think
he’s little more than a shell of a man, but Cee never had more than a husk to build on from the start. For a shadow of a person she’s remarkably well traced throughout. As with many of
Morrison’s novels, the title doesn’t give away too much. The issue at hand isn’t just whether saving Cee and making a woman of her will help Frank find home. There’s far
more at stake. Morrison’s gift is to take us there tacitly, and unannounced. Nothing is over-laboured. Each word resounds with sultry, heat-oppressive Georgia. With language as unpretentious
as all that this suggests, a bombshell really could be quite explosive.
Toni Morrison’s Home is published by Chatto & Windus on 3 May.
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