Helen Oyeyemi, a Granta best of young British novelist, was born in Nigeria, grew up in London and has lived around Europe and North America. She specialises in unorthodox, freewheeling plots, rooted in myth and narrated in an innocent-seeming style. Her fifth novel is a historical narrative of American racism set in the 1950s and 60s.
At the start a woman named Boy Novak tells us how she ran away aged 20 from New York to escape her rat-catcher father, Frank, a drunk who beat her (her mother was absent). She pitches up in a small town in Massachusetts to marry a widowed jeweller and former historian, Arturo, who has a seven-year-old daughter, Snow, whose mother died after complications in childbirth.
The central crisis of the novel comes when Arturo has another daughter, with Boy – named Bird – and she is born dark-skinned. Arturo’s family accuse Boy of being unfaithful but the truth, as they all know, is that they have been passing for white. What follows is the painful background to that decision, as Arturo’s family recount the horrors of life in the south and their disappointed hopes for how things might improve when they moved north.
Oyeyemi cuts to Bird, growing up with ambitions to become a reporter. At school she falls for an Asian boy subject to racist abuse fuelled by the Vietnam war. Bird stands up to his bullies and is generally tough: Boy recalls that when her daughter’s period came “she showed me the blood with an expression that asked me how she could possibly be expected to tolerate this level of inconvenience”.
Part of the narrative consists of Bird’s letters to her half-sister, whom Boy – in her allotted role of wicked stepmother – sends away. The fabular elements of Oyeyemi’s imagination come into play here: for Snow, read Snow White.
As in fairytales, Oyeyemi’s gentle, unforced tone can lull you into overlooking the underlying horror; Toni Morrison’s recent novel God Help the Child treats similar themes with a much heavier hand. Boy, Snow, Bird is an impressive performance marred only by the well-meaning but awkward explanation given at the end of the book for Frank’s abusiveness, which attempts to mirror the theme of racial passing with a parallel subplot about gender. If Oyeyemi tries to do too much, it’s a failing you can forgive.
Boy, Snow, Bird is published by Picador (£7.99). Click here to order it for £5.99
