Published earlier
this month, P. P. Wong’s The Life of a
Banana tells the story of a twelve-year-old Chinese-British girl growing up
in London. After the death of her mother, Xi Ling and her brother go to live
with their controlling and somewhat terrifying grandmother, famous actress
aunt, and struggling and mysterious uncle. Xi Ling is taken out of a school she
was happy in to move to a private school. There she has only one friend, half-Chinese,
half-Jamaican Jay, and is constantly the victim of harsh racial bullying. It’s
a story about identity, especially nationality, and about growing up.
It’s a slightly odd
book, and I was undecided for a lot of the novel whether or not I liked it. By
the ending, I had fairly firmly come down on the side of like, but it took me a
long time to warm to the novel.
Let me to explain
why.
Firstly, there’s
the writing style. Throughout it is a very odd mix of comedy and tragedy, and
you’re never really sure what tone Wong is going for. For example, in Xi Ling’s
mother’s bizarre and melodramatic death it almost seems that Wong is trying to
make this awful event funny. The
whole book ends up reading quite strangely, as often you really can’t tell what
is trying to be said. This strange overlapping of the serious and the comic
creates a novel that seems unable to quite make up its mind about what it is.
I find the frequent
block capitals to indicate characters shouting incredibly jarring to read. It
seems a minor point, but it really disrupts the book’s flow, and feels very
clumsy and overdone. Likewise I find the slang quite irritating. I do
understand that Wong taking on the voice of a twelve year old, but it still
feels very overdone. Slang and accenting in dialogue I have no problem with.
Slang in prose I’m more on the fence for. It can work very well, but here it
feels forced, especially as most of the slang is very out of date.
That’s the other
thing. This book is supposed to be contemporary, but it very much feels like it’s
set twenty or thirty years ago. There isn’t much internet or mobile phones, for
one thing. For another, the racism feels outdated. This may be just my ignorance,
but from my experiences and observations, it has always seemed that racism in
schools, while still present, often takes on subtler and at times more
subconscious level. Racism in children nowadays is, I think, more likely to
come from ignorance than active hatred. It’s still racism and it’s still a
problem, but it’s of a different and less obvious character than that of Shril’s
towards Xing Li. In fact, because it is less obvious it probably needs to be
written about me. For bullying of any sort to reach the violence of Shirl’s
attack against Xing Li is incredibly rare. It again makes the plot feel
overdone, because you end up thinking, surely
this would never happen. I understand that the bullying is meant to shock
the reader, but my personal impression is that it would lead to many readers
thinking this ridiculous, and thus perhaps dismissing the problem of racial
bullying in schools altogether. The novel often exaggerates to prove a point,
but the exaggerations to me go too far. They may well distract people from the
actual problems Wong is trying to draw attention to, or even make people
dismiss them.
I also felt there
was a slight hypocrisy present in the novel regarding Wong’s image of private
schools. Xi Ling seems never to encounter any racial bullying in her previous
state school, but encounters a great deal the moment she begins a private
school. This assumption that the sort of people who attend a private school are
far more likely to be racist than people at a state school seems, to me, rather
hypocritical in a novel that is all about fighting assumptions and prejudices,
about not judging people by their social background.
Another issue was
Xi Ling’s age. She doesn’t feel twelve. She feels about fourteen fifteen.
Obviously this is a twelve year old girl who has been through a lot, but I am
slightly bemused as to why Wong didn’t just make her a few years older. Her
voice seems older, as does her relationship with Jay. She doesn’t come across
as mature so much as impossibly old for her age.
Again, I’ve done
that thing where I want to get my criticisms out the way and then forget to
explain why I like the novel. Because I did enjoy The Life of a Banana by the end. And here’s why: Jay.
Well, not just him,
but mostly him. Jay is certainly my favourite character. He felt like by far
the most developed and real character in the book, perhaps with the exception
of the narrator. Again, he doesn’t really feel twelve, but he is still
consistently a delight to read. His family provides a good foil to Xi Ling’s, a
vision of a different sort of ethnic minority identity, and a much more certain
and confident one that Xi Ling addresses. It’s Jay that to me makes the novel.
I also like the
character of the grandmother. I do think that, at times, she is in danger of
becoming a stereotype (which is probably not the best way to fight racism), but
for most of the novel she avoids this. She presents us with various funny
scenes, and yet develops a lot throughout the book. I especially like that you
grow to have some sort of understand for her long before Xi Ling ever does, and
I like her role in the ending.
Uncle Ho is also an
important figure in the make-up of the novel. It is his plotline that saves The Life of a Banana from being a one
issue novel, that turns it from a novel about race and racism to a novel about
race, identity, family, and mental illness. It depends the novel another level,
and gives you a greater insight in Xi Ling’s grandmother’s mind.
Overall, The Life of a Banana is worth a read. It’s
certainly different, and the content and plot are, if rather melodramatic, fairly
strong. It’s the writing style that, to me, most lets the novel down. Nonetheless,
I think it’s the sort of novel you grow to like by the end of it. And if
nothing else, read it for the lovely character that is Jay.
Greatest
strength: Jay.
Greatest
weakness: I do feel
that a lot of the time both the writing and the plot was overdone. This book
lacks subtly.
Let’s
finish on a quote:
“Good morning class.”
“Good morning Mrs
Wilkins.”
“Class, before we
begin, I would like to announce we have a newcomer all the way from China.”
(I was born in
Hackney.)
Next week: Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell
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