The Broken Word

A rather bloody start to the week, reading Adam Foulds' The Broken Word on the train. It's a fast-paced and vivid account of a young man's experience of the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya in the 50's and his life after, back in England. By 'young man', I mean more particularly a young White man: the son of a settler family, who stays and performs acts of brutality out of fear and a half-hearted going-along-with his neighbours' macho desire to protect some kind of Englishness.

There's plenty missing in this long poem, despite the fact it's an entertaining read. Almost because it's an entertaining read (as much as I instinctively applaud it for that). There's a curious absence of credible motivation, of politics, of deep compassion. I heard about the book through the Poetry Book Society, in whose magazine the poet wrote:

No immediate relevance was intended. Nor was it meant to be an expression of moral outrage or a lesson of any kind. That extra-judicial killing and mass internment are bad didn't seem a point that needed making. I was simply interested in being inside the Kenyan Emergency...

Something of this positionlessness comes through, and it's unsettling. You don't have to agree with Adorno's supposed soundbite that 'to write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric' (interesting commentary about that quote here, btw) to think that writing poetry about Auschwitz that is 'just interested in being inside' the experience, without moral outrage, is at the very least, missing something important. And the same goes for this other bloody chapter in mid-century history.

What's missing in this book is obvious in comparison with Ngugi wa Thiong'o's breathtaking novel about the same uprising, A Grain of Wheat. This novel is fiercely politically engaged, but still emotionally nuanced and understanding of all sides and the complexities of engagement. And perhaps it shows a greater confidence in the immediate importance of literature than Adam Foulds' book does.

It's interesting that Adam Foulds chose to recommend Christopher Logue's War Music in the Poetry Book Society Bulletin, too. His book certainly has the flair, readability and cinematic violence of War Music (although to return to my earlier point, it's less pressing to do justice to mythologised figures like Hector and Achilles).

And speaking of justice, I want to be clear that I enjoyed this book greatly and was drawn in (as if reading a thriller, or watching The Last King of Scotland). And whilst I didn't find Tom (the central character) fully drawn, and felt the last section set back in England failed to integrate convincingly with the emotional experience that Tom had been through, there was much to admire and respect in the writing. It is indeed, as described by both Michael Longley and Craig Raine, 'a brilliant debut'. But perhaps 'brilliance' sounds a bit unengaged for this subject matter...