'And you,' I said. 'Do you believe in God?'
'It doesn't matter,' she answered calmly, 'what I believe or you believe, because we can do nothing about it, we are like these.' She flicked a dead moth off the table.
Wide Sargasso Sea nails 'place.' The thick, humid, gothic colonized islands. Unfortunately, the storytelling is somehow both overly simplistic and difficult-to-follow, and the characters feel rather blank.
I've never read Jane Eyre, which this book is a sort-of prequel to, at least plunging into the past of the mad wife, Bertha, from Eyre. I read repeatedly, however, that the book stands perfectly well on its own. Well, I'd say that's pretty true, I feel like I got the story, but I felt no attachment to the characters. This was the major shortcoming of this book.
The cast of characters is as slim as the novel. Antoinette (re-christened Marionette, later Bertha...), her husband, and a few house servants, and the story is a chronicle of how Antoinette loses her mind. We follow the white, Creole Antoinette from birth to womanhood as she encounters racism, a loveless marriage, and insanity. The story is simple, as it should be. The story is sad, as it should be ('It was like the morning when I found the dead horse. Say nothing and it may not be true.'). But all these aspects were irrelevant, because I didn't care if the main character went crazy or not. The characters are so neutrally drawn, and many of the actions they take feel unmotivated, like a way to make the story sadder. But maybe one does need the foreknowledge of some of these characters to give them depth.
Taking place mostly on Jamaica and Dominica, Rhys (who was Dominica-born) has native people of the islands cast as the servants, and through them drops in themes of racial inequality, displacement, and black magic. Rhys also pours a lot of bitterness and anger into her writing. This leads to some beautiful, elemental passages conjuring fire, magic ("obeah"), and the dead. In these moments, the book has a potent (if turgid) power.
RECOMMENDATION? This book was a slog. It was the shortest yet, but it also took the longest for me to read. Every page is depressing, which can be cathartic, but only if we have established a deep attachment to the target character. Rhys fails to achieve this, so we're left with bitter molasses with bits of truly worthy, primal writing. Wasn't worth the grind for me.
-N.C.
