It’s no secret that I love Margaret Laurence, particularly her novel A Jest of God, but I’ve always been a bit nervous of reading her debut novel. This Side Jordan (1960) breaks one of my cardinal rules for choosing novels. I call it ‘the Brits abroad’ rule in my head and, though Laurence is Canadian, it still stands. If I’m reading a novel set in a country other than mine, I prefer it to be by someone from that country – and that is doubly true when it’s a white person writing about an African country.
And yet – I thought I’d trust Laurence and risk this novel, set in Ghana. More particularly, it is set in 1957 on the cusp of independence, as Ghana was about to get that name after decades as a British colony called the Gold Coast. Laurence herself spent five years there as her husband, Jack, was stationed in the country as an engineer. She had a first-hand view of what life was like as a colonial immigrant (I never use the word ‘ex-pat’, which is almost always a whitewash of ‘economic migrant’) but how would that read nearly 70 years later?
I’ll be honest, the opening scene wasn’t promising. Here’s how the novel starts:
The six boys were playing the Fire Highlife, playing it with a beat urgent as love. And Johnnie Kestoe, who didn’t like Africans, was dancing the highlife with an African girl.
Charity’s scarlet smile mocked his attempts to rotate his shoulders and wriggle his European hips to the music. Her own fleshy hips and buttocks swayed easily, and her big young breasts, unspoiled by children and only lightly held by her pnik blouse, rose and fell as though the music were her breath. Johnnie grinned awkwardly at her, then he jerked his head away.
Oooof. The description of Charity seems both animalistic and overly sexualised, and the whole scene is pretty awkward. Johnnie is castigated by his fellow men for shaming himself by dancing with an African woman, and it was at this point that I googled ‘Is This Side Jordan racist?’ The answer was in the negative, for what it’s worth, so I carried on…
…and I quickly realised that Laurence is mocking the racists. She is showing us the attitudes, behaviours and (focalised through the third person) the perspectives of the sort of people who doubtless proliferated in this world. As it became clear that their time in the sun was coming to an end, they were becoming more protective, more vicious, more afraid of what would replace them.
The real hero of the novel appears in the next chapter. Nathaniel is a schoolteacher, and one of the more interesting, complex, sympathetic, flawed characters I’ve ever come across. As we meet him, he is anxious about money. As the educated member of the extended family who has left the village, he is expected to financially support a wide array of relatives. Yet his income is low, the school he teaches in is poor, and even the students who work hard have little chance of making anything of the shoddy education provided.
A slim hand flicked at the books on Nathaniel’s desk.
“You really prepare your lectures, Nathaniel? You crazy, man?”
“It’s a new course,” Nathaniel said stiffly.
Lamptey made him feel raw, a bush boy, a villager. Angery swelled again.
“What’s so terrible about preparing a lecture, anyway?” he snapped. “You ought to try it sometime.”
“What’s the use?” Lamptey said candidly. “The stuff I teach don’t make sense anyway. So I just tell them to memorize everything. Nobody do it, but that’s their business.”
The other teachers in the school, as you see, don’t worry too much about the substandard teaching they provide. They know the boys in their school won’t amount to much in the world. But, on the eve of independence, Nathaniel has ambitions and hopes: for himself, for his soon-to-be-born child, and for his class. It is his hope that leads to his unhappiness. He is not content with what he has, but is too poor, too unconnected, and too ground down by the context of colonialism to achieve all his intelligence warrants. Happier are those without his abilities.
One such is his wife – and she is only unhappy because Nathaniel is constantly trying to ‘better’ her, in ways she doesn’t understand. He wants their baby born in a hospital, rather than back in their village. He has encouraged her to attend the local church, rather than follow her ancestral faith – and her Christian faith seems genuine, but then he worries she is worshipping with too much fervour. As she sorrowfully points out, she can do nothing to please him.
Another complex, expertly drawn, relationship is between Nathaniel and Johnnie’s wife, Miranda. She is much kinder, more thoughtful than her husband. She admires Nathaniel, is interested in his work, and sees his capabilities – and he hates and despises her for it. Laurence is so clever in the way she shows that Miranda’s kind sympathy is more painful to receive than Johnnie’s ignorant unkindness.
Perhaps I’ve made Nathaniel seem unpleasant, but he is too real for that. There is a section in the novel where he is put in an impossible moral quandary, and the decision he makes – and its discovery – is scarletly shaming. And yet the reader has total sympathy with him. I think he is a staggeringly good creation. Laurence is so good at writing characters who invite both our sympathy and our pity. Characters who are trapped by their own shortcomings – who are, for want of a better word, pathetic. And all the sadder to read because we care about them.
Also pathetic, but less sympathetic, is James. He is in charge of things in this part of the Gold Coast, but there are rumours circulating of ‘Africanisation’ – that is, African people getting roles in the local governance of their own country, rather than everything being done by white immigrants. There is plenty of blather about this from the racist characters, but it also exposes how lost people like James are without these colonial structures to hold them up.
Johnnie, shocked into sharp vision by the Squire’s tears and by the pain in the old man’s voice, saw for the first time what James’s true position here had been. Bumbling and pompous, the Squire would likely have spent his life as a mole-like ledger-keeper, had he stayed in England. But here – here he had walked on Mount Olympus. He had dispensed justice as he saw it – rewards for the compliant ones, punishments for the unruly. A frail and balding Jupiter, he had paced his temple in time of riot, waving an old army rife, subduing and chastening his erring children.
The Squire had spoken as a god might speak, who had created a world only to have its creatures mock and finally destroy him by their disbelief.
It is right that a mediocre man like him be displaced, and that Ghana be truly independent. But Laurence is subtle enough a writer to make the reader feel a moment’s – perhaps irrational – sympathy for him.
She is, indeed, so subtle and clever a writer that I should never have allowed that opening chapter to put me on my guard. Of course Laurence wouldn’t write the sort of novel I’d feared I was reading. While I’d still rather read about Ghana in a novel or non-fiction by a Ghanaian, I do think This Side Jordan is excellent. It is peopled with unforgettable characters, a plot that is nuanced and a page-turner, and has challenged some of my preconceptions about what a ‘Brit Canadian abroad’ might bring to the table.
