The Darling

by Russell Banks

Set in Liberia and the United States from 1975 through 1991, The Darling is the story of Hannah Musgrave, a political radical and member of the Weather Underground.

Hannah flees America for West Africa, where she and her Liberian husband become friends of the notorious warlord and ex-president, Charles Taylor. Hannah's encounter with Taylor ultimately triggers a series of events whose momentum catches Hannah's family in its grip and forces her to make a heartrending choice.

Genres: Fiction, Africa, Historical Fiction, Liberia, Novels, Audiobook, Book Club

391 pages, Paperback

First published October 12, 2004

About the author

Russell Banks was a member of the International Parliament of Writers and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His work has been translated into twenty languages and has received numerous international prizes and awards. He has written fiction, and more recently, non-fiction, with Dreaming up America. His main works include the novels Continental Drift, Rule of the Bone, Cloudsplitter, The Sweet Hereafter, and Affliction. The latter two novels were each made into feature films in 1997.

Reviews

[Kinga · Rating 5 out of 5]

A white male American writing a book with a white middle aged female narrator reminiscing over the time she lived in Africa seems like a potential minefield. But somehow, Banks pulled it off and didn’t lose any limbs on the mines.

For many mediocre writers Africa seems ripe for picking, full of conflict and tragedy provides the story with high enough stakes to make up for the lack of talent on the writer’s part. But Banks does it well. He doesn’t use the continent as some shitty metaphor. He talks about Liberia, a country that’s a product of specific time and history and not some ‘unnamed African country’ that’s just a weird mash-up of stereotypes sprinkled with acacia trees and sunsets. Occasionally the passages explaining the history and politics of Liberia felt tiny bit too educational, but this is really a minor quibble.

I’m not going to summarise the plot because there are already hundreds of reviews here that do just that, but I will say than other than Zack and the narrator’s father, there is almost a complete absence of white male protagonists in this book, which was very refreshing.

All in all, this was a little like American Pastoral but better. I don’t know why the rest of the world seems to be sleeping on Russell Banks. He is a fine, fine writer. And he did a brave thing here, writing about stuff he had no business knowing about and weirdly pulling it off. He also opted for writing the thing in flashbacks, which removes some of the dramatic tension, as we already know how some of it ends.

My favourite aspect of the book is how it treats the question of otherness - how the white narrator doesn’t seem to be able to overcome the ‘otherness’ of her Liberian husband, and then her own children who slip away from her and her feeble attempts at motherhood.

I read a great phrase, I think it was in one of the interviews with Banks about this book – ‘the guilty innocence of white privileged people’, which describes white women in Africa well. This is what the half-sarcastic title of the novel refers to, and what I think when I see those Instagram posts. You know which ones.

[Algernon · Rating 5 out of 5]

My story in all its versions is only a tale of too-late. Maybe at best it’s a cautionary tale. To my sons I used to say, “Be careful what you wish for. Know what you love best. Beware the things that catch your eye.” And this, I tell you as well: “Never love someone who can’t love you back.”

Hannah Musgrave is a reluctant narrator, probably because her conscience isn’t exactly spotless. But she is a compelling one. Whatever misgivings I have about her stated motivations, her personal witness account of a violent period in the history of the United States and Liberia, two nations linked by a bloody heritage of slavery, corruption and greed, is passionate and memorable.

Born to affluence on the East Coast and educated in one of the top liberal colleges there, the young Hannah rejects her upper middle-class intellectual role and joins the ranks of anti-war, civil rights militants at the tail end of the 1960s’. After a stint in the Southern States organizing voters registrations and protest movements, one that end in disappointment for the East Coast do-gooders, Hannah turns radical and tries to bring forward a revolution by arson and bombing within the loose ranks of the Weather Underground.

Eventually, of course, literature got displaced by reality as it invariably does, but for a while my everyday life had the clarity, intensity and certitude of fiction.

Russel Banks managed to impress me right from the start of this revolutionary memoir. The account of Hannah’s involvement in the racial and political movements of those years certainly has the clarity and intensity mentioned in the quote above. The ‘certitude’ though is based on a shakier foundation, mostly implied by Hannah in her present time, as a 59 years old disillusioned farmer in a charming North East location.
She’s still one tough cookie, but what I really admired in her memoir is the way she lets her past actions speak for her, instead of trying to editorialize or rewrite history and put herself in a better light. Hannah, and Banks, use this return to the past as a tool to chip away at that youthful certitude, at the self-delusion of the white crusader with a mission to put the world to right.

This exploration of the past in search for enough evidence to give meaning and purpose to her journey through life takes Hannah back to Africa and Liberia, the place where she ended up when her own government put her on its Most Wanted Criminals list. The place where she reinvented herself as a nurse, environmentalist and, eventually, dutiful wife and mother to a local politician.

At the time, I didn’t realize that I was once again seizing an opportunity to abandon one life for another. [...] That’s the real American Dream, don’t you think? That you can start over, shape-change, disappear and later reappear as someone else.

Hannah’s main problem though is that her newly adopted country is heading towards a bloody civil war, pushed there by her former country through CIA and corporate intervention.

Once the necessary under-the-counter payments were distributed in Monrovia, the companies were free to loot whatever they wanted from the lands – rubber, citrus, rice, cocoa, and in recent years a small but growing quantity of diamonds.

Russell, through the voice of Hannah Musgrave, paints a comprehensive and passionate landscape of this little corner of Western Africa. Comparisons with Graham Greene, who wrote about neighbouring Sierra Leone, are easy to make and quite useful. Where Greene explores the questions of religion in a modern setting, Russell dissects the dilemma of liberal thinking and academic solutions confronted by the harsh realities of a tribal culture sabotaged by big industry and Cold War spy games.

Hannah Musgrave is not really a likable lead character. Frankly, she is rather annoying in her privileged, reckless, selfish and often naive attempts to do good. Her good intentions usually end up causing more harm than good, like a one person mirror of a nationwide adventurous and self-serving meddling in other people’s and other nation’s affairs.

It was like jumping from a ship that was in no danger of sinking and finding myself alone in a tiny rowboat in the middle of the ocean.

Most of the issues arise from an apparent inability of Hannah to decide who she is and what she wants to do with her life. Her marriage and subsequent family life is the result of lust and impulsive behaviour instead of true love. Her attempt to integrate into the life of the country ends in spectacular failure as she runs from the rudimentary village of her future husband and has a brief affair with his driver , her rejection of her parents’ values lead Hannah to a boring housewife existence in an elitist Monrovia quarter.
Wherever she goes, back to America, returning once more to Liberia, Hannah remains an outsider, an observer, a sidenote of history even as her adopted country crumbles into civil war and her husband and sons are taken away from her.

What then can be finally salvaged from that youthful decision to make a better world? How can Hannah reconcile her idealism with the wreckage of her African family? Is there any redeeming quality in her memoirs?

Without giving away any major spoilers, I would say that the fact that Hannah is able to ask these very questions at the end of a turbulent life is proof that her efforts were not entirely futile. Among her Liberian projects is establishing a sanctuary for endangered chimpanzees, hunted almost to extinction by locals for their tasty ‘bushmeat’, captured by foreigners for their zoos and by corporations for horrible research studies.
After failing to communicate with her family, with her fellow revolutionaries or with her Liberian family and countrymen, Hannah finally sees something true and certain in the eyes of these captive apes, deliberately infected with various viruses and maltreated by callous attendants. Her ‘dreamers’ force Hannah into a more honest self-evaluation, both in regard to politics and her racial attitudes.

In the new history of America, mine was merely the story of an American darling, and had been from the beginning.

The final lines of the novel echo a quote from a movie I felt compelled to rewatch as I read about Hannah Musgrave and her revolutionary journey. It’s from “The Way We Were” and about the same civil rights period and about the same personal responsibility dilemma :

In a way, he was like the country he lived in: everything came too easy for him

[Shane · Rating 4 out of 5]

This novel is a scarier version of Philip Roth’s “American Pastoral” in which the indulged upper middle class daughter rejects her comfortable surroundings in suburbia and joins a group of radicals to bring about a utopian socialist society in America, with disastrous consequences.

Hannah Musgrave, the errant darling of the ‘70’s, is nearing her sixtieth year in the early 21st century, and is reflecting on where her idealism and search for purpose has led her. Firstly, she is not a particularly sympathetic or warm person. She has an irrational hate for her stay-at-home mother who only wanted the best for her daughter, she is a promiscuous bi-sexual who will sleep with anyone, including her husband’s driver while waiting for the said husband to join her after a family party, she has no particular maternal feelings towards her three mixed-race sons, or her husband, she cares for her chimpanzees more than for her human family, and she is blindly fearless, venturing into danger zones and crossing borders illegally without much thought for her safety, buoyed by the whiteness of her skin and the suspicion that the American authorities who want to imprison her back home will keep her alive in Africa.

The story flows back and forth in time and location between America and Africa in five sections (there are no chapters) and we have to settle on the telling voice of Hanna who is the first-person narrator of the entire tale. We are introduced to her as she reflects on her prior life, while running a farm in the Adirondacks, a place of hard work and peaceful surroundings. She takes us on a tour of her life in the ‘70’s when she was a member of the Weather Underground, making bombs for the movement; she escapes arrest in America and makes it across to Africa, arriving in Liberia via Ghana. The history of the founding of Liberia, America’s cold-war colony in Africa, is covered in interesting detail. In Liberia, she marries a government official, Woodrow, and has three children by him. She finds purpose in caring for a band of chimpanzees that has been used by an American pharmacy for medical testing; Hanna persuades her husband to set up a sanctuary for the abused chimps and transforms the animals’ lives. Meanwhile, Liberia is heading towards civil war, with tribal chieftains jockeying for power. Fact mixes with fiction here for we are introduced to real-life warlords like Charles Taylor, Samuel Doe and Prince Johnson who become central characters in Hannah’s life and in her story. Woodrow and Hannah back the wrong horse and pay a terrible price, and Hannah’s dream of seeing the socialist utopia, once denied to her in the US, vanishes in Liberia as well, along with her family and her chimpanzees. It is through this loss that Hanna discovers her dormant maternal instinct and her love for family.

What is gripping and unsettling is the level of violence that quickly descends on a country that was originally conceived as the returning homeland for free slaves from the US. However, as is to be expected, the freed slaves quickly became the ruling class, the 1%, encroaching on the lands of the natives, creating resentment and discord. “Liberia was created to solve a race problem in the US not a slave problem,” observes Hanna. She goes on to posit that, “Everything changes, except the principles of exploitation and use,” for the US, in an attempt to maintain control, pits one warlord against the other and supports the best one to serve them in his attempt to get rid of the others. The mysterious CIA agent Sam Clement shows up in Hanna’s life several times and, while protecting her, seems to be manipulating her for his own ends. Hanna’s drive into the interior to visit her husband’s tribal family for the first time is like a journey into the heart of darkness; these shades of Greene and Conrad provide layering and narrative thrust to the novel, despite it occasionally resembling the ramblings of an aging woman in search of a country.

The challenges of a mixed racial and cultural marriage and its effects on the children are well drawn. Hannah never really has a visceral bond with her children, or with her husband, other than for a social and political one. And when those fragile bonds collapse everything and everyone is lost, and what is lost can never be regained.

The irony is that as Hanna concludes her odyssey on Sep 10th 2001, she reflects that her narrative will pale in comparison to the much darker one that is about to unfold between America and its international satellites.

[Fabian · Rating 4 out of 5]

"That's the real American Dream, don't you think? That you can start over, shape-change, disappear, and later reappear as someone else."

The white priviledge is tested to its limit. This American darling is a rebel; our multi-named heroine goes to Africa, liberates chimpanzees, talks with the Liberian president, marries a black man and gives him children. She has the capability of doing so many things in the world--she is so well-developed as a character that her tragic story seems secondary. I want to pick your brain! What is it with women who adore primates (or dogs, or cats, or pets) and yet have no maternal feelings...?

[Jordan Neville · Rating 4 out of 5]

"I wondered if I had lost my mind...I thought, I could be a madwoman. And I wondered if I was standing there in the dark by the side of a narrow, unpaved road in the eastern hills of Liberia because somewhere back there, without knowing it, I'd lost touch with reality. Lost it in small bits, a single molecule of sanity at a time in a slow, invisible, irreversible process of erosion, and couldn't notice it while it was happening, couldn't take it's measure, until now, when it was too late."

Banks easily ranks as one of my favorite writers. "Rule of the Bone" and "Affliction" are among my all time most loved novels. This one doesnt quite inhabit the same place those two do but it is still a great book. Banks always combines beautiful\interesting prose with exceptional imagination. As well as enaging the reader's intellectual curiosity. His books are always firing on all cylinders.

[AC · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars - a really fabulous book - set in the Liberian Civil War, Hannah, ex-weather..., underground. Banks, who is male, chooses to write about a woman in the first person -- and at first it's a bit weird - but in the end, he makes it work. If you're looking for something contemporary with bite and depth, a book about a life poised over the voids of history... you might like it. Nighly rec'd. Banks writes well -- realism -- yet a fine, fine writer.

[Leslie · Rating 5 out of 5]

the woman's point of view is so well done in this book that it's hard to believe it was authored by a man. i simultaneously loved and loathed the main character. the fact that it's historically accurate, and that charles taylor, who is featured prominently in the novel, has been in the press recently, make it all the more interesting.

[Andrew Stewart · Rating 4 out of 5]

I‘ve underestimated Russell Banks, despite having read hardly anything. Maybe it’s the movie adaptations that give me a vague sense of brooding northeast americana whenever his name comes up. This one sat around for a long time too before I got around to it. A white man from the west telling a story about an African country through the voice of a 60-year-old woman. Hmm. Let’s just say I was skeptical. I’m not the best judge of the authenticity of either of those things but as far as I’m concerned he didn’t just pull it off, the book is outstanding.

The prose is stark, he doesn’t indulge in lyricism. The narrator’s voice is hardened, cold, and occasionally bitter. There’s a moral fatigue seeped into the writing-appropriate for a story that spans decades of betrayal, war, and failed utopias. Liberia isn’t presented as an exotic backdrop but as a fully realized setting with its own complex history and politics. Banks avoids the patronization that often characterizes western fiction set in Africa. The political violence and corruption are presented matter of factly, neither sensationalized nor minimized.

It’s a powerful meditation on privilege, responsibility, and the legacy of American involvement in African affairs. He’s not explaining it, he’s confronting the limits of our understanding. It’s reads like a confession, but without any resolution or redemption. Which is all a bit depressing really, but so are a lot of great books. I’ll definitely approach my next one of his with more enthusiasm than in the past.

[Lena Webb · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have incredibly disturbing thoughts about primates, and this book didn't help me out one bit.

[Shannon · Rating 4 out of 5]

There aren't many Liberian authors - something like three, according to Wikipedia - and there aren't many books set there either. If you want a good idea of what the deal is with Liberia, where it is and what happened in its recent history, this is an excellent book for educating yourself.

Hannah Musgrove is a well-educated American with a famous doctor for a father and a fluttering, apparently silly woman for a mother. It's the 60s, and just before finishing her medical degree she drops out and becomes involved in a political group. Over the years, while not seriously involved in terrorism, she tries to hide from the FBI and takes on an assumed name: Dawn Carrington. It is as Dawn that she later flees America, thinking her life is in danger, with her friend and fellow revolutionary, Zach. They go to Africa, to Ghana on the west coast. After several months there Hannah leaves Zach - who is making millions buying up African art from tribespeople and selling it at inflated prices to rich westerners - and crosses the border to Liberia, squeezed in between Côte d'Ivoire and Sierra Leone, where she heard a company connected to an American university is looking for trained medics to work in its laboratory, where they use chimpanzees as test subjects.

Years later, now in her 50s and running an organic farm in the US, Hannah is driven to return to Liberia and revisit her guilt. She brings us with her, for the first time in her life telling someone the story of what happened - of meeting the Assistant Minister for Public Health, Woodrow Sundiata, and marrying him; of her three sons Dillon, Paul and William and how they became known as Worse Than Death, Fly, and Demonology; and the story of her chimps, how she rescued them and gave them sanctuary and then betrayed them. She feels her whole life is one betrayal after another, secret betrayals, betrayals to those who don't even realise it, and especially betrayals to her own self.

She is like a different person in Africa, especially with Woodrow. Normally an aloof, cold person with minimal maternal instincts and, one could say, a man's mind, in scenes with Woodrow she seems helpless, almost silly, and submissive. It is not really a contradiction - humans are contradictory, anyway - but I am always fascinated by how we behave differently with different people. I didn't always like her or understand her, but I appreciated the difficulty she had in opening up and telling her story, and the honesty with which she tells it. It does, throughout, read like a true story, a memoir. There is something very ... National Geographic about the story. Some undeniable truth to it.

Where Hannah's voice becomes less convincing, as a female protagonist, is in those sections where Banks tells us the history of Liberia - and it is Banks speaking at those times, like a history book, interesting but neutral, masculine, decisive. At such times Hannah disappeared, and I forgot all about her. But the history is very interesting to read, and very readable.

Which reminds me: it took me a while to get into the style here. It seemed to settle down about halfway through, but in the beginning the very long, wandering sentences with multiple clauses really confused me. It's an older style - old-fashioned, I would call it. We write much cleaner these days, more coherently, with less information rammed into one sentence. I could call it a Victorian sentence structure - and I think I will! - for the Victorian era is famous for its cramped, over-crowded style, with many fussy little tables and ornaments and paintings crammed into rooms. Their prose reflected that, and it's here too, though much more refined and ordered and interjected with sharp short sentences as well. When I started reading it, I felt bogged down by the lengthy sentences and abundant adjectives, but after a while I ceased to even notice it.

This is a story of several facets. It's the story of an American darling, who lives untouched and untouchable in "darkest Africa", a revolutionary, a political rebel at home who has no drive or desire to help or rescue the natives; nor does she feel terribly moved by their plight, by the corrupt government taking advantage of them. She recognises the contradiction, and also - with the mature hindsight that comes with telling the story of your past - realises how selfish she was even as a revolutionary fighting the state in 60s America.

It's also the story of a country haunted by ghosts, torn apart and shat on and forgotten. Liberia bleeds all over the pages, and if you've read any other books about civil wars and corruption and western corporate takeovers in Africa, it will be a familiar story to you. As such, it's highly politically charged, but not even surprising in it verdict - we've heard it all before. It's still truth, of its own kind, but repeated so many times in so many countries it seems lethargic in its truth. Liberia will be just as forgotten after having been heard, and it knows it. Banks brought it alive, briefly, within these pages; after which it will sink back into the bog, just one more horrific story of what humans are capable of.

And it is the story of the "dreamers", as Hannah calls the chimps. In a way, the animals are metaphors for the people of Africa, abused, captured, sold, taken advantage of, homeless, caged, dependent on aid, hunted down and killed and eaten. Converted. Never left alone to survive in their own way. These animals will damn near break your heart, and I almost hated Hannah for abandoning them - and for collecting them in the first place. But it's misplaced anger; she rescued baby chimps from their cages in the market, where they were sold to live in labs as test subjects, or pets overseas. I get angry at Hannah because she's there, and she cares, and doesn't do enough, and because it's blind anger at how we treat other animals and the planet in general.

I was disappointed that the chimps didn't have a stronger presence in the novel - they seemed rather to serve as a premise for Hannah. Considering how awful so many of the characters were - I can't think of any that I really liked; Woodrow especially made me very uncomfortable - the chimps seemed the most humane of all of them. (Did you know we share 99% of the same genes? And that female humans and female chimps are more alike, genetically, than female humans and male humans, and vice versa? Fascinating stuff.)

This is a story rich in detail, in action, in self-reflection and political history. It is a story of a bad country gone rotten, and of a woman facing up to herself, her flaws, her inconsistencies. It's a story of American history as much as Liberian, and it's well worth reading.

[Richard · Rating 1 out of 5]

I saw Russell Banks read when Affliction first came out. He came across as a very thoughtful man who was a novelist of the human heart--the book is one of his best, though I was also quite fond of Continental Drift. Banks had a mind towards international waters (he said in the Q & A afterwards, when someone asked how much he knew about Haiti when writing Drift, that he only started learning about the place when he decided he wanted to write about it and did not decide to write about Haiti because he previously knew much about it), but his realm of writing was clearly the human heart and its intricacies and failures and joys (for another good example, check out The Sweet Hereafter).

But, when Banks wrote Rule of the Bone, I started to lose my esteem for the man. At the time, I merely put it down for being a pale and flat representation of a young narrator by a much older author, but it seems now, after having sweated through the pale narratives of Cloudsplitter and this one, that Banks is also suffering from a need for international flavor. Perhaps Banks wants to be a Nobel laureate and believes that his writing will only receive that kind of attention if he stretches his subject matter out beyond the Adirondacks (which is where he still lives, according to the author bio), but this book as well as the Jamaican flavor of Bone, seem to prove that he is not very comfortable in this arena.

This novel is a story of Hannah Musgrave (or one of her aliases)--a Weatherman radical who flees the US to Liberia and ends up in a marriage that gets her quite close to the center of a coup and overthrow and tyrannical regime. She has three boys she has to decide whether to abandon for her own safety or not, but she also has a colony of chimps that she is concerned about her as well. As well as live through different aliases, Hannah Musgrave also goes through other forms of identity crisis--sexual, spiritual, moral, etc.

But a lot of the details of the narrative feel very mechanical--clearly, the book was meticulously researched, but the narrative feels somewhat imprisoned by the wealth of detail. Musgrave's crises of identity are more thematic than emotional, so the book overall feels like a well constructed tale worthy of all the praise of mechanics, but its endeavor feels a little short of the mark. Perhaps this is because Banks sacrifices the basics for the grandiosity of subject matter--this book has all the stuff of great, sweeping novels worthy of international acclaim, but feels empty because this is what the author may be striving for, rather than working deep within the intensity of character to create universal appeal.

[Stephen Wallant · Rating 5 out of 5]

OK No. Anyone who says anything about this book is wrong. This book is about this girl in the weather underground, like your parents? And Forrest Gump. So she goes underground. But she's not like the girl in American Pastoral who becomes totally annoying and pisses everyone off. Not that she didn't piss a LOT of people off. So she goes into hiding, and fucks off to Africa. Aggra. Agra. Ghana! Word, I TOTALLY want to go to Agra, Ghana after reading this book.

OK so she's hiding out. And who is she hiding from really? the FBI? NO! HERSELF! Right? Right? right. Nice. Well, also the FBI, who has guns. I mean, if she finds herself she probably wouldn't shoot herself! The FBI on the other hand might actually shoot your face. OK so she's shacking up with this charming Liberian cat. Real up and comer. OMY God right! this is the book with the chimps! She is coming back to check on her chimpanzees. She had raised the chimpanzees! The Liberian guy turned out to be an asshole, but she works with these chimps. If the opportunity arises where I am dealing with a chimpanzee, for whatever reason, I am going to look into its eyes and try to figure out if it is dreaming. She calls them her "dreamers" because they look like they are always in a dream. Sounds so nice. Well of course no hope for them. But her poor sons. Unimaginably horrible. No dreamers, they.

Anyway, Liberia. Wow. Just oh my goodness, allahu akbar! WHAT a nightmare. See what I did there? See? Go back. But yeah such cruelty. Remind me to never go there. I srsly intend to keep not going there. OK 18000 characters to go? SrslY? This is a meaningful limit? Like I'm going to really budget out what I have to say now! OH better look out. Srsly who is going to write all that. IMMA SRSLY. But yeah Liberia. So Charles Taylor is a character in this book.

Yours truly,

Steve Wallant

[Stephanie · Rating 2 out of 5]

War, massacre and menage a trois (thanks to LC for coining this phrase!). That pretty much sums up this disappointing book by the author of the great "The Sweet Hereafter". "The Darling" is long-winded, self indulgent, and at times, quite unrealistic. The protagonist is a white woman who fled to Liberia after creating and setting off a few bombs for the Weather Underground. We are constantly reminded of her mindset (and her bed mates) and she doesn't come off as an authentic female character, but rather she's the male author's reincarnation as himself, his alter ego, his hero? Who knows.

Add to this the whole chimp side story and it just doesn't work as a single book.

The area that is the most difficult to read are the atrocities and Big Man power plays that occurred in Liberia (all based on real events). How can people treat others with such scorn and complete compassion is hard to imagine, but it did happen and Banks only scratches the surface of the evil that played out in this surreal American-created African country, where citizens have last names like Smith, Doe, Monroe. But it's not a manufactured Hollywood sound stage, but rather an all-too-real country where its former benefactor turned its back and indeed, even helped fuel the fires.

[Chad · Rating 5 out of 5]

Who is the protagonist of Russell Banks’s 2004 novel The Darling? Is it Hannah Musgrave, the privileged daughter of a famous New England child-rearing expert? Perhaps Dawn Carrington, the political radical and member of the Weather Underground---a woman who forges passports, builds bombs, and is ultimately forced to flee America to avoid imprisonment? Maybe the novel’s protagonist/anti-heroine is Mrs. Woodrow Sundiata, the wife of Liberia’s Assistant Minister of Public Health? Hannah/Dawn/Mrs. Sundiata is the same person, and she is one of the most compelling, contradictory, and complex female characters in post-9/11 American literature.
Hannah is a first-person narrator, who in the present day is a fifty-nine year- old woman telling her life story directly to the reader. Banks often uses the word “ghost” to describe Hannah; she is a woman who drifts in and out of others’ lives. She is a woman who abandons, often repeatedly, her parents; Carol, her female lover and Bettina Carol’s young daughter; the Liberian chimpanzees for whom she was caretaker; Woodrow Sundiata, her African husband, and their three African children. The list continues. Hannah is a practical, astute, cold woman. Hannah’s actions often place the burden of judgment with readers. We find ourselves assigning moral codes to Hannah’s actions, and our sympathies often, until the novel’s heartbreaking conclusion, rest with the aforementioned family and lovers.
When Hannah moves to Liberia she gets a job caring for chimpanzees that are used in medical experiments, and she later makes it her goal to rescue these chimpanzees. Hannah’s feelings of connection and love reside much more closely with the chimpanzees---her dreamers, as she calls them---than with her own three children. As Hannah states halfway through the novel, “And my sons---I did love them, but I was not a woman for whom motherhood was a fulfilling, natural role. I’m still not. It’s always been an act. It was only with the chimps that I felt like a natural mother.”
One of the reasons Hannah is such a fascinating character is because Banks chooses to write her from a first-person point of view. She is an extremely unreliable narrator, and it is only in the last third of this eloquently crafted novel when I felt as if Hannah were telling me a story I could believe. By that, I mean a story she wasn’t manipulating and constructing so that readers would see her character only as she wished. Toward the end of the novel Hannah claims she was a “bad” mother but not a “neglectful” one. The former adjective places judgment on her character, but her actions show her as neglectful. She abandons her children in Liberia after Samuel Doe, one of a handful of dictators to overthrow the Liberian government, exiles her from the country. Six months later Hannah returns, but when the political turmoil worsens she once again neglects her sons. Liberian extremists, many of whom are boy-soldier guerrillas, behead Sundiata in front of Hannah and their three children. Hannah and her children are spared, and once again Hannah is ordered to flee Liberia. She turns her back on her children only for a few minutes, and when she returns to the car they have vanished. They have spilled into the Liberian night to join opposing political factions and seek revenge on their father’s murder. This is the last time Hannah sees her children alive, and when she hears reports about the children afterward they have transformed into unrecognizable, crazed killers. They have taken the names “Worse Than Death,” “Fly,” and “Demonology.” So when Hannah claims a difference between a “bad” and “neglectful” mother readers question whether this distinction is necessary. Earlier, she states, “I had no choice but to alter, delete, revise, and invent whole chapters of my story. Just as, for the same reasons, I am doing here, telling it to you.”
Banks masterfully captures the connection between narrative reliability and identity. Hannah/Dawn reinvents her identities to suit her specific context. This relates back to my original query: Who is Hannah Musgrave? Hannah herself often questions this: “My time with the dreamers was the most peaceful, restorative two hours of the day for me…Without it, I feared I would come undone…and at any moment I would be exposed as a fraud, a counterfeit wife and mother, not at all who I seemed or claimed to be. And not anyone whom I knew, either. It was only when alone with the dreamers that I knew myself.” With Hannah, Banks has created a character who is simultaneously self-aware but not always conscious about why she lies, cheats, and abandons.
The Darling ends on September 10, 2001. Hannah/Dawn can be seen as a petty terrorist and counterfeiter, but September 11 witnesses the end of a specific type of political revolutionary/anarchist. As Hannah states, “one dark era was about to end and another, darker era to begin, one in which my story could never have happened, my life not possibly been lived.”
Banks’s novel is a devastating, character-driven, political thriller, and it’s an important book to read for complexity of protagonist, plot, and point of view. Hannah confronts her numerous sins, as she often refers to her actions, at the novel’s haunting conclusion, and readers experience a narrative that is moving but never sentimental---a story that is both intensely personal but also set within a violent, rapidly shifting political landscape.

[Friederike Knabe · Rating 4 out of 5]

"There are certain things about me that I won't reveal to you until you understand...", Hannah Musgrave tells her readers. She is the central axis of this rich and engaging tale of one woman's journey from a privileged childhood to a quiet life on a farm in the Adirondack Mountains in upstate New York. The interim period, however, is dramatic and unconventional. She drops out of her middle class life as a young student, frustrated with the comfort of that life and the people around her. Joining the Weathermen Underground in the early nineteen seventies, she participates at the fringe of the movement. Eventually escaping to West Africa, she settles for an extensive period in Liberia, witnessing the overthrow of the corrupt pro-US president Tolbert by the brutal regime of Samuel Doe, a lowly military officer, followed by the complete collapse of the Liberian society, ending with the no less violent regime of Charles Taylor.

Now in her late fifties, she is recounting her story, divulging her varied life experiences in different episodes and on a need-to-know basis. Russell Banks captures her voice convincingly, getting into her mind, as well as, he explained elsewhere, "being her very close trusted male friend" who listens sympathetically to her story. Will the reader do the same?

Hannah's account is of her life, set against the backdrop of dramatic circumstances. As the revelations progress, the reader is able to see beyond her words and messages and paint a more comprehensive picture of Hannah's strengths and weaknesses than she can herself. Bank is brilliant in providing the tools for such a process. Factual descriptions of her surroundings unwittingly divulge more of her persona than she intends, adding depth and incisiveness to her version of events. In Liberia, for example, Hannah has more than enough opportunities to engage with the political and serious societal issues at hand, yet, she stays again on the sidelines. Having married a middle ranking Liberian government official, she lives a life of privilege with her three sons. While analyzing, with hindsight, her status as the American "darling" among the political elite of the country and reflecting on her complex emotions for her parents, her lovers, her husband and children, the only deep love and affection she admits to feeling is for a group of suffering chimpanzees. Why? What made her this reserved and distant observer of life?

Banks tackles challenging issues with his novel: race, for example is a recurring thread throughout Hanna's story. In her youth, Hannah displayed her solidarity with African-Americans, yet in Liberia, she is not able to comfortably relate to her African in-laws and their traditions. The author accurately depicts the tumultuous conditions in Liberia during Hannah's life there and gives her account authenticity. The special relationship between Liberia, established in 1847 by African-American returnees, mainly freed slaves, and the US is still evident. The role of the CIA and the American diplomats are made explicit as Hannah constantly feels both their friendship and scrutiny. The Americo-Liberians have maintained their privileged position in comparison to the indigenous African population. Woodrow Sundiata, Hannah's husband, while vividly drawn, comes across more as a composite of many facets of what could be a "typical" African bureaucrat: insensitive and ambitious, yet malleable to the powers to be, and expecting privileges through gaining a white American "trophy" wife. With her as a wife, Hannah reflects in retrospect, "Woodrow was exotic, a little sexy, and possibly dangerous, as if his newly consecrated American connection gave him access to power and information that were unavailable to other Liberians, even among the elite."

Another thread in the novel that gives the reader food for thought, revolves around deep emotions or the lack thereof, or establishing where "home" is and what it means for somebody on the run or underground for a large part of her life. Hannah always felt that departures are quick and painless, long tearful good-byes uncalled for. Yet, sitting at her farm now, she wonders about her Liberian home, the destiny of her children. Could she reconcile her life with that of her parents? It is up to the reader to explore those questions with Hannah and draw their own conclusions. Banks novel is very worth the effort.

[Larry Bassett · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have read and listen to a few books by Russell Banks. He has just died recently, and so his books are achieving a little bit of courage re-attention. Sometimes a topic seems to tie the books of a particular author together. However, Mr. Banks books occasionally seem radically different from each other, and I can barely imagine the connection, this is a prime example.

This story circles back around on itself so it seems to start and restart and go back to the beginning several times. It starts with a woman managing an organic farm in the Adirondacks in upstate New York. And it circles back to her life in Liberia, and how she came to live in that western Africa country and be married to a Liberian and have three sons. It deals with her somewhat estranged relationship with her parents in the US. With her time as a member of the weather underground. With her life in Liberia, for maybe a dozen years. And for her life there during a time of violent rebellion when her husband was murdered and her three young teenage sons joined one group of the rebels.

This is a complex story of one woman trying to find meaning for her life. One of the aspects of the story is her development of a chimpanzee sanctuary in Monrovia Liberia. Another part is her farm in the Adirondacks. Some parts of her life seem to hold together, but other parts seem radically different.

I am always impressed when I find an author who can create a meaningful character, who is not the same sex as the author. That skill is exemplified in this novel.

[Dayna · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book doesn't take on life until 1/4 way in, when Hannah Musgrave has returned to Liberia (to which she first fled in order to escape her possible imprisonment as a member of the the Weather Underground) to confront certain "ghosts" from her past. Russell Banks, to his credit, keeps these ghosts rather vague - does she return to confront the spirits of the chimpanzees who had fallen under her care and who perished because of her choices? Or to find the sons she had abandoned, the sons who had become boy soldiers and whose fate we do not yet know? Banks makes it clear in the narrative that Hannah throughout the novel can never quite tell an "accurate" story of what had happened since most circumstances of her life has necessitated her decisions to vary the truth, to survive by taking on different personas and hiding who is really is until she is no longer sure who that person is. This complexity is partly what makes me like this book because as the reader we are taken on the same journey as she, Hannah, in determining her loyalties, her understanding of herself and whether she deserves or will ever receive redemption for her actions.

Some critics have remarked that Banks fails with this novel by attempting to write from a woman's perspective - for what woman could be so emotionally detached and feel so little towards her own children? Ironically, this is one of the successes of the novel, which gives it its emotional grip. As people, why do we find this so hard to believe, that a woman can be that way? There are moments throughout when Banks addresses Hannah's guilt for feeling more towards the chimpanzees than her own children and for saying goodbye to people and places so easily, but not without the remorse which comes later, maybe too late, but maybe not. I look forward to reading the rest of the novel.

Final note: I welcomed Banks' use of Liberia as the background for this novel, especially since it educated me in America's, as usual, negative role in its history. What I did not find believable was Hannah's part in the Weather Underground. It didn't quite feel like she was in serious danger for her bit part - not enough to feel like she would have to remain forever in hiding.

[Ann · Rating 4 out of 5]

What starts out with an almost-elderly woman in a pastoral setting on a farm in the Adirondacks soon becomes an African adventure for a young American woman who rebels against her family and her country.

Hannah Musgrave, an unsympathetic character, if a reliable narrator tells her story and a harrowing one it is. After radical bomb-making in the U.S., the young Hannah is forced to flee the country and ends up in a roundabout fashion in Liberia.

Here she seems to abandon her political ideals. It seems to me that she was alone and frightened and grasped at Woodrow, a minor government official, for security. She found it. But only temporarily. Married with three sons, Hannah still never seems to belong. She only feels comfortable with her dreamers in their sanctuary.

The sudden violence that sweeps through the country took my breath away. Hannah's life is torn asunder.

While the warlords battle it out in the small country that was founded for ex-slaves, the theme of belonging or not overshadowed all else for me.

Unforgettable.

[Rob · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'd forgotten how much I love Russell Banks. The Darling is complex, sprawling, melancholy, and terrifying, and it taught me more about Liberia than I thought I'd ever learn (and want to know). It's useless to try and summarize the plot except to say that it's about a woman who becomes a traitor to the U.S. in the 60's, moves to Africa, marries a member of Liberia's ruling party, and opens a sanctuary for chimps. Except it's so much more than that. Like his earlier novel Cloudsplitter (about radical abolitionist John Brown), Banks bases his novel in the historical record (Liberian ex-president William Tolbert and dictators Samuel Doe and Charles Taylor are all characters), and then uses those facts to tell a compelling story. Masterful work.

[Paul Ataua · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hannah is ‘the darling’ of American wealth and privilege , and the story charts her life from early anti-establishment activity in the seventies through her life in ,and return to, Liberia in turbulent times. It’s thoughtfully written and holds you captive right up to the end. It has a lot to say about Hannah ,not much of which is good , but it also seems to offer a reading that mirrors her with American Foreign policy in the region. Or am I just reading too much into it? Banks is always worth reading.

[Julie · Rating 5 out of 5]

A brilliant and devastating work that shows through the fictional life of its female protagonist the real horrors of revolution and dictatorship in Liberia. Banks is a master writer who can reveal both the lovable and despicable in his characters and bring alive a piece of history through a story that is utterly believable.

[Krista · Rating 4 out of 5]

This might be a spoilerish review, better read after the book. As we meet Hannah Musgrave, she's an organic farmer in her fifties; a woman haunted by a past that she is finally willing to confront. In a first-person, confessional tone, Musgrave brings the reader along as she returns to Africa; revisiting the climax of her early life. Along the way, we learn that Musgrave was the privileged daughter of a semi-famous liberal activist father and a Junior League/charity works mother; a civil rights agitator in college; a fugitive member of the Weather Underground during the 70's; and after finding herself in Liberia, the wife of a mid-ranking minister in the corrupt government of William R. Tolbert, Jr. It is from that last pampered position that Musgrave has a front row seat to the coups and countercoups that led to the grisly Liberian Civil War of the 1980's. After visiting Liberia once again -- ostensibly to find traces of the three sons she left behind when she first fled the country (even though she had known at the time that they had become child soldiers in the revolution) -- Musgrave flies back to NYC on September 11, 2001.

(I) made my way home to a nation terrorized and grieving on a scale that no American had imagined before, a nation whose entire history was being rapidly rewritten. In the months that followed, I saw that the story of my life could have no significance in the larger world. In the new history of America, mine was merely the story of an American darling, and had been from the beginning.

Reading The Darling, I thought the book was about one thing (the life story of a former hippy and how her idealism had no practical effect in the real world), but by having the story end on 9/11, it became something different (a record of a time when people could be idealists and protest against their own government without violating the Patriot Act). This turnabout was so extreme that I needed to find out more about Russell Banks and his motivation, and after learning that this was his first post-9/11 book, I found this interview:

For me the central theme, and it's one I've gone back to in other books in other ways, is the unintended consequences of good intentions. She is in many ways emblematic even of American foreign policy if you want. Today in other areas of the world, especially in a post-9/11 world, we are suddenly filled with good intentions and are killing people as a result and probably radically altering our society in the process in a very dangerous way. You can look at the history of Liberia for instance: the creation of Liberia. In its conception there were good intentions lying behind it. There was a nefarious and a dark side to those good intentions as there almost inevitably are because pure motives don't exist. The bloody civil war that started in 1980 is in fact the unintended consequence of good intentions, which started in the 1820s. Let's send them back to Africa, make the world safe and pretty, make it civilized and Christianized, and at the same time solve our race problem here in the United States with all those free blacks appearing in the streets of Philadelphia or New York. That to me is the central theme running through the book. I like to think of Hannah as emblematic of that; her life is that, the good intentions of the 1960s and 1970s, and the unintended consequences of it that she experiences very directly.

If the good intentions (and their unintended consequences) of the 60's and 70's was the main point of The Darling, it's frustrating that the character of Hannah Musgrave is so unlikeable. Even though she has the full support of her parents, Musgrave is rather cruel and dismissive of them in her years underground; she is blasé about who might get hurt during her Weathermen years of making pipebombs and false passports; she's a sexual user who admits that her attraction to black men is probably a form of reverse racism; she is repulsed by the traditional-living Africans that she had a vague intention of helping; she's fine working in a medical lab that does experiments on chimps for the enrichment of some big American Pharmaceutical company; she feels no attachment to her husband and children; and she realises too late that during all of the years she spent as the wife of a health minister, she could have been improving the lives of the urban Liberians by teaching them hygiene, or reading, or other important life skills. Essentially, Musgrave is a narcissist, and every "good intention" has herself as the intended recipient, dismissing the whole hippy-movement thus:

When you abandon and betray those with whom you empathize, you're not abandoning or betraying anyone or anything that's as real as yourself. Taken to its extreme, perhaps even pathological, form, empathy is narcissism.

Despite not liking her, I did buy the character of Hannah Musgrave. It's not often that I find female protagonists as written by male authors believable, but Musgrave was plausible because she had so many masculine traits (sexual exploitation, a non-nurturing nature, swaggering self-confidence). And although it's meant to explain Musgrave's own diffidence, I think most young mothers have experienced the following to some degree (even if we're not supposed to admit it):

First you think, This is what my life is now. This is who I am. My life is this endless grinding and thumping, being ground and thumped. Then you think, no, my life now will be spent floundering clumsily inside and around the thick waters of my own strangely misshapen body. No, it's shitting red-hot coals to give birth. Turning myself into an inverted volcano. Then you think, no, I'm the leaking person who gives her sore breasts over to another creature's sucking mouth, and when the baby is filled, cleans up its vomit, piss, and shit.

Over and over, the same cycle, month after month. This is what my life is now, you think. This is who I am. And everyone, especially if she's a woman, assures you that you will love all the stages of this life, that each stage will make you feel for the first time increasingly like a fully realized woman, an expanded and deepened version of your old self.

So, I did believe Hannah, was intrigued by the revelation of Liberia's sad history, and enjoyed the format of skipping back and forth through time (so that, as Hannah explains, we can get to know her and not judge her too harshly when we get to her major failings). I liked everything to do with the chimpanzee sanctuary that Musgrave oversaw (and could almost understand why she preferred her "dreamers" to actual people). But I don't know if I loved this book -- there may have been just too many things going on: too much about her parents; too much about chimps (that could have been its own book); too much about her life today; all of these could have been cut out without losing anything. And there were just too many coincidences (and these are really spoilers): Hannah finally reuniting with her parents a week before her father dies; dropping in on Carol and finding Zack living there; Zack having been in federal prison with Charles Taylor; Hannah acting as a useful dupe for the CIA when she jailbreaks Taylor; flying into NYC on 9/11. And, while I understand that part of the theme of this book is America's interventions abroad and their unintended consequences, there was something uncomfortable (more reverse racism?) about the fate of an entire African nation being affected by the naive actions of one white American.


I can appreciate what went into The Darling: it's sweeping and smart and very well-constructed, but it totally lacked heart. I couldn't truly identify with or root for the narcissistic protagonist, and if she was supposed to represent the regretfully lost idealism of an earlier generation, it's not shown to be something to lament passing. It wasn't the hippies who led the Civil Rights Movement (although I'd imagine Black America appreciated what support they received); it wasn't the hippies who ended the Vietnam War; hippies never changed the world one bit; were they all darlings; dilettantes? In the end, hippies feel like they've done pretty well if they end up wearing silver ponytails and granny glasses on their organic farms in upstate New York (this is Banks' evaluation from the above interview), but I have to wonder if that was worth it (and especially for the Weathermen). I did not love this book but I'm giving it four stars because it's so much better than most of my three star reads.

[☕Laura · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ratings:

Writing 4
Story line 3
Characters 2
Impact/enjoyment 2

Overall rating 2.75

[JoAnn/QuAppelle Kirk · Rating 4 out of 5]

The main character was so despicable!

As I read this book, I wanted to grab Hannah/Dawn and smack her face. What a despicable character....and what a writing genius Banks is, at least in this book, to make me feel this way.

However, I like linear novels, so Banks' jumping back and forth in time is NOT my favorite device. This is not a spoiler: Wouldn't the book have been just as effective if the reader had not known at the beginning that Hannah escaped from Liberia and got back to the States? What is the point of starting the book out with her being 50- something and living in Vermont?

For me, doing this totally eliminates any dramatic tension that this reader might experience.

Back to the main character: I knew people like Hannah- I called them "convenient militants". She was also egotistical, self-absorbed, selfish, and overly impressed with herself and her so-called role in Liberia. For all her desire to make a better life for those who were oppressed, she was totally uninvolved and detached from daily life in her adopted country. In my opinion, ahe had no redeeming qualities....no matter what happened,it was ALL ABOUT HER.

When Hannah went back to her mother's, I had to laugh at a comment she made about her mother being so self-centered. Talk about the apple not falling far from the tree!!!

One thing that really bothered me----I know this is fiction, but I found the coincidence of Charles Taylor just happening to be in the same jail as Hannah's old friend to be a bit forced. And the fact of Hannah being in New Bedford just at this exact time was highly improbable. I guess that is artistic license but it rang very false to me.

I have no idea of how accurate this novel is, but it has spurred me on to learn more about Liberia

[Seattle Al · Rating 2 out of 5]

The book is well-written and well-paced, and the descriptions of customs and the war in Liberia are fascinating. The descriptions of the narrator's farm life and experiences in the Weather Underground are also believable and intriguing. However, where the book falls down is in the plausibility and likability of the main character (the narrator). Her sexual encounters are not realistic, nor are her reactions to them. More importantly, Hannah is too unlikable to bring the reader to care about her. She is ultimately racist (her failure to bond with her own children is almost pathological), and narcissism and self-absorption seem to be her predominant characteristics. She cares more about feeling important than about other people. Her concern for the chimpanzees of course is laudable, but that too seems to stem more from her desire to see herself in heroic terms than to help the animals. Her ultimate disappointment is not in the cruelties she has witnessed and the hopelessness of Liberia but in her own lack of Che Guevara stature.

[Dennis · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's not often that you get a book set in Liberia, and even more improbable to find it tied to the SDS and Weather Underground movements of the 60's and 70's but that's what happens here. A very entertaining read and very informative on the development of Liberia and its first civil war but for me, there was one defect, all too common in a book where the author writes in the voice of the opposite gender and that was that the narrator sounded a little flat to me. Instead of empathizing with the poor choices she'd made, I found myself a bit annoyed with her whining at times. When you screw up, you screw up and all attempts to somehow justify your choices begin to send pathetic, particularly if you keep returning to those poor excuses. However that may only be my take on it and in no way takes away from the fact that the book was well worth the time spent in reading it.

[Gwen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Until the very last page, I wondered why this wasn't called "The Dreamers." A book that melds 1960s radical activism (Civil Rights Movement, feminism, and Weather Underground) and political upheaval in Liberia, there was enough history to keep me reading. Hannah Musgrove was an exasperating protagonist: too self-reflective yet not quite introspective, unable to (openly) love people but willing to commit emotionally to animals, hard on others but somehow letting herself off. The CIA, American radicals and the 'embassy' personnel are colluding in more ways than we might imagine, particularly as Africa is increasingly unstable and wracked by civil war, coup and power struggle(s). How does it all hang together? You'll need to read it to find out.

[Stacia · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really wanted to like this book, and it was a very good book, but I didn't really like it. As always, Banks's writing is gorgeous. Though the book is written in first person, Liberia was, for me, the central character, primarily because the narrator was so detached from the events she described that I was detached from her. It was quite odd, reading a first-person narrative and feeling so little connection to the narrator. The reading group guide led me to believe I should have gained all these insights into Hannah (the main character), and I just didn't. She seemed like a hollowed-out shell to me, tediously self-aware and analytical but ultimately empty.

[Marguerite Hargreaves · Rating 1 out of 5]

What a weird experience this book was. What a weird experience this book was. It was on one of those best-of lists, and I brought it home dutifully and read about 100 pages ... only to realize I'd tried to read it before, but just couldn't get into it. The problem was, it wasn't memorable enough to register on my consciousness, either positively or negatively. This is my literary "Groundhog Day."

[Callista · Rating 1 out of 5]

Protagonist was completely unbelievable as a woman or mother. Doesn't seem as though the author's research on Monrovia was thorough. Please - especially if you are a friend of mine looking for information on Liberia - do not read this. Read The House On Sugar Beach, which is a much more accurate description.