Style, Memory, and Final Thoughts

One, two, four was spiteful, full of a baby's venom. The women in the house knew it, and so did the children. For years, each put up with a spite in his own way. But by 1873, Setha and her daughter Denver were its only victims. The grandmother, baby Suggs, was dead, and the sons, Howard and Bugler, had run away by the time they were thirteen years old. As soon as merely looking in a mirror shattered it, that was the signal for Bugler . As soon as the two tiny hand prints appeared in the cake, that was it for Howard. No . Each one fled at once. The moment the house committed what was for him, the one insult not to be born or witnessed a second time. Within two months in the dead of winter, leaving their grandmother, baby Suggs, Setha, their mother, and their little sister, Denver, all by themselves, in the grey and White House on Bluestone Road . So that was the opening passage of Tony Morrison's Beloved, published in 1987, and it's set in the eighteen seventies but looks back at an earlier time. And it's a book about an African American family formerly enslaved, now living in a very fragile state of freedom in Cincinnati, Ohio. But they are haunted by the memories of both their collective suffering and their individual suffering. And in fact, the house that we described in that opening reading, 1 one, 2, two fo,ur is both metaphorically haunted but also literally haunted. There's this line. It's the plaything of spirits. And the main character, Setha, and her daughter, Denver, they are convinced the house is haunted by this dead baby, Setha's daughter, Denver's sister, beloved , who it turns out later in the book returns in physical form to live among them, also it seems. It's it's ambiguous on that front. So it is a ghost story. It's also described as a horror story. But there's far, far more to it than that. It's a book about memory and forgetting about rebuilding a fractured identity, about terrible trauma, and above all the appalling legacy of slavery, of course. Um so it's obviously kind of a book that provokes very kind of strong feeling Yes. So hi everybody. Tony Morrison Ray Beloved because she wanted to say something about the specific experience of being an African American woman. And obviously Tabby, neither of us is an African American woman. And we'll come on to this and the experience of reading it, obviously, as a as a white uh in my case, a white British man. You know, M Morrison said herself when she wrote the book in the eighties that, you know, she was almost daunted, frightened was her word, about tackling the enormous subjects of slavery in this aftermath, and the implications of that for the people who had been enslaved. She said it never occurred to me to go into this area, I never thought I had the emotional resources to deal with slavery. Anyway, she she wrote the book and it was a colossal hit. So it was on the New York Times bestseller list for more than six months in Harback and then another six months in paperback. It didn't a national book award, and there was a huge controversy. There was no dozens of black writers and intellectuals signed an kind of open letter saying this was a disgrace. Then it did win the Pulitzer Prize and then she, Tony Morrison, won the Nobel Prize for Literature.x Si years later, she was the first black woman to do so. And Beloved has now become an absolutely canonical work of modern American fiction. So in 2006, the New York Times did this big poll of writers and critics to judge basically the best book of the generation the last twenty five years. And beloved one by a mile, ahead of books by people like Cormant McCarthy or Philip Roth or John Updike or whoever. So it's now enshrined as a kind of touchstone, a totemic work of modern American fiction. There was a film with Oprah Winfrey, actually, who's a great champion of this book. She's got her own book club, of course. I think it it was something like Tony Morrison said that there was kind of only one person who she'd allow to to make the film and it was April Winfrey. Which I haven't seen I have to say 'cause I think sometimes I I can't really imagine how it would work as a film because so much of it happens in the writing. Anyway, we'll come onto this. No, I'd never read it before we did this uh episode. But Tabby, you read it I think when you were a teenager, no? Yeah, I did. I I read it on my on my gap, yeah. Um when I was about seventeen. And I I have to say, even then, being, you know, a sort of pretty unintellectual uh seventeen year old, I I was pretty bowled away by I I remember the sensation of reading it this one night in this um in this room. Um I was appalled by it. I remember so well kind of the way that it makes you feel. And I also remember kind of the colours of the language. I love the way that she writes, and it's kind of these deep purples and like deep reds and that massively stayed with me. And I think it's kind of one of the books that I've been most affected by. And this time rereading it was no different, as we will see. But let's give people a bit of a sense of the story before we kind of dig into it. So Sabby, you're already set out. The house, there's a house and there's a family living in. The house is one, two, four, and Setha is the main character, isn't she? Yeah. So she is an escaped slave. She and Denver was born over the course of her escape on the Oh on the Ohio River eighteen years earlier. Aaron Ross Powell The border between s freedom and slavery. Exactly. There's this bit where Seth's um you know, when her water breaks it pours into the Ohio River, which is very um kind of symbolic. And then obviously their house, as opening reading, revealed it's been abandoned by uh Setha's two sons, and then now baby Suggs , their grandmother has died. But also there's this baby that haunts it, beloved. And we know that she died 18 years old earlier, but we don't know how. We find out later. But we also know that these two women, Denver and Setha, they live in unusual isolation. And the implication is that they are isolated because of some terrible decision Setha made eighteen years earlier, some heinous act that she committed. Again, we don't know what it is. And the past is crucial to the entire book and it a and it gradually gets unraveled as we go on. And you don't really know, and not even Denver really know what has happened. So their lives are kind of built around the idea of forgetting. And then something happens to kind of begin to bring the past back up. And this is the arrival of this guy called Paul D, who it turns out was also a slave on the plantation sweet home that Setha worked on as a girl, alongside her husband, Halley. We don't know what's happened to Halle, but we know that when they all tried to escape Sweet Home, he didn't make it. So he starts for in telling Setha what happened to him after their escape, he forces Setha to start remembering things. And then this other shadow from the past emerges. So Paul D kind of exercises the ghost of the baby from the house. And then one day, walking back from a carnival, they come across this young girl. She's soaking wet. She's literally walked out of a river and she's dressed all in black and she has kind of this sleepiness to her. And she says that she is called Beloved and they take her in. Denver, this lonely teenager, absolutely adores her and quickly comes to believe that she is her dead sister, come back to life. Paul D is very unsettled by her, and Setha gradually comes to believe, as Denver does, that this is her long lost daughter come back. But Beloved has this strange uh like effect on people where she forces them to remember the horrific things that happened to them when they were slaves. So gradually we discover, you know, who is beloved? Is she a ghost or is she just a young woman confused, you know, assumed to be this ghost? And we also learn the terrible thing that Setha did eighteen years ago Aaron Powell Yes. So the books on two different um there are two different time periods really. There's the eighteen seventies when the narrative is happening now and then there's the eight what happened in the eighteen fifties, eighteen years before. And the two sort of um narratives kind of inform each other, don't they? They kind of play off each other. And we and they both we discover more things about both time periods as the book progresses. But let's talk a little bit. So if that's the plot, well that's the setting, but we should say a bit about the historical context because this is of course a historical novel. And it is a book above all about slavery, I guess. So to give people a sense of um and we're not a history podcast, uh, but to give people some sense of the context. So the first African slaves arrived in North America in sixteen nineteen, in Jamestown, Virginia, and in total, probably tw elve million Africans were transported across the Atlantic in the kind of colonial period, but say the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. Most of them actually went to the Caribbean or to Brazil, but probably half a million were transported to North America. And obviously their descendants lived in slavery in North America. So that's about ten million people in total working in tobacco and cotton plantations. They're treated as property or as act regarded as animals, little better than animals, forbidden, for example, to read and write, subjected to horrendous violence, flogging, torture, rape, all kinds of kind of brutalization, women used as sexual commodities, children sold off, families broken up, people even used as for medical experimentation and so on. And actually me giving the historical summary of all these terrible things does not approach the power of a novel like Beloved in the way that it immerses you in this world and makes you see by taking individual intimate stor ies what that actually meant in practice. And actually that's that's part of I think the the the power that we probably affected you when you read it as a teenager, that it it catapults you into that world as an outsider and makes you feel in a way that a history book I would argue can never really do. Yeah. So I mean you obviously are aware of the historical fact. I was kind of aware of the history, but I don't think I'd ever sort of thought about it from the personal perspective. You know, the book Beloved Puts You in Their Minds. So it doesn't just just describe what happened, it makes you feel as they felt what happens. And I think and Toni Morrison actually said that. She said she wanted to translate the historical into the personal. So the book kind of painfully like forces you to experience the psychological impact of slavery on individuals rather than kind of a people, if you see what I mean. Agree completely. And two other things worth noting about this. So first of all, um there was obviously an abolitionist movement in the North, and we this is reflected in the book. There are the characters of abolitionists who play a sort of small supporting part in the story, Mr. and Miss Bodwin they're called Quite a telling part though as well, don't you think? Yeah. Yeah, I think so. I think completely. And and Tony Morrison is very good actually on the complexity of their attitudes. There's that they're they're abolitionists, so invertical as they're goodies. But at the same time they are there's something patronizing about them and something they are still they then they can never be part of the world of the the slaves that they are rescuing, I guess. And then the other thing is escape, because obviously this plays a massive part in the story. And the historical reality is that between fifty and a hundred thousand people probably escaped and fled to the north or to Canada. So in this book, a crux of the story, you've already mentioned it, is the flight across the Ohio River, which it lies between slave states, Kentucky, and a free state, Ohio. So crossing this river and the idea of water and rivers and so on carries enormous kind of symbolic power in the story, doesn't it? Yeah. I mean it 'cause it's it's the border between um freedom and slavery. So it's almost like it it's like met metap the horical River Jordan. So Setha crosses it to freedom. So one other important thing. So if you did cross and you crossed to Cincinnati, Cincinnati is massively important um in the story of slavery because it was basically the first free city that people got to. But under the Fugitive Slave Law of eighteen fifty, all escaped slaves were meant to be returned to their owners. This was a concession that the southern states extracted from the northern ones. So basically slave catchers could go north and the northern authorities were enjoined to uh they're legally bound to help the catchers if they can. So when Setha and her children escape, they can never be free from the terror that the slave catchers will catch up with them and drag them back to their former lives on the plantations. And so that's the context for the first of the two time periods, the eighteen fifty is the one we're looking back to in flashbacks. This is when Setha and Paul D were living on the sweet home plantation in Kentucky as slaves. And then the other time period is the present, which is eighteen seventy three. And now that's after the American Civil War, and it is just after so it's ten years after Abraham Lincoln's emancipation proclamation. So the slaves are now free , but their lives are very far from sweet ness and light, as and the book really is is excellent at capturing this. The fact that they're still living with the trauma of having been enslaved and all the violence they've suffered, but also the fact that white people, lots of millions of white people still regard them with hatred and contempt, and there's still an enormous amount of violence towards black people. Yeah, and and how kind of pointless and sort of hopeless, you know, s the end of the civil war really was, how little it achieved for the real kind of sufferers of it. Because there's this quote Republic? Well, not in his lifetime. And then he talks about working on both sides of the Civil War. Even though obviously his interests were very much on one side, he was forced to work for the Confederates. Exactly. And um and later on he's thinking about the the the countryside around the house, territory infected by the clan, that's the Ku Klux Klan, desperately thirsty for black blood without which it could not live. The dragon swam the Ohio at will. And the dragon is kind of the clan, but it's also kind of white racism. And this sort of theme of the fear of white people, and the fear of what white people will do to you, that they could snap at any moment, they will turn on you. They I mean some of the characters say at times, you know, they don't behave like normal people, white people. You can think you're okay with them, but suddenly they'll s you'll do something wrong and they will snap and they'll hit you or they will do terrible things to you. And there are a few direct references, aren't there, to not many, but a few references to kind of historical to sort of grounded historical political realities. It's rare that the book plants you um in the real world. But but then when it does happen, when it does come along, it's it's quite kind of shocking 'cause it kind of wakes you up in a funny way from this strange mystical reality that it sort of guides you through. So for instance, at one point this character called Stampade, another former slave, says eighteen seventy four and white folks were still on the loose, whole towns wiped clean of negroes. Eighty eighty seven lynchings in one year alone in Kentucky in Kentucky, four colored schools burned to the ground, grown men whipped like children, children whipped like adults, black women raped by the crew, property taken, next broken. And then kind of later, this the grandmother, baby Suggs, who is officially a freed woman. Even so, you know, the white folks still managed to get her and she says the white folks had tired her out at last and she kind of gives up and sort of goes to bed. Exactly. She dies almost of weariness at the at the the the terrible toll that racism and slavery and then the legacy and what that's meant for her family and so on that all this has kind of exacted on her. So the backdrop is quite a bleak story, obviously. Of course, how could it not be? But arguably the most affecting detail of this is the one historical story above all that inspired the book. Yeah. And this is the story of a particular woman called Margaret Garner. I had no idea that this was based on an actual person, an actual historical event, and I couldn't believe it when I when I came across it. So Margaret Garner, she was a real life slave who escaped from Kentucky across the Ohio River to Cincinnati before the Civil War, so like Setha. And these are the details kind of of her life. So she's born probably in 1833 on the plantation of a guy called John Pollard Gaines in Boone County, Kentucky, to a slave named Priscilla. And she may well have been Gaines' daughter because she is mixed race. Yeah, and Gaines was the only white man on the plantation. So exactly. Realistically, he's probably her father. So it's kind of the logical conclusion. And then in 1849, she married another slave from a nearby plantation. This is a guy called Robert Garner . And then Gaines sold his plantation , including the slaves, to his brother Archibald Gaines. Margaret has four children. The first, probably to her husband, but then the younger three, who were described as being lighter skinned, were probably the children of her owner, Archibald Gaines, again, the only adult white male at the plantation. So then in January eighteen fifty six, Margaret and her husband decided to escape, probably because of ill treatment on the plantation, with their four children and they decide to escape along with some other slaves. There are about seventeen of them in total and they cross the frozen Ohio River and head towards Cincinnati. And then there they split up to avoid capture and they're aiming to get to Canada. But the Garners go to a relative's house first, and here they're cornered by Archibald Gaines, slave catchers, and US Marshals. And you know, Robert Garner has a pistol, he fires several shots, but they are totally cornered. And Margaret picks up a butcher's knife. There's a there's actually a famous painting of this that you can look up online called the modern Medea, but she picks up uh a butcher's knife and she cuts the throat of her two-year-old daughter, Mary. And then she stabs her other children, Thomas, Samuel, and Priscilla, and herself, you know, trying to kill them all. But they don't die. They're all captured and they're put in jail. There's a two week trial, it's the longest in the history of the fugitive slave law. Margaret's defence team argue that she's a free woman and should therefore be sh tried for murder, and then that way she and her family can be considered free. It's unsuccessful. The prosecution argues that under the federal fugitive slave law, she is property and she should be returned to her owner. And this is exactly what happens. And she's tried not as a under the fugitive slave law, she's tried not for murder, but for destruction Exactly. So she's just a commodity. Exactly. Who's destroyed and she's destroyed another commodity, meaning her daughter. And even though this story was widely circulated in the kind of pre-Civil War anti- slavery press as an example of the kind of the unnatural consequences of slavery. And she became this kind of cause celebra in the fight against the fugitive slave laws. It kind of was more or less lost to public memory and you know, once she returned to the Gaines plantation she kind of disappeared from sight. And as far as we know, she probably died uh still a slave of typhoid fever in Mississippi in eighteen fifty eight. Yeah, so that's Margaret Garner's story. It's a terrible story. Uh a mother who's driven by her fear and hatred of slavery to kill her own daughter. Her husband Robert said later she tried to kill their children because she believed, quote, it would be better for them to be put out of the world than to live in slavery. And an abolitionist Lucy Stone spoke at her trial and said, The faded faces of the Negro children tell too plainly to what degradation the female slaves submit. In other words, they mi'xreed race, they're light skins, that's telling you exactly the the nature of the sort of sexual abuse that women have to face. Rather than give her daughter to that life, she killed it. If in her deep maternal love she, felt the impulse to send her child back to God to save it from coming woe. Who shall say she had no right not to do so? And so this argument about whether, you know, the fact that Margaret Garner was driven to kill her own child , rather to spare her the horrors of slavery. What does that tell us about slavery? Who are we to judge her? How could a mother do that to her own child? All of this kind of thing. I mean obviously this real life story raises all kinds of questions. And it was reported at a time and then Tony Morrison, more than a century later, comes across it, doesn't she, when she's preparing an anthology? So Tony Morrison is from Ohio herself. Her parents, she was born in 1931, and her parents had grown up in the in the deep south, in I think Georgia and Alabama. And her parents are part of a generation who grew up in an extremely unequal country where the legacy of slavery is never far away. Her father supposedly hated and feared white people so much he wouldn't allow them in the house, which tells its own story. But sh Tony grows up uh she's obviously a extremely bright child. She grows up reading kind of Jane Austen and school and Tolstoy and stuff. She goes to uh Howard University in Washington DC, historically kind of African American university. She ends up doing a master's, didn't she, about Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner. Two writers that you see massively reflected, I think, in in her style in this book. And then she became an editor at Random House and she worked well, she was the first black woman to be a senior fiction editor at Random House, I think. And she did a series of these kind of landmark projects, one of which was called The Black Book in nineteen seventy four. Very much of its time, an anthology of essays and documents, you know, born of kind of black power and the black arts mov ements and stuff, a sort of revival of interest in African American culture. And she has this great compilation of stuff about the black experience from slavery to the present. And this is when she comes across the Margaret Garner' storsy, and it obviously lodges in her head and she thinks, you know, one day I will turn this into a novel. Yeah, she wrote that she was kind of fascinated by the what she calls like the ferociousness and the willingness to risk everything for what was to this woman kind of the necessity of freedom. So yeah, as you say it lodged in her mind. But by this point, she's already a published author, so she'd published most famously The Bluest Eye in nineteen seventy and The Song of Solomon in nineteen seventy seven. Both books about the black experience in a kind of magical realist vein. But then she decides to turn this Margaret Garner story into a novel. So the Margaret Garner story kind of serves as a bridge between her two other bo oks and therefore allows her to kind of charter the whole experience of black people in America. And you know, as I said, what what is it that appeals to her about this story? What happens internally, emotionally, psychologic ally, when you are turned into a slave? What happens to your identity? What happens to your mindset? And what would it mean to be a mother who's never really be allowed to be a mother because you and your children belong to someone else. So I think that's what Ghana represents to her this kind of unapologetic acceptance of shame and terror. You know, choosing infanticide, which is, you know, surely one of the most kind of transgressive acts there is into kind of a form of freedom, claiming your freedom. Well we'll see it Setha in the book, um who is the sort of Margaret Garner uh character, she says multiple times that perfectively she wants to save her child, that she what she wants to do is put her children where white people can't get them, where slavery as a system will not engulf them. Which when you understand the reality of what slavery meant for her, you can see why to a mother that might seem the most liberating thing you can possibly do for your children, as awful as that may be. It's worth saying, of course that she didn't I mean we mentioned this right at the beginning. Tony Morrison very deliberately did not write this book for us, Tabby. Yeah. So she said specifically, she was interviewed in nineteen eighty four for a book called Black Women W Writers at Work. And she said when I'm writing about the world I'm writing about black people, it's not that I won't write about white people. It's that the people who basically manifest the themes that I'm interested in are black people. And she went on to say, didn't she, I want to write for people like me, which is to say black people, curious people, demanding people Which I think most of us write for people like ourselves, deep down. So I think that's completely understandable. Particularly if if you're climbing into the heads of the people you're describing. You know, it's much easier to do that if they're like you. Well, I mean th this is a whole different subject about how much writers' characters are merely reflections of the writer and so on. But I think obviously the nature of writing fiction is that as soon as you send it out into the world, to some degree you lose control of it and people you don't expect end up reading your books. And actually one of the joys we've talked about this before, I think, one of the joys of reading fiction is that it allows you to stick to step into someone else's shoes, if only very fleetingly and in a kind of um very sort of transitory way, and to experience what it might have some sense, I guess, of what it might be like to be somebody else. Which actually is one reason why I think fiction is much more powerful than history at conveying what it might have been like. Trevor Burrus Well, we discussed this, didn't we, before this episode? Because obviously you've just been getting ready for episodes all about the KKK. And we spoke about how you know you can know all the facts and not really kind of feel it deep down and then actually you climb into someone else's head yeah through a novel yeah and you really feel it. There's this guy called Russell Banks and he wrote the introduction for the Folio Society edition of Beloved . And he, I thought, summed it up so well. You know, reading something like this, something that lets one know how it feels to be American and yes, black and female, and ultimately how at the deepest and most inclusive level it feels to be human, knowledge that if one is a late twentieth century white American male, as he is, as I was, is obtained with let us say, undeniable, if not understandable difficulty. So yeah, so in other words, you have to make an imaginative leap, you have to work at it, but it will give you a sense more powerfully. Fiction will give you a sense more powerfully than anything else of what it would be like to have slavery in your head to be invaded, you know, in every atom of your being, your soul, your your your mind, whatever, by this incredibly repressive, intrusive system that treats you as not fully human. And actually we'll talk about this when we get into the book. Aaron Powell The epigraph of the book was quite controversial though, wasn't it? It's dedicated to sixty million and more. Aaron Ross Powell Yes, exactly. So this is Tony Morrison's estimate. She says she got this from historians of um Africans who died thanks to the sl ave trade. And we don't massively need to get into this, but some critics who are hostile to the book said, Well, this is a massive exaggeration, you've just made this figure up. And indeed, some critics went further and said, You've deliberately chosen a figure that kind of echoes the number of people Harold Bloom was one of them actually. I read a a piece he wrote about this. And there are some critics who don't like the book. So there's a you can I read a review online in The New Republic by a critic called Stanley Crouch , black himself, but a kind of more conservative black writer who felt that Beloved was too ideological. Which I actually don't think it is. I think you can read it and not feel that you're being patronised or lectured or preached to. I certainly didn't I certainly didn't feel that the book was I felt that it had its own internal life and consistency and that it wasn't you know, pre I I didn't find it a preachy book, frankly. No, not at all. Because it's actually infinitely readable as well. Like it's it's a good story. It's a bit of a page turner, funnily enough as well. Because of the mysticism of it and and the dark horror at the heart of it, and I don't feel like it's pointed, I don't think I don't feel like she's pouring in unnecessary quantities of violence in order to make a point. Because of the way that she writes, the manner of the writing, the kind of sort of the m the almost magical realism of it, which we'll get onto later, it kind of protects you. It never says it directly. It comes it it it comes to the point sideways, which is very clever and I think saves it from ever being a a kind of a doctrine. The violence is there, but it's not the danger with this is the violence becomes kind of pornographic. It becomes Which she acknowledged. But it d the book doesn't do this because as you say, it always comes to it slightly obliquely, but it leaves you in no doubt about what that that violence meant and the effects that it had on the people who suffered from it. I completely agree. But speaking of that, let's actually get into the book itself and mainly let's get into the characters. So the heart of the book is this character, Setha, and her experience. So as we've said, born into slavery, and you learn quite touchingly, I think, bits and pieces about her past, her early life, her life on Sweet Home, as the book progresses. So you learn about like her mother or lack of a mother. This woman you know, she she remembers this woman Nan telling her about it on a plantation. She threw them all away, but you, this is about her mother. The one with the crew she threw There's a children other children that her mother had that were the product presumably of rape during the voyage. Yeah. You she gave the name of the black man. She put her arms around him. The others she did not put her arms around. Never, never. Telling you. I am telling you, small girl Setha. So i.e. this woman kind of made Setha feel like she had a special connection in some way to this mother who she only really remembers as kind of an outline in her field. Yeah. And and like all the slaves, she has lost her ident her own identity, we'll talk about this maybe in the second half. Her identity is so fragile and sort of provisional almost, because everything depends upon their the white people who control them and own them. Your identity can be taken away at any moment, your name can be changed. But you can see her constantly throughout her life clutching at some form of an identity. So for instance, there's this bit when she gets married to this guy Halley when she's young. And she kind of try you know, she thinks of herself as a bride. She tries to be a bride. She makes a dress for herself and stuff, but actually, even that is meaningless. And there's this bit where where she says she doesn't know where she stops and the world begins. And so what she does is she pours all of her identity into her children with this kind of ferocious, heavy love. The characters Paul D. call it thick. He says, Setha, your love is too thick. And then she says love is or it ain't. Thin love ain't love at all. Exactly. So she lives for her children, but again one of the the horrors of slavery is that she's not allowed really to to live as a mother. I mean the nature of the slave system was a family could be broken up as any moment, and often they were, that the owner would break up a family for financial reasons. He would tr I mean effectively, they would rather like you know, as if you were as horrific as it sounds, as if you were breeding pets. Yeah, they would breed them. They would breed them and then sell them off or or whatever, trade the children. Which are without any sense whatsoever that the slaves would have feelings themselves, would have familial relationships, all of this kind of thing. But Setha clings on to her children. She she is determined at any cost not to let them be taken from her or Yeah. And the tragedy is that she's ended up with just one child left, which is Denver, hasn't she? So Denver is eighteen years old and Denver was born on the at the sort of transition point between freedom and slavery on the Ohio River. She's named after a white girl who helped um the one white character in the book who is unambiguously kind of c kindly, I suppose, who is a character called Amy Denver, um who was on her way to Boston, came across Setha, helped her during her labour. Setha gives birth on the boat. And Denver has grown up in isolation in this very weird household, haunted literally a haunted house. She starts off as quite a bitter girl because she's so very lonely and she's watched everyone that she loves leave. And we tragically discover that she idolises her absent father, who she's never met, Hallie, and ge keeps expecting him to turn up, which of course, you know, he won't. We don't really know what happens to him, but he certainly won't be turning up. And I thought so so tr so sadly, she lives in fear of her mother because of some this terrible choice that her mother made when she was a baby, this terrible act that Setha committed. Which Setha never repents , by the way. You know, she sees it as kind of the obvious choice, ev this as almost like an act of resistance. And then Denver also is is hungry, ravenous for beloved's love when beloved alig arrives and seeks to protect her from Zephyr. And then the third character, we should just talk about before we go into the break. The one who really sets the narrative moving is this guy who's a reminder of the past who's called Paul D. And Paul D. is a somebody who was also a slave on the Sweet Tone Plantation with Setha, with Setha's husband Halla. And Paul D , he you know, he has suffered the most horrendous abuse in slavery and its aftermath. He talks about how his heart is now a tobacco tin. In other words, he's suffered so much that his heart is hardened, but also he's it's like he's locked away, he's He sealed it all in . Yes, exactly. Now he's always had a f a great fondness for Setha . Um going back to their days on the plantation. He has a lovely expression. I think it's one of the really um anyone who doubts that Tony Morrison is a brilliant writer. She has these these phrases that really lodge in your head that are so beautifully judged. So he he talks about his love for Setha as follows. He says, She's a friend of my mind. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me all in the right way Yeah, it's so simple. It's so unadorned and yet it cuts to the quick. Yeah. But he arrives anyway at the house, and with him comes this kind of rush of memory, I guess. He's a reminder of the past. He arrives at the house and he discovers that they're haunted by this ghost, who appears to be this ghost of this this girl who this Denver's sister and Setha's daughter, who died eighteen years earlier, he physically exorcises the ghost, basically he throws furniture at it. Yeah. He kind of fights it, yeah. And the ghost is is is defeated. They all go off to a carnival, but when they return, as you described at the beginning, there is a woman, a strange woman, sitting there on the steps of the house. This is beloved, and they s at least two of them soon decide that this is actually the ghost returned in physical form. Now is beloved the ghost or is beloved somebody else or a metaphor or what? I guess we should decide all that, Tabby, after the break. Some follow the noise. Bloomberg follows the money. Whether it's the funds fueling AI or crypto's trillion dollar swings. There's a money side to every story. Get the money side of the story. Subscribe now at bloomberg.com . A fully dressed woman walked out of the water. Nobody saw her emerge or came accidentally by. If they had, chances are they would have hesitated before approaching her, not because she was wet or dozing, or had what sounded like asthma, but because amid all that, she was smiling. Welcome back to the book club. Now before the break, Dominic, we promised that we would be unravelling the truth behind the character beloved herself. And that there, that reading is our first introduction to beloved. Sort of third uh first quarter of the book, we meet her. And when Setha first sees her walking back from this carnival, as you say, her bladder fills and she rushes to relieve herself. So it's almost as though her water is breaking and she's giving birth. And obviously, beloved has come out of this river, and the river has always been kind of pregnant with kind of symbolism of giving birth, because that's where Denver is born. And she there's so much about beloved that kind of implies that she is indeed the this baby, this ghost ly baby brought back to life. She has smooth skin, hands with no lines. She's exactly the age of the elder daughter, the age that she would have been. And she has this question, tell me your diamonds. So, you know, is is she asking about Setha's other children? Is she asking Setha to bring forth memories? If so, why does beloved know Setha's memories? So many question marks about her. And her name, you see uh Setha when her eldest daughter died, she didn't have money enough um for the tombstone. So she bartered with the guy doing the tombstone with the Reverend Pike. And the Reverend Pike used the phrase dearly beloved and she said, Well I can o I've only got space for one word, basically, and that's the word I will use, which is beloved. So beloved is the name that was on the tombstone. Beloved is the name that this character has has, who suddenly come out of the river, that is going to end up living with them. And so the question on our mind as a reader, is this very childlike, sort of greedy she she I mean she is very greedy. She's very unlikable in lots of ways. Literally greedy. Yes, exactly. She always wants sweet things, like you know, like a child would, or maybe someone who hasn't ex you know, it's had sensation for a long time. She likes shiny things. And Setha once says of the ghost of the baby that she um she was a greedy ghost and she needed a lot of love. Well beloved like watches Setha with like an animalistic hunger. She's desperate for her love, for her face, for her touch. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So there's three uh possibilities I think that strike you as a reader. So number one, which is the one that I actually started the book with, or read the first half of the book with. Now I know you and I don't agree on this, Tabby. Or we we read it differently. So my starting position was that she didn't exist at all. That she's a kind of that they're in a hallucination or that she is a just a metaphor for haunting and for memories and for trauma and all of these kinds of things and that they kind of imagined her. That's number one. Possibility number two, which I'm thinking is yours, is that she is another person who they've mistaken for the ghost. Halfway through the book, I think I thought this. Um because there are these references to a an escaped slave girl who lived on a nearby farm or plantation or something, was kept um in isolation and under horrific circumstances and therefore would be , you know, very damaged. She maybe would be a bit like a child and and beloved, as you say, is such an unlikable character and she behaves like someone that's been kept, you know, in a house cold and hungry by herself for a very long time. So I thought, oh well she's just the escaped slave girl and then I I gradually changed my mind. But then there's another possibility, isn't there? Yeah. So this is what Setha herself thinks. And indeed all the almost all the characters in the book think, which is this is genuinely the ghost of Setha's dead daughter come back to life. And Setha says this herself, beloved, she my daughter, she mine, she come back to me of her own free will, and I don't have to explain a thing. And then she she hints at what had happened to beloved eighteen years earlier. I didn't have time to explain before it had to be done quick. Quick. She had to be safe and I put her where she would be. But my love was tough and she back now. I knew she would be. So Setha had put Beloved somewhere where she would be safe, and um now she has returned. And actually Tony Morrison in interviews is surprisingly straightforward and explicit about it, she says this is definitely the ghost of the dead daughter. And she says basically, the core of the book is this terrible decision that Setha made eighteen years earlier. And Tony Morrison said, I decided that I couldn't judge that properly whether what she'd done was right or wrong, so I had to make a living ghost called beloved, who would then react mournfully, desperately, lovingly or furiously as a baby would if they had been involved in this decision that we'll come to in a second because it's one of the great revelations. Yeah. Probably a lot of listeners who haven't read the book can guess what this decision was because we've talked about the history. But basically the way that the book unfolds is that thanks to beloved being back at the house in physical form, the past starts to kind of enter the present so that the memories that have been suppressed for the last eighteen years start to come out again and we as readers learn a series of things about what happened to Setha and to Paul D. and to the other characters on the plantation and afterwards. So basically, as with quite a lot of the books that we've done on this podcast, the way the narrative works is that you get this slow, very carefully judged reveal of information that has not yet been disclosed to us. Things we suspect start to become explicit as the book goes on. Yeah, and it's and it's not just Setha though that she has this effect on. It's all the characters who come into contact with her. Except Denver, a child born you know, born out of slavery, which is kind of interesting. Anyone else who has been enslaved a is forced to remember these terrible things. So as you say, there are these big revelations that we we learn after um kind of beloved's arrival on the scene. So the first thing is what happened to Setha at Sweet Home, the plantation that she once um worked on. And it's a really it's a it's a horrible scene. It's kind of quite rare in this book that things uh you know, like we said, that things are said outright. But we learn that basically these two boys get her and they kind of hold her down and they take her milk from her. She's pregnant. This is this is a really a horrible scene, I have to say. So she says, I am full, goddamn it, of two boys with mossy teeth, one sucking on my breast, the other holding me down, their book reading teacher watching and writing it up. And the the most tragic thing about this is I mean A, it kind of takes her motherhood from her , but also she feels guilty, she actually feels complicit in this terrible, terrible action. She says, I made the ink, Paul D. He couldn't have done it if I hadn't made the ink. So basically, the person who um was running the plantation is a character they call school teacher. He comes in after the fact. He comes in to take over from the old owners who were, you know, comparatively benevolent. Yeah. He's a he's a terrifying man. We only glimpse him very obliquely in their memories. Um he's clearly an educated man. He's been teaching the white children, and he has decided effectively can to conduct an experiment on Setha. They are literally kind of milking her while he is writing it down with ink that he got her to make for him, which is why she feels guilty and complicit. And this scene, which we only glimpse in fragments, aga you know, sort of a fragment here, a fragment there, a few pages later or whatever, that clearly is incredibly traumatic for her. Her husband, um, Hallie, he was watching , he was hiding in the loft of the barn and he saw this happen, and it drove him literally mad. Because the last we see of him, he's and I quote, squatting in butter, greased and flat eyed like as a fish. This is I mean that's that's part of Tony Morrison's genius as a writer. No one really you you never are told what that means. It's never really spelled out. All you know is that it's like it drove him literally mad to see his wife being treated in this way. And the last that's ever people say they saw him churning butter or they saw him covered in butter or something, and that's the last we see of him. It's never clear. It's never clear. And then Setha is whipped for telling Mrs. Garner. The owner of the plantation. Yeah, who owns the plantation. About having her milk stolen. And she's a horribly brutally whipped and she describes the scars from that whipping as a chokecherry tree on her back. And this way of describing her scars is um typical of the book because like I said, it's you know, a chokecherry tree is a nice thing, it's a nice image. So if you're really battling with facing up to a truly traumatic thing that has happened to you, you're gonna try and find a nice way to describe it, a way to look at it sideways and not be, you know and and able to live with the scars, if you see what I mean. So Setha tries to turn it into a beautiful thing. But then there's this passage later on where she, you know, states it. She states the reality, the actual horrible, violent rea reality of what happened. This again is is horrible. So she says, Bit a piece of my tongue off when they open my back. It was hanging by a shred. I didn't mean to clamp down on it. It came it come right off. I thought, good God, I'm going to eat myself up. They dug a hole for my stomach so as not to hurt the baby. Denver don't like me talking about it. So treated appallingly. And this is what inspires them to try to run away. Exactly. So she's not the only character who tried to run away. Paul D also tried to run away, who was a slave with her. He was caught with his friend Sixo. His friend Sixo was burned, wasn't he, in front of him? They kind of make a pile of hickory sticks. They hang Sixo and they they burn him. Paul D was made to wear a bit. There are constant references to the fact that the wearing the bit and then the fact that he's later been chained up have left him with kind of scar again, with physical scars. And a a really hideous part of the book, he ends up in a chain gang in Georgia, and the men in the chain gang are kind of buried alive at night. They're made to sleep in things that are almost like coffins dug into the earth. And then when they get up every morning this is probably I don't know, for me this was the whole the worst part of the novel so Yeah. They're sexually assaulted at dawn every day by their by their guards. And he recalls this again in quite an oblique way. And it takes you when you read the paragraph, at first you're like, I'm trying to puzzle out exactly what this means. Then as soon as you do puzzle out what it means, it kinda again it kind of stays with you because it's so h so horrible in almost the matter of fact way that the guards do it. The kind of mundane, routine abuse that is part of this sort of um part of this system. As you say it's oblique, but it's so visceral and I I don't want to sound kind of you know sanctimonious or anything, but I remember I remember reading this on the tube, going back home and then walking home and feeling like almost kind of just like sick. Like like I needed to be purged or something, just from having read that. Of course. That's the effect of the book, right? That's shows that the it's it's a what a brilliant book it is, that it lives with you. You don't just dismiss it. And again, it's not done kind of voyeuristically. You have to kind of w the the nature of Tony Morrison Star, which we'll talk about in a little bit, is you have to work at it. So it takes you a while to figure out what's going on. And then when you do, the effect is all the greater. This is kind of the truth hidden at the heart of the novel that you only realize later. And aga and again, it's like it's it's you don't you read the scene. We both said this, I remember when we were talking about it. You read the scene, you're like, wait, what what actually happened? And then it hits you. Yeah. So Setha had escaped. Uh she'd escaped with her children and she's in Cincinnati and then and I quote the four horsemen came school teacher, one nephew, one slave catcher, and a sheriff. So school teacher is the guy who would conduct the experiment on her, this terrifying figure from the plantation. One of his nephews who was involved in that incident. And interestingly, this is one of the only moments in the book where we see a scene through the eyes of a white character. We see it actually through the schoolteacher's eyes, don't we? His slight confusion as he realiz es the lengths to which Seth Setha will go to save her children from slavery. And effectively, you know, massive spoiler alert though the listeners will surely have guessed what is coming. She does what Margaret Garner did. She picks up a in this uh version, basically a handsaw and uh cuts the throat of her daughter, beloved, and then stabs her other children and herself, but doesn't kill them. So she's killed her then, I think, two-year-old daughter. She's two, yeah. They call her when Seth first arrives at Baby Suggs' house when she th when she thinks she's free at last and she's so relieved. It's very humanizing and it makes it all the more kind of appalling 'cause she she's delighted by the fact that this little girl that she um sent off to escape uh is already crawling. So she's not just like the outline of a baby, she's very much a little girl. Yeah, exactly. And Setha explains why she did it. She says, I couldn't let all that go back to where it was. I couldn't let her nor any of them live under school teacher. That was out, and so the narrator tells us she collected every bit of life she'd made, all the parts of her that were precious and fine and beautiful, and carried, pushed , dragged them through the veil, out away, over there where no one could hurt them, over there, outside this place where they would be safe. That's the her rationale for killing her own daughter. So it's exactly modelled on the Margaret Garner story from eighteen fifty six. Yeah, and and the horror of this act, you know, infanticide is is such a you know repulsive thing. It's it's really kind of it makes you flinch. But the fact that Setha takes it so sanely, so unashamedly, it allows you as the reader to some extent kind of penetrate and understand the degree of dread that she feels you know, of enslavement that she feels from the perspective of a mother, utterly terrified that her child will also be dehumanized, commodified, abli as she has been, as that her child's future will be totally obliterated too, that it will also be made into an animal that and she has heard herself described as being an animal and she she calls her children her best thing, you know, her her dearest treasures, I suppose. She's keeping her her best things free, you know, that basically to die is to be a slave is a fate worse than death. And that in killing them, she's allowing them to be free. And yeah, so you you really comprehend just the the horror that she is seeking to shield them from by committing an act that is horrific. Of course. And I think that listeners who haven't read the book may think well how can you you know how could you ever justify such an act? But actually, once you've read the book and you realize the the dehumanizing effects of slavery and the depth to which Setha and the other characters have been condemned, you can I think it's perfectly possible to understand why a loving mother would decide that the best thing to do for her child was to take this most drastic and horrendous act, don't you, Tubby? And the fact that it is done in this non that the language is deliberately elusive and as you say it's kind of coming at it sideways makes it all the more powerful I think because it's not you know if you'd done it in just a very explicit way, it would be almost pornographic and voyeuristic, but it's not like that at all itself had to be not only buried but also understated. Because if the language was going to compete with the violence itself, it would be obscene or pornographic. So yeah, there you go. And as you say, in terms of how you know, how could any reader read this without loathing Setha and thinking that, you know, th there was no there was no world in which you could justify her actions. Actually you kind of do. That's the extraordinary quality of the writing. Even Baby Suggs says at one point she could not approve or condemn Setha's rough choice. You actually you don't judge Setha at all for what she does. Yeah, and I think that's partly because behind this one act of shocking violence lies an entire system of violence from which Setha is trying to spare her daughter. And part of that is I mean one element of that that comes up again and again throughout the book and it's egg very much there in the writing is that the enslaved characters are systematically denied their humanity by the system? So Setha I mean the the fact that the great act of kind of sexual abuse against her is that she is being milked. That's because the white characters don't see her as human, they see her as an animal. She's often described as a cow and likened to a cow. And in one of the most traumatic incidents in her life, she overhears the school teacher instructing his pupils and he says, Remember, she she doesn't know what that has come before, but she just hears him saying, remember, put her human characteristics on the left, her animal ones on the right, and don't forget to line them up. And that really shocks her. Yeah, more than the violence that shocks her. The fact that all the time these people have viewed her as not human like them, but they view her as livestock, as an animal. And actually, I I I said that um the the scene where you realize about the t the her killing her daughter. That's one of the only times you see something from a white person's perspective. And in that, we're we're given it through the school teacher's eyes. And he thinks to himself, God, this one has gone mad. She's kill ing her own daughter. And the reason for this is because of the quote the mishandling of the nephew who'd overbeat her and made her cut and run. He had chastised that nephew, telling him to think, just think what would his own horse do if you beat it beyond the point of education? Suppose you beat hounds past the point that way. You can't mishandle creatures and expect success. He views her as an animal who has been beaten beyond the point of endur ance. There's no part of him that views her as human. That's the really, really shocking thing, the cold-blooded way that he thinks about her. Yeah, and and Setha's kind of ultimate kind of breakdown, her moment of kind of total crisis and collapse is when Paul D learns what she did, you know, that she killed her daughter, and he goes to her and he reprimands her and he he reminds her that she is human. He says, You got two feet, Setha, not four and she's genuinely like she's really kind of confused and staggered by this and and it angers her. But then she says later, as I said earlier, she says later, like no baby of hers is gonna is gonna have four feet not two. And the other thing about the four feet not two is because she doesn't see herself as a singular individual, she sees herself as multiple people, because she pulls herself into her children. So she comes to totally, totally define herself by her role as a mother. And yet, another aspect of this novel is that the women in it, that the the enslaved women or formerly enslaved women are totally denied their role as mothers. As we said, they're like they're more like animals for breeding a lot of the time, if that, so Setha has her milk stolen, as you said. And then also another obvious example, the grandmother, baby Suggs. She's lost all her children except Halle , whose life was spent working himself to the bone to buy her freedom. And then when she is freed, she kind of thinks, Yeah, but you freed me, but you're also separating me from you, the last of my children. And it's heartbreaking because she, unlike Setha, who fights you know, tooth and nail for her children. She kind of ref uses to acknowledge their existence because it's just too painful. So she says seven times she had done that, held a little foot, examined the fat fingertips with her own, fingers she never saw become the male or female hands, and mother would recog nise anywhere. She didn't know to this day what their permanent teeth looked like or how they held their heads when they walked. Did Patty lose her lisp? What colour did Famous skin finally take? What And then there's this really heartbreaking bit later when she tries to track them down. And you know, she's had no education, she doesn't she doesn't know how the system works, but you realize how kind of cold and and uh unapproachable it is because she all she has is little scraps of information. So she'll say, Oh well he went west. And then the people who are meant to be helping her are like, that's no good to us. We can't find someone that went west. Yeah. Or she knows them just by one name. She'll say, you know, the name is Patty and I know she went up north somewhere or whatever. And exactly that. She'll never find those children again. They're their her role as a mother has been totally denied her that but' thats how slavery wor ked. Families were broken up, as we said. And um the sort of matter of fact way with which the slave owners and slave traders implemented that system makes it again all the more shocking, I think. So there's that. I mean, it's not just a book about women. I mean, obviously it's book in which women play a massive part. You know, Tony Morrison, very much a book of the 1980s, so women at the forefront of it. But there's also the men, slavery denies the men, their masculinity d doesn't it? So Paul D. often says, you know, my m his manhood was dependent upon the goodwill of his owners. It was only his uh having a good owner that basically allowed you to become a man so And Paul D says he partly loves Setha because she allows him to be a man to her. She's a friend of his mind. Um I think that's one of the love the lovely things about their relationship is he feels exactly that, that she she all he can be himself. And being yourself is so important. You're not even allowed your own name under slavery. So the characters often try to rename themselves. So Baby Suggs, her name is not Baby Suggs, originally it's Jenny Whitlow, and her owners say to her, You should call yourself Jenny Whitlow. Baby Suggs ain't no name for a free negro, and she says no, I don't want the name you gave me, I want my own name. There's a character called Stamp Paid. He used to be called Joshua, but he was made to give his wife to his master's son. What a shocking and terrible detail that is. And when he did that, he said I no longer want to be called Joshua. He takes the name stamp paid. That's the like he's paid his debt. He's made that appalling sacrifice. So that's why he names himself. And Paul Paul D, I mean he's called Paul D because there were lots of Pauls at Sweet Home Plantation. The owners must have been very unimaginative, just called them all all thees male slav Paul or a lot of them Paul. Yeah, there was a Paul A as well, yeah. And then just give them an initial to distinguish them. Yeah. And this honing in on people's names, which is such a personal th you know, thing to everybody. That's another way in which beloved always manages to focus on both kind of the individual charac characters as well as you know the historical um impact of slavery. Yeah. So so sort of rebuilding yourself or creating yourself for yourself, as as it were, is an absolutely central part of the book. These people, um the the characters in the book have come out of slavery and they don't really know who they are, and they're trying to rebuild a sense of self uh and their self their selves are very kind of fragile, which is why when beloved finally comes to the house , she with her sort of supernatural quality and the fact that she is kind of reawakening the trauma , their souls, particularly Setha and Denver, kind of break down, don't they? And there's a bit in the sort of about two-thirds of the way through the book where you almost feel like they're they're they've lost track of who they are and they're sort of melding into each other, the language starts to break down, the the punctuation breaks down, they just start repeating, I am beloved and she mu she is mine. And they have these kind of streams of consciousness. And you just get this sort of sense that those things that are so precious to us, which is like our name, our selfwood, our personality, our individuality, that they have never properly developed. They're undermined by trauma and suffering and they can they're collapsing kind of as you turn the pages of the book. Yeah, and it also teaches you the fragility of this hard-won freedom. So I was there's this very touching moment when Paul D talks about kind of realizing for the first time that he can do what he likes and that he's free. And he says his first earned purchase made him glow, never mind the turnips were withered and dry, so he buys a little bunch of turnips. That was when he decided that to eat, walk and sleep anywhere was life as good as it got. I e the very basic, you know, requirements of existence are for him a true pleasure and a privilege if he is able to choose them for himself. And also the fact that baby Suggs basically kind of gives up at the end, even though she's an officially freed woman. Being a freed woman doesn't prevent, you know, these white men from coming into her free yard and you know, threatening to take away Setha for you know, which results in Setha's, you know, harsh act. And so sh at the very end she r you know, resorts to her bed and she focuses on colours 'cause they're the l the only things that can't harm her, even though technically she's out of the system. Aaron Powell So you say about some the the bit where she takes to bed and she focuses on the colours, and I was saying earlier about the bit where there are this kind of streams of consciousness that kind of meld into each other. And I guess that's um so for people who haven't read it, maybe kind of raising their eyebrows and saying this sounds like quite a peculiar book. And I guess the style of the book is obviously a huge part of the effect. So to somebody who I'd never read Tony Morrison before I read this book. And the a couple of things that jumped out at me. Number one is you mentioned magical realism earlier in there when we were talking. And I think that's obviously a huge element of this. So for people who are not familiar with it, that's kind of fantastical elements in an otherwise realistic setting. So the book appears to be set in you know in our world, in a normal world, but weird and unsettling things happen and the characters kind of take them for granted. They don't question them. And this was very, very fashionable in the seventies and eighties thanks to Latin American writers like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Colombian writer. I mean he's like the cornerstone, you think of magical realism, you think of him. And a lot of people have actually when it when this book was first published, a lot of people compared uh Morrison's style to uh Marquez's I think completely rightly but one of my favourite writers, a writer I absolutely love, William Faulkner, who she wrote her masters about. So in William Faulkner's books, which are set in the South, slavery is a big part and the spirit race relations in the South and racism and all of that. That's a a a big element of Faulkner's writing. And in Faulkner's books you have these I mean he's writing um in the first half of the twentieth century is a great modernist writer. And in those books there are l streams of consciousness, different narrative voices that kind of blend into each other, different time periods colliding, kind of memories resurfacing in the present, all sorts of buried traumas, lots of stuff about southern history and all this kind of thing. And people always would say of Faulkner's books, they're really difficult. You have to work at them. To me, that's one of the joys of them, that you have to work really hard as the reader and it makes your experience much more immersive because you have contributed to it. And I think that's the brilliant thing about this book is that you don't read it passively. You have to read it really, really actively. You have to work out what's going on. And once you do, you feel that you have invested so much more in it than you would if you as a very detached narrator telling you what to think? Yeah, you could you're not allowed to basically be a detached bystander because you have to work out what you think beloved is and who you think bel oved is, you have to kind of make a judgment about Seth's what she does, you know, what you think of that. And as you say, you have to piece together the fragments of the past. And in this, the style is is very, very cleverly judged because it's neither entirely realistic nor is it entirely fantastical. So I actually think that to call it just definitively magical realism is a mistake because to to read it in that way, to read it as purely kind of mystical and and imagined and you know, to see it as almost like a a a a gothic, you know, an a made up South, you know, almost fairy tale like, is to distance yourself from the very real kind of flesh and blood events of the novel. So I I think it's both. It's both it's like mystical realism. I think that's a good way of putting it. I think you're never sure, but at the same time you ne you're never you never doubt that these things happened and that these characters are really experiencing them. You know that there is a real history behind it. If it was purely kind of magical realism, you wouldn't believe it was true and it wouldn't have the emotional impact that it does. So you you're conscious of the magical realism as a as a vehicle for exploring something unbelievably traumatic and dark and whatnot. And I think the way the star works is is so clever in that the two time periods are always informing each other. So we're never told everything about one of them. As we discover what happened in the 1850s, so the story in the 1870s is kind of motoring on, and the more things change in the eighteen seventies, the more we learn about what happened in the eighteen fifties. And your views of the characters are constantly shifting. And every page I think you're learning something about what's happened to them, but you're also feeling something different. And I think that's a very rare feat and of craftsmanship on the part of the writer. To make you the language is very sensual, but at the same time it's as though the kind of the fog that surrounds the past is slowly beginning to clear . Yeah, the language and the structure exactly as you say plays very cleverly into the theme of memory in the book because the memories constantly change the kind of the flow of of narrative time. So like memories are slowly and kind of agonizingly retrieved. And so we run forwards and backwards like this river, as you say, present and past. And also there is kind of something of like the melancholy emotional depth of blues to it , I read this really interesting piece again by Russell Banks, the guy that wrote the introduction, um, saying that in in the way that it moves forwards and backwards it's like jazz, but in the kind of steady, relentless flow of it. It's very bluesy. And as we said, memory is central to the whole book. And this I think is something that makes it slightly different from traditional slave narratives, which kind of generally plot a physical escape and a journey to freedom. This is also a linear journey to freedom, but it's so, so much more than that. You know, you're thrown sideways, you're thrown down. And through that, Morrison shows how the slaves survive this psychological trauma and and the long term scars of slavery embodied by their efforts to forget. But there's an idea, isn't it, that's that lies behind all this sort of memory stuff, which is rememory, which is um a word that Tony Morrison uses a lot. So it's the idea that re memory is more than memory. It is connected with suffering, it's something that's half buried, it's something that kind of reawakens despite you almost. Yeah, so it's like trauma that exists external to your mind. It's something you can't really control and then kind of throughout Beloved , um, the characters are kind of forced to address this. So Setha says at one point, I was talking about time, it's so hard for me to believe in it. Some things go, pass on, some things just stay. I used to think it was my re memory, you know, some things you forget, other things you never do. And this is beloved's kind of dark power. She embodies like the collective experience of all slaves. She fought, you know, she reappears in their lives, she forces them to unbury their past. She's very kind of elliptical in that sense. And the complexity of her character allows her to represent all sorts of different kinds of experiences, all relating to slavery, you know, Stampade, Paul D, Setha , even the women who gather at the end of the novel to kind of exercise beloved , you get, you know, you get these passages of memory from all of them and the the pace of it picks up as you go on as they're all forced to kind of confront the past. The narrative voice is less consistent. You're pushed far more rapidly between different mindsets, between different narrative voices. Aaron Powell It's interesting, you get to the end of the book. I mean we won't give the ending away. But you mentioned, Tabby, there there's the group of women who Again, that's that's quite 80s, I think. The idea that basically the resolution comes with Denver reaches out to the community for help. Who there's been an exiled from all this time. Yeah, that basically you can't there are some things that you cannot deal with on your own, that you have to do it collectively as a group. And she goes out and she gets the help of basically the the black women who live in the area and about thirty of these women come to the house and they're kind of singing and and so we get to the kind of the resolution of the book. And it ends actually in a very moving way. I love the the there's a bit where Paul D and Setha they kind of come together at the end. She's very damaged by what has happened to her and her experience with this ghost. She's kind of gone back to bed like baby Suggs. She's kind of she's almost she's lost hope. And Paul D is trying to tell her, No, there is a future and there is hope for you. And he says she has always said, you know, her children are her best thing. And he says, You your best thing, Setha. You are. And she's asks me me and that kind of asking her to believe in herself and to to realise that it's it's herself that gives her life value. I think that's really moving for somebody who has all her life she'd been treated as property and as less than human and had no value in herself. I think it's obviously a really important thing for her to hear that she's never heard before. And she's simultaneously kind of gone back to being like a child in her helplessness, but also like a very, very old woman who's also helpless. And you know, lots of simple things are in her mind and in the way she speaks, but but then she's also like someone that's can go no further, that's hit the absolute maximum of what they can endure. All of the terrible, tragic things that she remembers kind of come back to her in one go. And I found this I find this um very evocative too. So she says Howard and Boogler walked on down the railroad track and couldn't hear her. That Amy was scared to stay with her because her feet were ugly and her back looked so bad. That's Amy, the girl that helped her give birth to Den Yeah. So at the very end of the book we won't give the ending away, but beloved, the implication is that beloved is somehow still there, as a memory would be. Her footprints come and go, come and go. Should a child, an adult place his feet in them, they will fit, take them out and they disappear again, as though nobody ever walked there. But the last line of the book is beloved. Like she's still there somehow in the way that memory is, and a way that the the impact of this dreadful collective experience can never kind of evaporate completely. Alright, do you know what, Tabby, we've made it sound so we've actually made it sound like a really harrowing book, which of course it is. But the funny thing is that a couple of days ago when we were texting about it, I said to you, I'd really enjoyed reading it if you know what I mean. And I remember you said, I do know what you mean. I totally know what you mean. I think I wanted to pick this book up and take it with me everywhere that I went. To the tube, to work, I wanted to read it at lunchtime, whatever it was . It's so readable. You know, it's as like I said, it's a bit of a page turner. There's something of the thriller in it. Yeah, it's totally harrowing. But the brilliance of Morrison's language always slightly shields you from the molten core of the pain at the heart of things. And it's up to you to look it in the eye. She never says, look this in the eye. You have to choose to. That choice it makes it even more of a thrilling read somehow. Agreed. So um I cut we haven't actually decided what we're marking this out of. I know. Um we've done ghostly apparitions, I think, before. Maybe just black dresses? Black dresses. That was that's that what she's wearing. That's what she's wearing. So black dresses out of ten. I am going to give it ten out of ten, Tabby. I think it's I really, really enjoyed reading it. I think it absolutely deserves its place in the kind of liter ary canon. I think it's up there with the writers that she did and her masters, Tony Morris and Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner, you can absolutely see the influence, the stream of consciousness writing, the way that the the blend of different time periods, the way that the kind of narrative voices meld and collapse into each other. But I think it's a brilliant way of tackling an almost, you know, unfathomably horrific subject in a way that makes it so intimate and so personal. As I said, having spent a lot of time reading history books about this, I found this more powerful than almost any other history book I'd ever read on the subject. So yeah, definitely a 10 for me. Yeah, I mean I I agree. I mean its sound so hackney to say, but it really does make you kind of think about and consider, you know, one of the most obviously appalling things that's ever happened in history. But really think about it, you know, the book's so intimate, so it forces you to confront like a different side of it, which isn't the great sweep of history, it's you know truly the individual lives. So yeah, I'm I'm also gonna give it a ten. Ten out of two, tens out of ten. Two tens out of tens. And also, I love the quality of the writing. It's like you're caught in this like mesmeric nightmare, but you kind of want to be there. You kind of hate yourself for wanting to be there. Yeah. It's just beautiful writing. Um yeah, and and actually this is my second time reading it, and which I would only ever say of the very best books, but two I mean, one time was not enough. The second time I felt like the the first time reading it was just the beginning. The second time all sorts of new meanings and layers come into view. That's a brilliant um uh recommendation for a book. And it's so I mentioned William Faulkner. William Faulkner is just like that. Once you've read it once, you can't wait to read it again. Because you know you missed things. Yeah, you know you missed loads of things. And the thing is, for people that are put off reading this because it sounds so um you know horrific, the horror isn't what you remember, actually. It's this world, it's this web of lives, it's this shared you know it's the heartbeat of their experiences rather than kind of the the scars above that. And the book does end on a I mean the the A really hopeful note. A hopeful note. A hopeful note, genuinely. What do we have coming up? We actually mentioned Virginia Wolf just now and we've got Virginia Wolf coming straight up. So we're doing Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf's great 1920s book, a much shorter book than thank I mean I need a break, so um to do a short book is my idea of a break. I'm gonna read Garfield for a while, I think. A Garfield? Yeah. I always feel like that's quite a good like, you know you want pudding. You don't feel like a main course. That's your palate cleanser. I love coffee . Wow, that's a revelation. Anyway, after that we have the Hunger Games, which you've also never read, so that'll be exciting. That'll be thrilling. Yeah, but you love a dystopian Odyssey, don't you? I do, but I I I I did feel weird buying it in the sh I mean, I bought a mad combination of books when I last went to Woodstones. Yeah. And I remember handing over like the Court of Thorns and Roses Yeah, you basically have morphed into a teenage girl. I have. But that that's always been a huge part of my identity to be honest, Debbie. Definitely. Then the picture of Dorian Grey we're doing by Oscar Wilde, then the one of my favourite books, uh, The Code of the Worcesters by P.G. Woodhouse, Little Women by Louisa May Alcott, The Thirty Nine Steps by John Buccane, and then The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Graham. So lots of fun things to come and a real variety of stuff. Right, so tons of things to look forward to. I can't wait. We'll see you all next time. Bye-bye. Bye