The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese

1900, Travancore, South India

She is twelve years old, and she will be married in the morning. Mother and daughter lie on the mat, their wet cheeks glued together.

“The saddest day of a girl’s life is the day of her wedding,” her mother says. “After that, God willing, it gets better.”

So begins Abraham Verghese’s masterwork, The Covenant of Water, a sprawling novel that involves three generations, two continents, and several geographic locations. It is a superb piece of writing, but not, I think, a great novel. There is a huge cast of characters, a dizzying number of locations and episodes, and the sure hand of a compassionate doctor behind the pen.

It would be impossible to overview this monster of a novel in a few pages, but I will dip in a bit and tell the reader about some of the major themes.

In his Notes at the end of this 700 page wonderwork, Verghese tells us:

The story in these pages is entirely fictional, as are all of the major and minor characters, but I have tried to remain true to the real-world events of that time.

Certainly it reads like a carefully researched historical novel. There are many doctors in this story, and each of them expresses some of the views and the overall compassion of Dr. Verghese himself.

The primary family in the novel has a weird connection with water. Each generation has at least one son who dies by drowning, and even the males who fear water and never cross over it find bizarre ways of dying due to water.

Big Ammachi is the matriarch of the family and devoted to keeping her first son away from water.

Some of the language in this novel is wonderfully mellifluous.

For most Westerners, Malayalam’s rolling ”rhha” scrapes the mucosa off the hard palate and cramps the tongue

However a Scottish doctor by the name of Rune, banters with the children outside his clinic with a Scandinavian lilt to his Malayalam. “Rune’s fees are nominal for the poor and painful for the rich.”

I learned so much about medicine and disease in this novel. For example, I learned just how diphtheria kills. I learned what life is like in a leprosarium, and was surprised to read that leprosy is far less contagious than I had thought, but also how it attacks nerve endings and leads to lepers injuring themselves without feeling it at all.

There are love scenes in this novel that are so beautiful, but nothing like the steamy scenes of western pornography. Verghese describes how simply seeing a naked foot or feeling the breath of a lover on ones skin can be so erotic.

The political content of this novel is both profound and subtle. It is obvious that Verghese favors democratic socialism. His many descriptions of the caste system are pointed but cognizant of its long history.

“Because you loved my father, this is harder for you to grasp…You see yourselves as being kind and generous to him. The ‘kind’ slave owners in India, or anywhere , were always the ones who had the greatest difficulty seeing the injustice of slavey. Their kindness , their generosity compared to cruel slave owners, made them blind to the unfairness of a system of slavery that they created, they maintained, and that favored them. I’s like the British bragging about the railways, the colleges, the hospitals they left us—their ‘kindness’! As though that justified robbing us of the right to self-rule for two centuries! As though we should thank them for what they stole!

We’ve been doing the same thing to each other in India for centuries. The inalienable right of the Brahmins. And the absence of any right for the untouchables. And all the layers in between. Everyone who is looked down on can look down on someone else. Except; the lowest. The British just came along and moved us down a rung.

This is such a rich novel, and it is not unremittingly sad. If you take on this lovely book, try not to read it in short snippets before bedtime. The complexity of the narrative and the huge cast of characters would, I think, make it nearly incomprehensible. Read it in as sustained a manner as possible. No speed-reading.

River Sing Me Home by Elenor Shearer

Let me begin by allowing Eleanora Shearer to say in her own words why she wrote this beautiful/awful novel:

My aim in writing this novel was to bring to life a story about the Caribbean in the aftermath of slavery—a place and time that is not always well-known or well understood. Doing this history justice was incredibly important to me, especially given my family ties to the Caribbean. To make this story as accurate as possible, I have chosen to use some terms—such as “mulatto” and “Negro”—that are offensive to many people today, myself included. There are also characters who express deeply racist views., which were widespread at the time. I do not use these terms or write these characters to condone them, but I want readers to be clear-eyed about the extent of the brutality and oppression that enslaved people faced. As we excavate history through fiction, we can confront the injustices of our past as a way to shed light on our present and work toward a more equitable future

Although I won’t reveal much of the story of Rachel as she searches the islands for her children who were taken from her and sold, I will sketch out some parts. When the King of England announced the end of slavery for Barbados in 1834, that did not mean the slaves were free, it simply changed their title from slave to apprentice, But they were still bound to the plantation owners who went after, caught and often executed so-called runaways.

Rachel has two sons and two daughters that were taken from her and sold. During the course of this harrowing but beautiful story, she finally finds two of her daughters and the one son who lived, the other having been killed during an uprising.

When the hurricanes came, they ripped up even the sturdiest tree; and when the white men came, they tore children out of their mother’s arms. And so, we learned to live without hope. For us, loss was the only thing that was certain.

Hope hurts…She [Rachel] had survived for so long by suppressing hope, but when she left, she dared to believe her children might be found…Hope led you to dream things that could not be, like freedom wrested from the white man’s unwilling hands, or a family reunited.

On her journey from island to island, Rachel is assisted by others One man, Abraham, has lived as a hermit.

Me don’ think about it when me was young. When me first get here. Me think about going home. But that’s why the white man love to keep us on islands—how can me get home? The sea help them keep us here.

I found myself wondering why Shearer adopted the odd grammar and the pronoun Me instead of I. She answers that question in her author’s note.

The other bit of historical accuracy I grappled with for this novel was how to write the dialogue. I wanted the characters to speak in a way that reflected the wonderful creole languages of the Caribbean, but also was accessible to non-Caribbean readers. In the end, I went with dialogue that is not always perfectly in line with how someone like Racheal or Mama B would have spoken at the time, but that still follows some of the rules of Caribbean grammar. Language such as Bajan creole do not conjugate many verbs, which lends an immediacy to Caribbean storytelling…

This novel reads as a kind of epic, and at least for this reader, there was no problem with suspending disbelief at some of the wild adventures. There are grisly scenes of chase and horrible descriptions of some punishments meted out. But as Shearer herself says, “I hope this sense of possibility, of love, is something readers will take away from the novel.”

Both her academic training and her own history lend authority to this historical novel. I agree whole heartedly with Shearer’s evaluation:

Women like Rachael (and the real Mother Rachael) set out to make a kind of freedom for themselves when they brought their families back together again. There is something so wonderfully hopeful in those stories. They are histories that need to be told.

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver

The best way to introduce you to young Demon Copperhead is to let him announce his entrance:

First, I got myself born. A decent crowd was on hand to watch, and they’ve always given me that much: the worst of the job was up to me, my mother being let’s just say out of it.

On any other day they’d have seen her outside on the deck of her trailer home, good neighbors taking notice, pestering the tit of trouble as they will. All through the dog-breath air of late summer and fall, cast an eye up the mountain and there she’d be, little bleach-blond smoking her Pall Malls, hanging on that railing like she’s captain of her ship up there and now might be the hour it’s going down. This is an eighteen-year-old girl we’re discussing, all on her own and as pregnant as it gets. The day she failed to show, it fell to Nance Peggot to go bang on the door, barge inside, and find her passed out on the bathroom floor with her junk all over the place and me already coming out. A slick fish-colored hostage picking up grit from the vinyl, worming and shoving around because I’m still inside the sack that babies float in, pre-real-life

Mr. Peggot was outside idling his truck, headed for evening service, probably thinking about how much of his life he’d spent waiting on women. His wife would have told him the Jesusing could hold on a minute, first she needed to see if the little pregnant gal had got herself liquored up again. Mrs. Peggot being a lady that doesn’t beat around the bushes and if need be, will tell Christ Jesus to sit tight and keep his pretty hair on. She came back out yelling for him to call 911 because a poor child is in the bathroom trying to punch himself out of a bag.

Here is Barbara Kingsolver showing her genius again, managing to take on the voice of a young boy and keeping that voice with all its grammatical blunders and peculiar wording for seven hundred pages of monologue. I can imagine writing a short story in the voice of my younger self, but to be able to convincingly hold that voice not just for a short story but for a very long novel simply astounds me.

There is no way I could do justice to sketching out the whole story of Demon’s life, but I could easily assemble a series of terse bits of advice he gives to the reader. Although it says his name is Damon Fields on his birth certificate. “Did she think she’d even get me off her tits before people turned that into Demon?” And once he got his copper-wire hair, he became Demon Copperhead.

Like Dickens’ David Copperfield, Demon is passed from foster home to foster home and works dangerous, low-paying jobs from the age of eight on. His mother loses custody and regains it several times, but takes in stray men one after another. The worst of these men, Stoner, beats on both him and his mother until Demon is taken from her by Children’s Services. “At the time, I thought my life couldn’t get any worse. Here’s some advice: Don’t ever think that.”

Demon’s great talent is drawing, and he loves to draw super-heroes. He draws his friends and tells them what super powers they have.

While he is with one family, the McCobbs, Mrs. McCobb takes him to Walmart and using money he has made sorting junk for a junk-dealer, she buys him new clothes, not so much for him but to protect her family’s good name.

But at school the next day in my new clothes I still felt horrible. Not even proud. Embarrassed honestly, because nothing would change. Now they’d all think I was just that much more pitiful, because of trying. Loser is a cliff. Once you’ve gone over, you’re over.

At one point, in desperation he seeks out his grandmother, hoping to be taken in and cared for.

My grandmother had no use for anything in the line of boys or men, “Any of them that stands up to make water,” was how she put it. Bad news for me.

Still, his grandmother, his father’s mother, does provide for him and an uncle who lives with her encourages his art and provides sage advice when others only laugh at or curse him.

While Demon’s life is sad and his very existence precarious, this novel is often humorous and Kingsolver’s wisdom shines through. She exposes the many stereotypes applied to hill country miners, so-called hillbillies, and looks long and hard at opiate addiction. In her afterward, she acknowledges her debt to Charles Dickens:

I’m grateful to Charles Dickens for writing David Copperfield, his impassioned critique of institutional poverty and its damaging effects on children in his society. Those problems are still with us. In adapting his novel to my own place and time, working for years with his outrage, inventiveness, and empathy at my elbow, I’ve come to think of him as my genius friend.