Toni Morrison's loves

BOOKMARK

Nobel Prize winner, Toni Morrison's world is a land of pure memory. Ever since her first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970), moving on to Sula (1973), Song of Solomon (1977), Tar Baby (1981), her classic, Beloved (1987), Jazz (1992), Paradise (1997) and now her latest, Love (Chatto, Special Indian Price, Rs 695), her imagination has waited upon memory to reveal itself.

But hers seems to be a collective memory whose 'personal' contents mingle with the Afro-American experience, not just in her own lifetime but what it must have been then. As she said in her Beloved, she wanted the story's centre "to be there...and to be looking at it too."

What made her novels memorable is that her memory also has its style, a plain way of telling that leaves the emotions and drama to emerge from the events themselves. It is narrative, plain, unvarnished and unheroic; there is no plot, no climax, no happy ending "" just telling it as it must have been.

Love is set in Silk, a small town in north Carolina, along the coast. Here are five women with their memories "" May, Christine, Heed, Junior and Vida "" even the narrator 'L' "" who are obsessed with a mysterious Bill Cosey, the wealthy owner of Cosey Hotel and Resorts.

Each wants Bill for her own reason "" as a father, husband, lover, guardian, friend "" yearnings that dominate long after he is dead and gone for forty years.

For each woman, memory moves forward, hope backwards. Cosey's presence dominates the household and the power he exerts over the house is one of the novel's several themes.

All the women were dependent on him but they were responsible for their own unhappiness because they were not prepared to shape their own destinies.

While Cosey remains at the dead centre and the stories told were monstrous and shadowy, Cosey himself is driven by secret forces and a highly possessed woman, Celestial.

We are now in the 1990s though the story goes back and forth in time. Cosey Hotel is twenty feet under water, smashed in a hurricane though part of the Resort still remains as a dilapidated outhouse.

Having set the scene, Morrison recounts the memories of each of the characters, principally Christine and Heed as told to Junior who has seen it all and apparently holds the answers to their drama of misspent love.

The women disclose their grievances and memories to Junior, to themselves, and to each other. Morrison returns time and again to the past which is never quite past to wonder and pity the life around her.

But behind all the kitchen gossip there is an underlying tension in their relationships. Who will inherit the Resort? Has Bill drawn up a secret will, and if so, what happened to it? Who did he truly love? And above all, what is this thing called love?

Does it all add up to that elusive thing called 'care'? If so, what does 'caring' all amount to? Questions come thick and fast to which there are no concrete answers.

Morrison has always built her stories through the use of different voices, multiple points of view simply because "no story can be told today as if it is the only one."

Clues are contained in the conversations and in the unguarded moments of reflections that we don't immediately grasp but which hit us as we go back and forth with the novel.

The pleasure and fascination of Love lies in the straightforward but richly gentle prose and the effortlessness with which Morrison weaves the various strands of the story of badly damaged women, leftover friends and newcomers.

"Cosey's Resort was more than a playground; it was a school and a haven where people debated death in the cities, murder in Mississippi, and what they planned to do about it other than grieve and stare at their children." For the sheer force of language, one could go on and on and for this alone you need to read it.

But at the end of the day, you may ask what Love is all about? It is about many relationships: passion between men and women, family ties, the tenderness of the elderly towards the young, especially when they are about to make their own mistakes.

But above all, it is about how women love which is very different from the way men love. All those who have loved and lost would know this, but Morrison tells this in her own unique way.