THE WHITE FAMILY by Maggie Gee (hier online bestellen)
Contents:
Maggie Gee's novel explores the "problem" of race as it originates and
festers in the minds of present-day white Britons. Touted as the most provocative contender on this
year's Orange Prize shortlist, The White Family is an audacious, groundbreaking condition-of-England
novel that delves for the roots of xenophobic hatred and violence in the English hearth.
Alfred White is the keeper of Albion Park. An army veteran, he has mounted a 50-year campaign to
enforce park rules, keep order and "hold the fort". If it were left to him, the park in Hillesden Rise -
a fictitious part of London reminiscent of Willesden or Hackney - would have stricter rules: "This was
England. If in doubt, keep them out." Even the arrival of brightly plumed "yellow foreign birds" is
unwelcome.
When Alfred has an "event" - an apparent stroke that turns out to be cancer - he and his wife, May,
find their divided family at his hospital bedside. Darren is the "golden boy" journalist who files
columns from the US but has two broken marriages and a bulimic third wife. Shirley, who appalled her
family by marrying a Ghanaian lecturer, is now widowed and has taken up with a West Indian social
worker, Elroy. Dirk, a skinhead stagnating behind the counter of a newsagent, is the graver family
embarrassment, unable to contain his hatred of "coloureds", old people and women. While Alfred idolises
his eldest son, Darren, it is Dirk who hangs on his words, seemingly his true heir.
Other characters include Darren's schoolfriend Thomas, a librarian and would-be writer; Melissa, the
teacher he fancies; George, coughing his lungs out in his shop but loath to sell it to Asians; Elroy's
brother Winston, cottaging in the park gents but unable to admit he is gay in a community that abhors
"batty boys" ("It was as if they thought only white men did it").
The perspective is insistently that of the white characters, whose inner voices are given free rein.
Dirk is angry that there are "no opportunities for the native English"; that "we have to stay open late
because the frigging Pakis do". Alfred's is more an idealised nostalgia: "There weren't any coloureds
when I was a kid. It was just a normal part of London. We were all the same. We were all one. No one was
rich. We stuck together."
The illusion of "sticking together" as a family gives way to revelations about Alfred's beatings, the
child Shirley was forced to give up for adoption and the repressed homoerotic source of Dirk's hatred
of black men. Dirk's portrayal approaches parody. There was "something jerky about his walk, as if he
was butting a low brick wall. As if this habit had injured his brain." Yet, as Shirley puts it,
"Sometimes he seemed comic, like a bad cartoon . . . But all that anger. All that pain." He is a
casualty, at first sight, of his father's opinions, but in reality of Alfred's despotic violence
towards his family.
The novel's inexorable violence is mirrored in Shirley's apocalyptic vision of the priest as führer
smiling over black corpses in Elroy's church. If the climax is unsurprising, its resolution involves
a twist. While the damaged Dirk may be a scapegoat in the true sense, other characters prove capable
of growth.
Gee gives them space with neither posturing condemnation nor condescension. They, though not their views,
have authorial sympathy. The novel tilts expertly at a middle-class fallacy that racism is something
"out there", in the football terraces or the sink estates; its genteel manifestations are insistently
explored. Those who imagine themselves to be liberal are constantly wrong-footed for their casual
assumptions: May thinks she is being mugged by a man trying to help her; Thomas imagines the large
man borrowing One Hundred Years of Lynchings is out for revenge, only to discover he is researching
a PhD on Baldwin.
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