This is a very subtle and moderately modern novel that deals, one is led to think, with the author’s own experience as a successful, wealthy and beautiful black woman in the predominantly male world of London’s financial market.
Having “spent a decade working in financial services after studying Maths at Cambridge University”, as states the dust cover, Natasha Brown has plenty to say about the not-so hidden sexism and the mostly unconscious racial prejudice that besiege her at every moment.
Many pages of this brief novel consist of almost ethnographical snapshots of the small, stinging humiliations Brown suffers everyday. She describes a work meeting.
At the onsite, we review the latest figures, the overall trends […] When I speak, I am to-the-point with a measured pace and even tone. Backed by the data. Illustrated by the slides.
Mid-afternoon, there’s a comfort break. The men strand, stretch, wander the room […] One man gestures at the espresso machine, says he doesn’t know how it works: which button to press, where to put the pod. When is the receptionist coming back? The others concur, they don’t know either.
They ask me, perhaps I know.
Well.
I make their coffees. And if they’d like, add frothed milk to the top. The men, relieved, say oh, thank you.
Thank you.
Everything is said, with minimal means. Brown’s fragmentary, cooly understated writing couldn’t be more distant from the old empathy-seeking novels of social denunciation that, from Dickens to, say, Steinbeck, relied on the readership’s compassion towards oppressed, ever-suffering characters.
This wise aesthetic option poses, however, a problem. How to build up a novel from what is basically a series of brief notations taken from real life?
First person, third person
The plot of Assembly is organized around two parallel situations: a garden party, in which the narrator will be presented to the parents of an aristocratic boyfriend, and her medical consultations, in which she stubbornly refuses to be treated from cancer. One could think, at first, that her acceptance of a fatal disease represents some kind of transferral –instead of reacting to the innumerable aggressions she receives, the narrator seems to welcome an enemy that, at least, comes from within herself. But Natasha Brown’s novel is probably too elegant to be framed in such simplistic terms.
There is, for instance, a subtle play between the words “metastasis” and “assimilation”, knitting together the two main themes of the novel; it is possible to see the spread of cancer as a symbol, alternatively, of British imperialist expansion in the past, or of the fear white men experience in front of black people –the urge white men feel, says the narrator, “to protect this place from me”.
English language itself –as inarguably shown by Brown when she contrasts the connotations of “black” and “white” in the dictionary– harbours, like cancer, cells of “ill intent” towards her.
To be married into a country gentleman’s family –and suffer from their “tolerant” behaviour? “I reject it”, says the narrator. Her boyfriend is so sure she will accept his marriage proposal, being what she is, that any promise of happiness would sound as a humiliation to her. Cruelly, all those constant aggressions remain invisible to others than herself; the pain of an untreated cancer could be understood, thus, as a way of telling the white establishment that racism, albeit repressed, concealed and unconscious, is still unbearably hurtful.
If the prospect of a marriage and the acceptance of cancer provide the elements of a plot in Natasha Brown’s novel, there still remains a contradiction between them and the ethnographical character of the narrator’s short notes, that seem transcribed from the diary of someone who is more concerned with the daily life in the City than with the terrible threat of dying from cancer. The choice of a first person narrative is appropriate to the detailed account of invisible racism; from a literary point of view, however, the story of a successful black woman refusing medical treatment would be more manageable, I think, in the third person. It seems in need of a more distant point of view to match the unsentimental, analytical spirit with which the author approaches her subject.
The nature of injustice
“I have scarcely read a work of fiction which confronts me so clearly and viscerally with the nature of injustice in our contemporary moment”, says Kayo Chingonyi in the dust cover of this book.
Important as it is, Assembly is here being praised too much. The fate of African refugees in the coasts of Europe, to mention only one example, is certainly more telling of “the nature of injustice in our contemporary moment” than the veiled insults Brown receives while working in the City.
Moreover, some passages in her book do not favour the enthusiasm of any reader concerned with questions of social justice. Typically espousing the neoliberal ideology of her colleagues in the financial market, Brown complains about having to pay too much to the government.
“I pay my taxes, each year. Any money that was spent on me: education, healthcare, what –roads? I’ve paid all back. And then some. Everything now is profit. I am what I’ve always been to the empire: pure, fucking profit”.
One could ask if the taxes she pays go “to the empire” or to the education and healthcare of poorer people. A question which is certainly not very popular among bankers and high-rewarded financial experts.
But Natasha Brown, it is worth remembering, decided to write in the first person.
Tastes and Distastes 