The Darling meanders through the history of American radical politics in the ’60s and ’70s, the Liberian political powder keg of the ’80s and ’90s, and the plight of endangered chimpanzees. Those are three reasons that you might want to read this book. And here are three corresponding reasons why you’ll more than likely not enjoy it.
The book’s narrator is Hannah Musgrave. She is a member of the Weather Underground Organization, the radical group of “revolutionary communists” that splintered off from the American student group Students for a Democratic Society in the ’70s, and despite telling us ad nauseum that her political allegiances are oh-so radical, she describes little of interest about her years as a fugitive on the FBI’s Most Wanted list. What’s missing throughout her account are the sexy details. What you get instead is lots of allusions to the danger, the intrigue, and the loneliness that she felt, but you never really get the actual feel of it.
Hannah leaves the United States behind and lands finally in Liberia. She marries a minor Liberian diplomat, whom she refers to often, and despite her ostensibly solid background in anti-racism, as “my black African husband.” She tells the story of Liberia’s political turmoil in the 80s and the bloody uprising in the 90s, and in a singularly compelling portion of the book, she explains how her three teenaged sons figured in to the assassination of Liberian President Samuel Doe. Even though this is interesting material, Hannah’s willfully detached voice and her preponderance towards irritatingly psychological anecdotes kill your ability to get emotionally involved with the book.
Finally, the chimpanzees play a central, if ambiguous, role in Hannah’s story, somehow uniting her sense of failure as a mother and the underlying racial tension throughout the book. (Lurking in the subtext throughout is the unnerving sentiment that the plight of the captive chimpanzees is akin to the racial oppression experienced by Africa-Americans.) Hannah’s relationship with the chimpanzees, through overworked metaphor and cliché symbolism, is somehow meant to be a thematic link between her inability to reconcile her own subtle acts of racism, her inability to give a “mother’s love” to her sons, and the guilty conscience that plagues her after she abandons both her Liberian and American families.
In the end, Banks has found three stories that are more than worthy of being told, but he’s mashed them together in an artless, pipe-cleaners and Scotch-tape kind of way. All three could be the subject of truly compelling works of non-fiction, must-read biographies, or true-life accounts of political intrigue and the banality of evil. Here, they create a stinky potpourri of a plot, growing more repellent and tiresome with each page. In the end, The Darling flouts that golden rule of fiction to “show” and not “tell,” and the reader, not to mention the Weather Underground, Liberia, and chimpanzees the world over, suffer as a result.
-CHRIS MCKINNON
