Hey everyone welcome back to the Waterstones vlog. It is Will here and I
think this might be my last solo vlog for 2018. That's because next week we're
going to be assembling en masse, the whole gang will be here and we'll be sharing
our favourite books of the year. And then the week after that things will be
getting distinctly Christmassy, there may even be Christmas jumpers; we
will be talking to you about the one book that we want to receive this
Christmas and the one book that we want to be giving to people this Christmas.
But that's all in the future; this week I want to talk to you about a book that
I've read recently and absolutely loved. This is the book here, it is called
A Different Drummer by William Melvin Kelley. It was initially published in 1962
and Kelley died at the beginning of last year so it's a very timely republication
for this book. He had great success with this debut novel actually when it was
published when he was only 24 and whilst he continued to write for his whole life
actually a lot of his work towards the end of his life remained unpublished and he
sort of fell out of favour. He wrote some quite varied and often quite difficult
books, this one is very easy to read and is absolutely fantastic on its
themes of race in America, segregation, civil rights. But it's approach is quite
unique and what it does is to tell the story of a town called Sutton which is
in a sort of made up state in the south sandwiched between Mississippi and
places like that. And what he's doing is telling the story of this town and in
particular one of its members, a farmer called Tucker Caliban, who was a black
farmer who one day sows salt into his fields, kills his cow and his horse, sets
his house on fire and leaves with his family. And the next day the entire black
population leaves. Which is a fantastic setup because you're like, what is going
on? Why has this happened and also what is the consequence of the black population
of an entire state deciding to up sticks and leave and to go somewhere else? And
what does that mean as a political act? It's a brilliant, brilliant set up and
interestingly Kelley tells the story not through Tucker Caliban
telling his own story but it's narrated by a series of different characters and
they are all of them white. They are the white members of this sort of fairly
well-established community which has its roots very much in the Confederate south.
Now that was quite interesting I thought at first; why is this black
writer telling an important story about black people in America through white
characters? And the sort of set up in itself, that way of telling, the
structure, that way of telling a story is a political act in itself and it very
much puts the onus on the idea of the race problem not being a problem for the
black members of that society but the problem is for the white people to deal
with. And in fact through them expressing themselves through the various chapters
and we see people from different generations speaking, you get this
fascinating insight into what race means to white people in America and the way
that these things can change through the generations. The n-word is peppered
throughout this book and in fact one of the things is that the younger
generation are learning that they're not allowed to use one n-word and they need
to use a different n-word in order to talk about the people that they live and
share the town with. And they're struggling with this language or how to
talk or how to act with black people which raises all sorts of fascinating
ideas and questions. There is this very brilliant way of slowly revealing the
character of Tucker Caliban and indeed his history and indeed the history of
the whole town through the history of its white inhabitants and
especially the history of one family which goes right back to I guess
the sort of the founding father of the state. The brilliant thing I suppose is
that if you're going to write a book which has got different authorial voices,
different characters, it's quite hard to pull that off, for them to actually be
different, but Kelly does a brilliant job of these different characters. They feel
very, very differentiated; very, very clear. And even, as I say, where there's
different ages, different attitudes; those are really, really
clearly set out in the book. So it throws up this really, quite difficult to think
about at times, ideas about race; but done with this kind of humour, almost.
He's able to comment, not in a nasty way, but by allowing
people enough space to give away their own prejudices and their own
problems. Then at the end of the book there was this really swift change in
tone which ends things in quite a brutal way and brings things right back down to
earth again. And that hits home really hard. It means it has something to say
about race in this period which is sort of the end of the 50s and going into the
early 60s but of course it still has something to say about race in America
today. And actually it has something to say about 'othering' in any part of the
world today. And in fact this idea. that the class of people who you think of as
being the people who clean your cars or clean your homes or do the jobs that you
don't want to do, if they all decided to up and leave – and this is the problem the
white characters in this book have – what does that mean for the town? What does it
mean for the state? Will they survive if 1/3 of their population disappears? What
does that mean? Now I couldn't help but look out of a
window and think about where we are now with this country and with Brexit. What
would happen if all of these people who a big section of this country have a
problem with and worry about them taking their jobs away and all that sort of stuff,
what if they instead of sticking it out doggedly and stoically and
working in the service industries that other people won't work in, if they just
upped and left: what would happen? Or indeed what would happen if politics or
Brexit demands that these people have to up and leave. What does that mean for a
country, what does it mean for its economy, what does it mean for it as a
society and a community? Difficult questions. I don't have the answers to
those questions and Kelley doesn't offer them here in this book. He
just throws it up to you. What would it mean if that was the
course of action? What would it mean if a whole group of people decided they weren't
going to take being treated like that anymore and they decided to go somewhere
else. Something for us all to think about. Really, really important question and a
really, really fascinating book. So I really, heartily recommend A Different
Drummer by William Melvin Kelley. I cannot help but now want to go and read his
other books even though they sound very very different and
this might be his best book. I don't know how available they are but I always used
to like finding second-hand books in various places. So there you go; a writer to
definitely find out more about and that is that for this week. So, as I said, join
us next week, we will be sharing our favourite books of the year. I'm not going
to tell you what mine is yet, you'lll have to come back next week and find out.
But until then, take care.