Hey everyone, welcome back to the Waterstones vlog; it is Will here. So Milkman won the
Man Booker Prize in the end. Did you pick it? I haven't read it, so I don't know but
congratulations to Anna Burns. Huge congratulations to her, congratulations to
you if you picked it as a winner. If you have read the book I'd love to know
what you thought of it so do leave comments below. But I'm going to be
talking about another book that was on the shortlist this year which is this
one here, Washington Black by Esi Edugyan which I read just before the Man Booker Prize
announcement happened and it's a shame it didn't win because it's an absolutely fantastic
book, but I wouldn't envy any of the judges on that prize trying to pick a
winner from those six shortlisted books. I have read Esi's previous novel, Half
Blood Blues and absolutely loved it so I was always looking forward to this book.
It's actually the kind of book I guess I don't read an awful lot of, which is
historical fiction because for various reasons I'm not a massive fan, but she's
a fantastic writer and she did not disappoint with Washington Black. I did
actually get the chance to speak to her about the book and if you haven't seen
the interview already if you're watching on YouTube a link will have popped up
around my head somewhere, if you're watching it elsewhere we'll probably put
a link together with this video. She's absolutely fascinating, she's very sort
of intelligent but also calm and sort of humane and really thoughtful. And we had
a really good chat about a lot of the themes that come up in the book and I'll
talk about a few of those today. So what is this book about? Well it's about a
chap called Washington Black, George Washington Black is a sort of 11 year
old slave boy on a plantation in Barbados and at the beginning of the
novel we are thrown straight into the life of the slaves on this plantation. We
see how awful their life is frankly and we see him being sort of looked after
and cared for by a woman called Big Kit. She's his protector on this plantation
and very quickly he is sort of plucked almost from the fields to be an
assistant to the brother of the plantation owner, a man called Titch. And
he has various things that he's sort of into pursuing, scientific pursuits, he
seems to be building a kind of, well in fact you can see it here on the
cover; what he calls his 'cloud cutter'. And Washington turns out to be a really good
draftsman, he's really good at sketching and drawing and so that's exactly what
Titch uses him for. And that means he has this very very different relationship of
course he's always been scared of white men and then he has this man who seems
to be very caring of him and looks after him and it offers up the first of sort
of many big changes in Washington's life. And in fact I don't think it's much of a
spoiler to say that they will leave the island together,
there is an escape of sorts, and this of course is the beginning of a completely
different life for Washington Black. And the rest of the novel is concerned with
him finding his place in the world I guess.So that having had an existence on
that Island where he had no rights he was a slave and he knew exactly what he
would be doing from the day that he was born to the day he would die,
he now has these opportunities in the world. But the question I suppose of the
book is how free is he in a world where of course black men are still regarded
as less than human by much of the world in which he travels? And also of course,
having endured the trauma that he's been through in his life, is it going to be
easy for him or even possible for him to understand how to trust people, how to
love people, how to forge the kind of bonds and relationships that most of us
completely take for granted. It's filled with lots of very, very important themes:
slavery, freedom, guilt, survival; all sorts of things going on there and I guess
most crucially Washington Black is a character which is created with such
sympathy, empathy that I think it would be a very hard-hearted reader who
doesn't read this book and care about him, worry about him and sort of wish
the best for him as he goes through. He has to endure an awful lot, it's quite
difficult to read in places but that is a skill that I think Esi has, you
know, she's just so strong at creating these characters that you care about. I
remember this from Half-Blood Blue's as well.
So that's the kind of book that can really grab hold of your heart and make
you care. So there is a lot to recommend this book, it's a sort of a rich,
historical epic, he will travel to various parts of the world. But I suppose
most importantly it has this huge beating heart in the middle and a lovely
ambiguous ending as well to leave you wondering just exactly what might happen
after that final page. It's also an absolutely gorgeous book, it's got this
gold foiling on the cover, it's got these lovely green designed endpapers, it's a
really gorgeous hardback, the kind of thing that when you've got it in your
hand you will enjoy reading every minute that you read it. So there we go, that's
Washington Black by Esi Edugyan, a book that I absolutely loved and it absolutely
deserved its place on that Booker shortlist and may even have deserved to
win it, but hey, as Julian Barnes once said, it's just 'posh bingo'. That's all for
this week, I will see you in a few weeks' time, there'll be some more vlogs over
the next few weeks and keep your eyes peeled because we will, all of us, be
revealing some of our favorite books of the year.
Not sure I've quite decided what mine is yet, you'll have to tune in and see, but
until then, take care.