NIKE SULWAY Dying in the First Person. Reviewed by Jessica Stewart
Nike Sulway’s new novel is a powerful and extraordinarily beautiful story of family, love and sacrifice.
In Dying in the First Person Nike Sulway has created a world we enter slowly, uncovering the past and its hurts in small steps. It draws the reader into a place of mystery and wonder as Samuel, the narrator for the first, longer section of the book is brought face to face with an emissary, Ana, who brings news of his long-estranged twin brother, Morgan. Ana narrates the book’s final quarter.
We learn of Morgan’s death in the canal near their home in Amsterdam in the opening lines: ‘A woman came across the field, carrying the body of my brother, who had drowned.’ Ana’s first contact is through letters, then telephone calls. Samuel and his mother, Solange, have had no first-hand contact with Morgan for many years. Accompanying Morgan’s body back to be buried, Ana stays, allowing herself to rest, to be loved. In Sulway’s depiction of her growing relationships with Samuel and Solange, there is longing and vulnerability.
Sulway explores ideas of sacrifice and the accompanying notions of obligation, commitment and entitlement; these are part of loving somebody. Her characters’ offerings to those they love are almost biblical in their scope – life, freedom, memory and voice – but we can see echoes of them in our own lives.
It is through the book’s gradual unfolding that we learn of Morgan’s life, his self-imposed isolation from his family and why and how he died. Ana’s complicated relationship with Morgan is teased out. Ultimately, she had wanted to save him: ‘I believed I could rescue him, restore him to himself, simply by being patient and kind.’ Sulway’s examination of Morgan’s mental state reminded me of Jeffrey Euginides in his 2011 book The Marriage Plot where Madeleine, who wants to save Leonard, is told, ‘But you can only save yourself.’ Sulway is acutely aware of our limitations in treating emotional pain.
The book’s central theme is the power of language. Sulway portrays its role, through narrative, in recording truth, or lack of truth, which then, in turn, allows the reader to see reality and change and grow. As children, the boys develop a secret language, sophisticated and complex. As adults, Morgan writes books in this language and becomes famous; the language has taken on a life of its own, studied by linguists, the focus of international conferences. His books are translated by Samuel who feels the weight of being an imperfect translator, struggling to convey Morgan’s intentions.
The boys had built an entire world using this secret language – the island of Nahum – inhabited by men only. Sulway’s examination of the roles of men and women, their strictures and freedoms, is light and deft. She never hammers home a message, leaving nuance and murkiness to allow us to reach our own conclusions. While her attachment to her women characters is evident – Solange, in particular, with her talents, intellect, resourcefulness, independence – she tells her story through men and their agency. Women’s stories and powers, the influence of a mother in shaping her children, are always present but in the background:
‘One spring morning,’ my brother would intone, holding his tiny craft aloft in his wide, pale hands, ‘the father leaves his son sleeping and goes to the sea. He does not know, when he steps onto the deck, whether he will return, whether it will be a good day, or a bad day, but he goes down to the sea, because that is what men do.’
And at the end, we are left with Ana’s sacrifice, her selflessness, as she too goes into the storm.
Sulway’s writing is beautiful and evocative. She forces her readers to slow their pace, to absorb every detail, through her creation of scenes with real-time precision: the trappings and formalities of a funeral, the basting of a turkey:
In the kitchen, our mother laid out her ingredients, as well as her needles, skewers, scissors and string, her long-handled, flat-faced spoons and glass bowls. She had taken out her recipe from its hiding place, where it lay folded all year, cheek-to-cheek with a page clipped from the newspaper in 1949, which had detailed instructions on how to truss a turkey. Once everything was in place, she opened a bottle of dry Semillon, poured herself a shallow, golden glassful and began.
This is a book about the complexity of human relationships and the little that children ever really know of their parents’ lives.
Nike Sulway Dying in the First Person Transit Lounge 2016 PB 304pp $29.99
Jessica Stewart is a freelance writer and editor. After two decades working in public policy, she followed her heart and now works with books and words entirely for less money, but a thousand times more satisfaction. You can find her at www.yourseconddraft.com where she writes about language and books she’s loved.
You can buy Dying in the First Person from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW here or you can buy it from Booktopia here.
To see if it is available from Newtown Library, click here.
