(courtesy Allen & Unwin)
Making sense of life can often take everything we’ve got.
While many events are ostensibly straight forward such as births, deaths and marriages, they never occur in a vacuum and are tangled, rather ferociously and labyrinthinely, in a whole host of grievances, hurts, family dynamics and differing worldviews which offer see the same moment in graphically different ways.
Just how challenging deciphering what it all means is becomes beautifully clear in Soraya Palmer’s debut novel, The Human Origins of Beatrice Porter & Other Essential Ghosts, which takes into the mystically grounded world of Trinidad-American family, the Porters, who grapple with all the same things everyone of us does but filtered through some quite magical and very much alive storytelling.
Blurring the real world and magical realism to an arrestingly compelling and emotionally resonant degree, The Human Origins of Beatrice Porter & Other Essential Ghosts explores what a powerful difference storytelling can make to perception and understanding and how while it may be a pivotal way to decipher the undecipherable, or at least to attempt to do so, it doesn’t always keep us immune from the very human consequences that befall any family.
And the Porters have a lot to unravel and reconstruct and to deal with in the 273 finely-judged pages of this quite extraordinarily warm, honest and immersively alive novel which offers up some quite mystical ways of interpreting the ordinary while admitting, rather releasingly, that this doesn’t mean everything becomes clear and easily understood.
Beatrice stared in disbelief for a moment, wondering what it would be like not to be ashamed of the things that people shamed her for.
Raised with stories of the seductively vengeful spider Anansi , the flame-breathing Rolling Calf who haunts butchers and half-human, half-snake Mama Dglo who calls the ocean home, sisters Sasha and Zora Porter easily blend the ordinary and the extraordinary in a household that is heavily Christian but also very much alive to traditional belief systems.
While the two very American girls don’t always buy into these beliefs, until of course life events impel to try anything in a bid to save their family and those within in, they find comfort and a sense of safety and identity in them, especially Zora who wants to be a writer and a storyteller like her dad (though life intervened and his dreams did not find full fruition in real life).
They need the comfort of these stories increasingly as their home life is ripped away by the dissolution of their parents’ tempestuous marriage, their mother’s illness which looks somewhat fabricated at first until it is most definitely, distressingly not, and their father’s new relationship which seems happy enough but which the girls, especially Zora, vociferously object to because its existence means the end of their family’s unified state of being.
Life is, to take the status update of a particular social media platform, complicated, and navigating the ups and downs, all while going through the emotional stresses and hormonal swings of teenagerdom, challenges Zora and Sasha at every turn, their sense of safety and security threatened to an extent that the two try quite different ways of making sense of it all.
(courtesy Twitter / X)
Zora, in common with many creative souls, tries to find solace in her art, pouring her thoughts and feelings into her writing, specifically her journals which comes to encapsulate a raft of tortured and confused feelings, some of which begin to make more sense down on paper while others skitter off across the void, defying understanding and taunting her with their contrary irrationality.
Meanwhile Sasha, coming to grips with a queer identity, which various revelations in The Human Origins of Beatrice Porter & Other Essential Ghosts reveal have a strongly unexpected presence in her family, discovers sex and chest binding, trying to deal with out of control events around her by diving deep into herself, a tactic which seems to work at first but which ultimately sees her consuming herself until she and Zora, struggling to deal a huge raft of emotional challenges, finally find some late-in-the-piece equilibrium.
What stamps The Human Origins of Beatrice Porter & Other Essential Ghosts are something quite special is the fact that real life events and storytelling elements begin to mix together in ways that unsettle and comfort the sisters in almost equal measure.
They suddenly find that the stories of their past, all magical and breathlessly over and over, are bleeding through into a fractured, emotionally unsettling present, in the process revealing all kinds of real world secrets that will fracture the family forever and possibly finally and belatedly bring them back together.
‘But I did feel something,’ she says. ‘It’s hard to explain. It felt like a memory, like Mom putting me to sleep when I was little or something. I don’t know. I felt safe, though. It was something like safety.’
If you have wondered or marvelled at the capacity of our species to grappled with the often cold, bleakness of being human by spinning hopefully sense-making takes, then you will find much to love about The Human Origins of Beatrice Porter & Other Essential Ghosts.
It dives deep into the great chasm that exists between belief and real life experience, explores the shadows that lurk between what is said and what is left buried and unspoken, and how we all try to exists in those in-between, grey-shaded placed but not always, if ever, successfuly.
Yes, stories are incredibly moving and powerful and the events of The Human Origins of Beatrice Porter & Other Essential Ghosts prove that in graphically intimate detail in a story awash with mysticism and groundedness, but while they can help make sense of things and that’s a massive thing in a world short of comprehension, they don’t take away the fact that life asks a lot, demands even more and that we don’t always get it right.
We are, wondrous and impactful though the stories might be, and indeed in this novel they are the beating cultural heart of the narrative, still very human and at the end of the story, what makes The Human Origins of Beatrice Porter & Other Essential Ghosts such a liberatingly wonderful read is that it is a luminously honest love letter to the power and wonder of storytelling while also embracing the hardness and emotional challenge of being alive, finally landing at a point where the mystical and the everyday combine and life comes a little bit closer to making sense, well as much as it can manage, anyway.