ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

I don’t usually review books I haven’t finished — but I’m making an exception with Helen Oyeyemi’s Gingerbread, because I am so baffled by it, I’d like to know if anyone else has made any sense of it.

I was well out of my comfort zone anyway because it’s an adult novel with fairy-tale elements, but in first four chapters I could see how the author used whimsy to deliver a biting critique of contemporary British society.  But from there onward, I was mostly lost.  When I finally decided to give up at page 155 because the confusion was impenetrable, I sought out some reviews… and I found that everyone else seemed able to make some sense of the first part and then got lost just as I did.

Which makes me wonder what to make of praise like this, from Ron Charles at the Washington Post who isn’t embarrassed to admit that Oyeyemi works in an adjacent realm of dreams where things simultaneously make perfect sense and no sense at all:

Oyeyemi, now 34, isn’t just goosing old fairy tales with contemporary melodies. She’s drawn to what’s most unsettling about these fables: their disorienting logic, their blithe cruelty, their subtle encoding of race and gender. Nor is she in any way beholden to the source material she collects in the dark forest. No matter what characters she’s dealing with, she’s willing to cut off their tales with a carving knife.

Her new novel, “Gingerbread,” is a challenging, mind-bending exploration of class and female power heavily spiced with nutmeg and sweetened with molasses. If you think you know where you’re going in this forest, you’ll soon be lost. Oyeyemi has built her house out of something far more complex than candy.

Mmm, yes… but …at some point, absurdism can just become absurd, and so is any attempt to make sense of it.

Helen Oyeyemi is a British author of Nigerian heritage, and elements of her storytelling style reminded me of other Nigerian authors: Chigozie Obioma (who wrote the widely admired The Fishermen) has the same vivacious chattiness, which, as I understand it, has origins in oral storytelling.  Ben Okri’s The Famished Road features the same kind of non-judgemental narrator as in Gingerbread, with the same endearing impudence.  And though Oyeyemi is similarly dealing with some very serious issues as Harriet relates her life story to her daughter Perdita, the tone is upbeat and often droll, most remarkably even when Perdita attempts suicide.

Hansel and Gretel by Arthur Rackham (1909) Wikipedia)

Gingerbread is known to most of us as a feature of the Hansel and Gretel fairytale, where it is used to lure the children to their doom, but there is also the story of the Gingerbread Man who comes to life as the longed-for but rather unpleasant child of an old man and woman.  There is a kind of malevolence in these representations of the sweet and spicy baked dough, but OTOH there are gingerbread houses as a symbol of love and affection at Christmastime in Germany and the US.   But…

Harriet Lee’s gingerbread is not comfort food. There’s no nostalgia baked into it, no hearkening back to innocent indulgences and jolly times at nursery. It is not humble, nor is it dusty in the crumb.
…
A gingerbread addict once told Harriet that eating her gingerbread is like eating revenge. “It’s like noshing on the actual and anatomical heart of somebody who scarred your beloved and thought they ’d got away with it, ” the gingerbread addict said. “That heart, ground to ash and shot through with darts of heat, salt, spice, and sulphurous syrup, as if honey was measured out, set ablaze and trickled through the dough along with the liquefied spoon. You are phenomenal. You’ve ruined my life for ever. Thank you. ” (p.1-2)

The gingerbread that Harriet bakes seems to be a kind of currency, a symbol of efforts to belong and their rejection.  As we see when she tries with gifts of gingerbread to bribe her way into social acceptance…

Perdita’s school has a PPA, a Parent Power Association instead of a Parent Teacher Association, and, determined to take her own place in this pantheon, Harriet filled nine tins with gingerbread, wrapped rainbow-coloured ribbon around each tin and attached notecards with the names of each PPA member.  Every single one of the PPA members left the tins on, under or behind their chairs without even opening them, leaving Harriet to wonder whether she had caused offence by mis-spelling names or misidentifying people — she could have been more diligent.  She’d been a bit tired when she wrote the notecards, her head full of the GCSE coursework she’d sat up all night correcting. (p. 10)

Later Harriet realises that she’s been trying to break into an impenetrable in-crowd, formed over twenty years ago, when these parents were prefects at the same school.  Not, we are meant to note, a disdainful cohort of racist middle-class whites, but, rather with their multi-ethnic names from Africa, Asia and Europe, an embodiment of Cool Britannia before the concept had even had a name.  They have wholly absorbed the status-conscious culture which (we are led to believe) clashed with postwar migration from the Commonwealth.

Harriet, by contrast, has only petty ambitions for her daughter: she wanted Perdita to get good marks at school, they wanted her not to cause trouble, not to punish them for being unable to afford the very best of everything for her. Oh, and they wanted her to smile every now and again. 

However, once Perdita is recovering from her failed suicide and Harriet is telling the story of her life before she came to London, things get very messy.  I am not even sure that I have made sense of the strand about Harriet’s birthplace, which appears to be a mythical place:

Druhástrana (druhástranae) is the name of an alleged nation state of indeterminable geographic location. Very little verifiable information concerning Druhástrana is available, as there have been several prominent cases of stateless people claiming Druhástranian citizenship under a form of poetic licence, and other, yet more unfortunate cases in which claims to Druhástranian citizenship or ancestry have been proven to result from false memories or flawed cognitive information.
…
To date, Druhástrana has been formally recognized by only three nations. (See: Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary.) Slovakia revoked recognition of Druhástrana without explanation on January 1, 2010, and Hungary followed suit on January 1, 2013.

Several prominent thinkers have proposed reclassifying Druhástrana as a purely notional/mythical land since a) nobody seems to actually come from there or know how to get there and b) literal interpretations of the assertion that Druhástrana exists may be a profound mistranslation of Czech humour. (pp. 18-19)

Now it might just be that this apparently invented birthplace is nothing more than a vehicle for the storytelling, and it does offer an opportunity for a dig at Brexit:

The referendum has been the only way to definitively withdraw from the so-called brotherhood of nations; let them see, yes, they’d all see how well they got on without all the contributions Druhástrana has made towards world peace. (p.114)

It also seems to be a critique of landowners, colonialism, the stupidity of the exploited workers and (maybe) a dig at the invisibility of Commonwealth nations in their post-colonial phase.  When the map of the world was coloured pink on the empire where the sun never set, schoolchildren all over the world knew the names and locations of Britain’s possessions, from Kenya to Malaya.  But now? I bet many would be hard pressed to locate Nigeria in the right place in Africa, and indeed it’s a frequent complaint that many people refer to Africa as if it were a nation, and not home to 54 separate countries.

There are acerbic barbs at lotteries, which only teach you that the finer things in life aren’t earned by working round the clock and doing everything you can to uphold the law.  But some elements seem utterly pointless, as when we read that characters are expecting to experience discrimination from a hotel doorman, and then they don’t. A character is 78% happy.  What does that even mean? Is it satirising the way bean counters force data collection about things are fundamentally uncountable?  I don’t know.

Even though I am mindful that there is no shortage of people who dismiss James Joyce in a similar way, I did begin to wonder if this is a case of the of a wilful weaver creating the Emperor’s New Clothes, just to see if she could get away with it.

If you too have also struggled with this book, do share your thoughts about it in comments… and take a moment to enjoy this video of Ron Charles spoofing the work.

Image credits:

• Gingerbread men: By Alcinoe at English Wikibooks – Transferred from en.wikibooks to Commons by QuiteUnusual using CommonsHelper., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9423747
• Hansel and Gretel by Arthur Rackham (1909) Wikipedia): By http://www.mythfolklore.net/3043mythfolklore/reading/grimm/images/rackham_hansel.htm and http://www.surlalunefairytales.com/illustrations/hanselgretel/rackhamhansel.html, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1057110

Available from Fishpond: Gingerbread

Author: Helen Oyeyemi
Title: Gingerbread
Publisher: Picador (Macmillan), 2019
ISBN: 9781447299431
Review copy courtesy of Macmillan