by Windy Sinnamon
Jean Rhys was a bad-ass. Jean Rhys was once brought to court for throwing a brick at a neighbour’s dog after it had attacked one of her cats. Jean Rhys also wrote, fearlessly. Her complex female characters laughed (and cried) in the faces of the patriarchal literary elite, robbing those esteemed men of the prescribed labels they were so desperate to hang her fiction on. Her experiments with narrative and voice broke apart the assumptions of modernism. In her novel Good Morning, Midnight we are introduced to Sasha. The messy embodiment of a literary and emotional crossroads; colonial and post-colonial, feminist and anti-feminist, pitiable and loathsome. Sasha is simultaneously all of these things and none of these things. She is the dark beating heart of a book that is ambiguous, conflicting and problematic. A book that is beautifully and painfully human.
Sasha tells us that she is searching through the streets of post-WW1 Paris for the things with which to ‘arrange her little life’. She has been traumatised by life and the machinations of a fiercely patriarchal society. She is the eternal demi-monde. Never fitting in, only ever feeling at home in grotty lavabos that lurk, dark and dank, under shimmering Parisian streets. With a voice that consistently evades conviction and certainty, Sasha takes us through the streets of her Paris, her life, and it is a hostile place. She has no friends, no money and no purpose. In the first few pages of the book we learn that she is intent on drinking herself to death and as the hellscape of her life unfolds before us in a series of blurred and fractured recollections, we simply couldn’t blame her.
In Good Morning, Midnight, men are the clear enemy. Sitting behind imposing desks, leering from street corners, assuming and judging Sasha into shape. She is the perpetual victim. A seemingly innocuous encounter with her boss drives her to complete despair. An unrelenting despair that consistently underpins Rhys’s masterful narrative. Full of contradictions, anaphora and ellipses, the narrative continually invites the reader to finish Sasha’s sentences for her, to assume her life, just like the men that want to break her. This is admittedly dangerous territory for a writer, coercing the reader to take on the role of your protagonist’s oppressor. But Jean Rhys was never about soothing the reader. She wanted to shake them into realisation. She wanted to show them the world, divided as it really is, into hunted and hunter, victim and perpetrator. Or is it?
If you scratch beneath the surface of her flitting and distant voice you glimpse another Sasha. One that not only appears to be complicit in her downfall but at times openly invites it. An uncomfortable read no doubt. A victim who brought this on herself? This is not the narrative we are used to in the twenty-first century. The culmination of this contradiction is seen in the novel’s shocking and excruciating end.
At the time of its publication, 1939, it was simply ignored. Sasha is too complex, the book’s plot and subject too elusive, the ending too unthinkable. It is very easy today to do the same thing to Sasha and her eccentric creator. To push her to the back of the pile, go back to twitter and the safety of our comfortable echo chamber. But to turn our backs on Sasha is to turn our backs on humanity. Life is fucking messy. People do things that don’t make sense. Pain is everywhere and sometimes, just sometimes, victims are to blame. Reading Good Morning, Midnight forced me to look at my own life. At the choices I believed were taken from me, at situations I believed were forced on me. It was uncomfortable, a lot of chocolate was involved but I did it. I examined my little life, claimed the mistakes as my own and… moved on. This book will hit you like a brick upside the head, leave you reeling on the floor and eventually extend a hand to help you back up again.
Wendy Sinnamon is a working-class writer from Portadown, County Armagh. She is currently studying for a BA Honours in Creative Writing and English Literature. She has been awarded bursaries from the Irish Writers Centre and the John Hewitt Summer School. Her work is featured in Abridged online journal. You can follow her on Twitter @iwdeatinsects or on Instagram @sinnamongirl. For review inquiries you can contact her at wendysinnamon@hotmail.co.uk
