JAMES by Pervical Everett — Review by Stella

If you’re like me, and have been late to get to this award-winning novel, bring it to the top of your pile immediately. In James, Percival Everett does that rare thing — he compels you to read a story in spite of its horrific content. This is a brilliant novel about power and the ability to write yourself into being. Set in America just prior to the Civil War it follows Jim and Huck’s adventure as runaways. Unlike in Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, our narrator is the slave Jim. Huck is there and well played, and the relationship between man and boy is strongly developed to the point where Jim will have to choose who to save — the boy Huck or his fellow traveller? But before we get here, there is a great deal of travel and, dare I say it, adventure. For Everett takes the adventure trope and wrings out of it all that is good but presents it with a sting in its tail and the darkest humour. Humour often at the expense of the masters, foolish townsfolk, the wealthy and the opportunistic. Here is a story of expectations, of the powerful and the disenfranchised (at its most extreme); of revelation and revenge, and of love. At the centre of this is the man, James, striving to be free. Free in body and mind. His internal conversations with philosophers such as Locke and Voltaire pepper the pages, his joy at acquiring a small pencil and stealing a notebook palpable, his ability to read and write are actions which propel him forward towards a different possible ending. One which excludes the master. Yet, James is trapped. Trapped by circumstance — he needs to free his wife and daughter and there is no easy road to this; he’s a wanted man who will not be given a fair trail for the sin of escaping but instead has a noose awaiting him; trapped by his appearance in a society that judges him for how he looks and his worth as a chattel; and trapped by the violence which breathes down through every pore of his story and the story of slavery. In James there is hope and humour, but the horror tells us all that history cannot be swept away by guilt or forgiveness, by blindness or ignorance. There is no absolution. We must look at the past straight on to understand its impact on our lives now. Percival Everett gives us the gift of James to help us see.