Book: The Gospel According to Cane
Author: Courttia Newland
Publisher: Telegraph Books
Review by Tricia Wombell
Award-winning author Courttia Newland’s seventh novel, The Gospel According to Cane, takes you on a journey that keeps you anxious throughout at the thought of what the end might bring.
Beverley Cotterell’s baby son is stolen from outside a Chinese takeaway while in her husband’s care. The marriage breaks down. From this pit of loss and grief she claws her way back into a life, of sorts, which takes 20 years.
Despite a life filled with such a gaping hole of loss, she manages to find tiny slivers of fulfilment through teaching creative writing, but she is never truly at ease. Then one day a dishevelled young man appears on her doorstep and says he’s her son.
She desperately wants the new arrival, this unsettled young man, to be her flesh and blood. Is he? As she’s never mothered him, surely he can only ever be a stranger. Or is it that a mother will always recognise her own?
This is a story of coping with grief and an exploration of identity. What sustains Beverly are the hearty dishes of a kind neighbour. There is also the support of a distant therapist, an emotionally empty sexual relationship with a policeman who worked on the failed case to find her son, and her creative writing class for a group of socially excluded teenagers.
Newland builds the tension from the off. His writing is confident and controlled. The anxiety is created not only through Beverley’s observations of her conscientious and creative students’ behaviour, but also through her uneasy mind when she dreams of her Bajan ancestry. Barbados is a place that she only knows second hand from her parents, but as with her missing experience of motherhood, she does not feel she truly belongs.
Despite the difficult subject matter, Newland joyfully plays with a range of voices and stories. In just over 260 pages, so much happens. I particularly enjoyed the way that Beverley comments on the use of language between the generations. While this is primarily a story of loss and despair, it is richly built and undeniably tense.
I cannot remember the last time I was so genuinely frightened for a character in a novel. Beverley is a deeply despairing woman who you want to have happiness and peace of mind.
It’s not easy being a dedicated writer and so we are lucky that Courttia has stuck with his craft since the publication of his first acclaimed novel, The Scholar, in 1997. A marvellous storyteller, he continues to create vivid and absorbing work and continues to tell our stories.
Tricia Wombell blogs at Black Book News, www-tricia-blackbooknews.com and is the co-ordinator of London’s longest running Black Reading Group. She is a founder member of Black BookSwap, a combined book exchange and literary salon that takes place twice a year.