Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer's Reviews > To Paradise

Hanya Yanagihara’s previous “Little Life” was shortlisted for the 2015 Booker Prize and (even despite not winning the prize) six years further on, still I think remains one of (if not) the shortlisted book from the last few years most likely to provoke some form of reaction in those who have read it. Selling an astonishing 250,000+ UK copies of a 700+ trigger-ladened US literary novel speaks for itself, and explains the excitement the 2022 publication of this book has provoked.

My own views on “Little Life” were complex and mixed – it is I think telling that the top review on Goodreads with 4000+ likes is titled “5 things I liked … and 5 things I didn’t like” (with a list of points that almost match my own thoughts), it is then followed by a mix of 1* and 5* reviews. My brother Paul in his review (which also identifies the book’s huge number of unarguable flaws alongside all its successes) captured it brilliantly as this is a book which will “divide opinions, even amongst the same person”

The author’s long awaited next novel is in many respects only like “A Little Life” in one respect – that there are parts of it that are excellent and parts that are far more questionable.

The novel is told in three Books – of which the second and third Books are both split into two narratives – although while those narratives in the third book are interleaved and have a very clear cohesion, the second Book itself reads like two distinct halves.

Book 1: "Washington Square" (after the Henry James novella) is in many respects a very competently and controlled but also very conventional Whartonesque fin de siècle story of a member of a privileged elite New York family, living in a large house in the titular square and having to choose between two futures via two potential partners – one an older respectable and rich candidate picked by his Grandfather in an arranged marriage, the other a far more “unsuitable” and penniless candidate his own age – to whom he is attracted but whose very fundamental unreliability is at the heart of their attraction.

The main character is David Bingham – one of three (long ago orphaned) children living with their Grandfather Nathaniel. While David's siblings Eden (married to her wife Eliza) and John (with his husband Peter) are settled with children, he is single, still living with his grandfather and his grandfather’s servant Matthew). His grandfather urges him to marry a widower Charles Griffiths (whose suitability rests more on family wealth than family name – David himself a lonely individual and not an ideal catch due to a series of depressive episodes he suffers) . Charles has his own manservant – Adams. David teaches art at a school endowed by the Bingham foundation and their encounters a salaried music teacher Edward Bishop and the two begin an affair. If he does he will forfeit his inheritance of the Washington Square House – something bequeathed to him at the start of the book – if not he may lose his future happiness and self-regard. The book itself is rather open ended – never revealing the consequences of his final choice.

The setting is 1893 – but an alternative 1893. The observant reader of the review will have realised that all the relationships are same sex – and the book is not set in the United States – but the Free States, a smaller sub-set of States that from what we can tell (the book largely refreshingly free from artificial expository sections or conversations) were not based on Puritan values but instead are formed around liberal ideals of sexual choice, education for both sexes, freedom of religious practice. The Free States seem closely aligned to the wider United States (with the illiberal West and the defeated but still racist Southern Colonies separate entities still) but with their own freedom and wealth – based around a series of founder families who maintain their bonds via largely same-sex arranged marriages.

I must admit I found the society rather troubling – and here I think we already see the ambiguity that for me seems intrinsic to any reading of Yanagihara’s work.

For while the society may indeed seem a liberal Paradise at least in terms of sexual rights (which for many liberals today is The touchstone) – it is based (in increasing order of appalling-ness) on: severe inequality entrenched via marriage; racial exclusion – racism is frowned upon in the Free States and the States act as an escape point for blacks from the Colonies, but racial diversity is very frowned on and the blacks are quickly helped to other States where they will be more suitable; genocide – as Native Americans were simply massacred.

But then of course so is America in all its “Manifest Destiny” – and this I think is exactly what the author explores and asks us to consider. How do we feel about the Destiny. How Manifest really was it. What is America and what could it have been and what could it become. What groups are allowed to be free and who is excluded.

The author has said: “It was the sense of possibility, of how easily America could have been something else, how easily it could become something else, that I wanted to explore in all three of these books. Because there have been certain moments in America’s creation, certain turning points where the country could have gone another way. So, in that sense [the novel is] not quite speculative and it’s not quite fantasy, but I’m interested in general in these sorts of hinge moments, in either personal history or national history, in which a choice is made that sets you barrelling down one course and a different choice could have meant something profoundly different. All three of the parts of this book are marked, I think, or identified by very personal stories against the background of much larger questions about national identity and what a nation must do, what it can do, what it should do and the very real consequences it has for these small individual lives within them.”

Now so far I have described the first book, to summarise (in what effectively becomes a game of Hanya-bingo):

Fin de siècle temporal setting. New York geographical setting. A large house on Washington Square. The family names – Griffiths and Bingham and Bishop (all incidentally names of early missionaries to Hawaii – so that implicitly Hawaiian colonisation is part of the story) – and the relationships forming between them. Main characters called – Charles/Charlie, David, Edward, Peter. Others called – Nathaniel, Eden, Eliza, Matthew. A manservant Adams. Privileged elites in society. An America divided not just along class and race lines but actually divided into different state groupings. The phrase - “America is/was not for everyone”. Societal attitudes to male homosexual relationships. Grandparent choices on behalf of a grandchild. An unresolved ending. A closing reference to a journey into an unknown paradise

The next two books begin at exact 100 year intervals, seemingly starting largely from scratch and not even in the same “alternate” timeline. While ostensibly very different – every element of my bingo card (and I am sure many more besides) recurs in each.

[Actually I was down an Eliza on the second Book]

The author has said; “They are not meant to be the same people across centuries, nor living in the same America …………….. It was this idea of just taking the country
and turning it a half tweak on the dial each time. The people always had different selves, but the names themselves remain; just like the name of America remains for each generation, but America itself is something quite different.”

And I would note that it is not just the names of the characters that recur - their status does to (see my comment 10 below my review).

Book 2: Lipo-Wao-Nahele is as I implied above a book of two distinct halves. The first part (and I have to say for me by far the weakest of the whole novel) is a rather conventional and well told but rather tedious AIDS era tale (AIDS is not mentioned by name but it is hard to see this as much of an alternate timeline) set among the homosexual elite of New York. David (“Kawika” – the Hawaiian equivalent) Bingham is a young Hawaiian-origin paralegal whose lover is a senior partner Charles Griffiths. Much of the action takes place at a party held before the assisted death of Charles’s lifelong friend (and ex-lover) Peter. David has a (for much of the half) unopened letter which he knows says that his long estranged father is dying and he will need to visit.

The second part is perhaps the oddest and introduces the one part of my my bingo card only implicit in the first book – the colonisation of Hawaii. It is effectively an internal monologue addressed to David by his father – also Wika. The older Wika (the father) is living largely physically and mentally incapacitated (it seems through choice – a choice he has decided to reverse by surprising his son when he comes to pay last respect) in a care home. In his monologue he tells his life story – something which his son never really understood. Wika is effectively the deposed Crown Prince of Hawaii (the descendant of the last Queen who abdicated when America annexed the Island) but for all his grandmother’s pride he was unwilling to take on the role expected of him and drifted in life. But then he was taken in hand by a friend - Edward Bishop – who, inspired by Black Power movements in the US in the 1960s espouses a radical form of Hawaiian independence, the two eventually forming an ill-founded commune on some deserted ancient forest land which is part of Wika’s family inheritance (and which gives this section its name) . The encounter between son and father does not happen – so the story is both not resolved - but is also not really tied up between the two sections (it is really not that easy to relate the father to the son).

Interestingly though one the black activists that radicalises Edward does raise exactly the fault lines which I felt were missing from the way in which the Free States are portrayed

“And in the same way, nothing has really changed here. America is a country with sin at its heart. You know what I’m talking about. One group of people sent away from their land; another group of people stolen from their land. We replaced you, and yet we never wanted to replace you— we wanted to be left where we were. None of our ancestors, our great-great-great-grandparents, ever woke up one day and thought: Let’s sail halfway around the world, be part of a land grab, pit ourselves against some other native peoples. No way, no how. That is not how normal people, decent people, think— that is how the devil thinks. But that sin, that mark, never goes away, and although we didn’t cause it, we are all infected by it.

Book 3: Zone Eight was by far the strongest of the novel, it is the part that will make the novel so zeitgeisty but also the part that will I think be hardest for people to read and the part that is the most problematic.

There are two sections – the first is set in a extremely dystopian 2093 – New York is part of a totalitarian State (an unspecified part of America) where pretty well every freedom has been sacrificed to counter the existential threat of periodic and devastatingly deadly pandemics. The main character is Charlie Bingham-Griffith – a quiet and rather unemotive lab-technician in the research labs which effectively (under Chinese supervision) dominate not just the economy but the society. She is in a marriage of convenience with a homosexual – Edward Bishop – an aquatic gardener in the same facilities. Their marriage in a society which is focused on child raring to deal with a population denuded of its children by the regular pandemics is permitted as both are sterile - Charlie due to the side-effects of life-saving anti-virals, David by choice as he was deemed a subversive and took sterility as an alternate to recorrection camps.

As time goes on, and with the increasing threat of a new even more terrible pandemic, Charlie befriends the rather mysterious David – who she meets in the square where she lives (one of the few permitted activities being listening to storytellers – in a rather clever aside (and deliberate author acknowledgement of the frustration readers might feel with the first two parts) she remembers a previous storyteller telling the story of Book One, ending ("to groans of disappointment"), “And next week, I’ll tell you what happened to the man”.

The second strand is an interwoven series of letters written over some 45 years (2043-2088) by Charlie’s grandfather Charles to an English acquaintance (and likely ex-lover) Peter. Charles is involved in the American research to pandemics and Peter in the English response – both rising into government/state circles over time beyond just academia. Early on we read

So I gave him my short speech about infectious diseases and how I spent my days trying to anticipate the newest ones, playing up the statistics that civilians love hearing, because civilians love to panic: How the 1918 flu killed fifty million people, which led to additional, but less disastrous, pandemics in 1957, 1968, 2009, and 2020. How, since the 1970s, we’ve been living in an era of multiple pandemics, with a new one announcing itself at the rate of every five years. How viruses are never truly eliminated, only controlled. How decades of excessive and reckless prescribing of antibiotics had given rise to a new Family of microbes, one more powerful and durable than any in human history. How habitat destruction and the growth of megacities has led to our living in closer proximity to animals than ever before, and therefore to a flourishing of zoonotic diseases. How we’re absolutely due for another catastrophic pandemic, one that this time will have the potential to eliminate up to a quarter of the global population, putting it on par with the Black Death of more than seven hundred years ago, and how everything in the past century, from the outbreak of 2030 through last year’s episode in Botswana, has been a series of tests that we’ve ultimately failed, because true victory would be treating not just each outbreak individually but developing a comprehensive global plan, and because of that, we’re inevitably doomed.

(As an aside there seems to be a very major error in this paragraph with the completely out of place reference to antibiotic resistance – fascinating for bacterial disease, irrelevant for viruses)

Charles marries Nathaniel and they have when they move a very young son David – both from Hawaii but tears their family away to the US for his career – something Nathaniel always resents. Hawaii itself regains independence but is then devasted by pandemic. As time progresses the state takes greater measures to contain pandemics including a series of controversial quarantine camps – which in some cases are little more than places for people to die – and Charles is increasingly involved with the policies and their increasingly illiberal drift. This is to the disgust of the increasingly radicalised and conspiracy theorist turned activist turned later terrorist David (who in the meantime has a daughter Charlie by an activist Eden). Later though – Charles himself starts to realise that David's once absurd accusations are becoming true as liberty is sacrificed to fear and we begin to see how the dystopia of Charlie’s world emerged.

Over the years, I’ve been astonished at and dismayed by and fearful of how acquiescent the public has proven to be: Fear of disease, the human instinct to stay healthy, has eclipsed almost every other desire and value they once treasured, as well as many of the freedoms they had thought inalienable. That fear was yeast to the state, and now the state generates its own fear when they feel the population’s is flagging.

This last section builds, in both sections to something of a climax, one of these around the legality of gay marriage and then Charles's fate as an insurgency starts to look for people to blame; the other around the fate of Charlie and David – with the now inevitable lack of resolution of the latter.

Now this last part of the novel left me troubled. It feels like Charles’s prediction has some grounding in current America – but seems to have the politics almost exactly the wrong way around.

In Hanya’s telling via Charles – the fear of viral pandemic and the resulting shredding of liberties is exploited by a totalitarian right wing state (the clear signifier in this book of a right wing attitude is the opposition to same sex – particularly male – relationships and marriage and this is the very thing Charles fears will happen when he writes these words). And is left leaning radicals like David who oppose this and propose conspiracy theories – few (if any) founded initially but some prescient.

But of course in the real world (particularly the real America) it is the liberal left who feel liberties should be constrained (mask wearing compulsory, businesses shut down, schools and economy put on hold, quarantines and policing of gatherings, vaccine passports or even compulsory vaccines) and those on the right (who are almost always opposed to gay marriage and other liberal ideas) who strongly oppose this and who form the conspiracy theories.

With the net result that large parts of this last part feel like they could actually have been written by (or at least will strengthen the views) of anti-vaxxers (although it should be noted that oddly vaccines are mentioned precisely once) and anti-lockdown protesters. Perhaps though this section is again meant to be about an alternate America and warn against the dangers of how exogenous threats now seem to increase rather then decrease polarisation in American society.

Overall though a fascinating novel – one sure I feel to provoke debate, like and dislike, just like “A Little Life” albeit for entirely different reasons.

I will be very surprised if this does not appear on major Prize lists in 2022.

My thanks to Pan Macmillan for an ARC via NetGalley