Russell Banks: The Darling

No white American novelist has agonised over the original sin of racism quite like Russell Banks. It is — in a sense — his white whale.

From The Book of Jamaica (1980), his mandarin yarn of a white professor performing research in the Caribbean, to Cloudsplitter (1998), his epic historical novel about the life of abolitionist John Brown, Banks has shot harpoons at the concept and then followed it down to the dark deep of America's past. Rarely does he emerge with something pretty.

In his latest novel, The Darling, Banks switches literary ancestors from Melville to Conrad, tracing American racism to its little-remembered heart of darkness: Liberia. In 1825, this American colony was considered a bastion of freedom for freed American slaves. The country descended into martial law 150 years later when Samuel K. Doe became the first indigenous president of Liberia during a bloody military coup.

The Darling begins five years before this event, in New Bedford, Massachusetts, the port city near Boston from which many American freed slaves sailed to Liberia. The darling of the title is Hannah Musgrave, a well-educated white American who flees New England for Ghana in the mid-1970s, in part because of her involvement with a radical activist group called the Weather Underground.

After a year in Accra, Hannah winds up in Liberia, where she works in a lab with ill-kept chimpanzees. She is courted by Woodrow Sundiata, an elegant government official who she later marries and with whom she has three children.

Up until this moment, The Darling is a rather conventional novel about a not-uncommon culture clash of a white American in Africa — an activist, essentially, who believed that simply by sacrificing comfort she earned the moniker of a revolutionary.

Hannah essentially retraces the route of blacks returning to Africa without considering the political significance of the act. To her, Africa is an escape.

But as in the thrillers of Graham Greene, The Darling takes an abrupt turn and Hannah begins to understand she was merely standing at the mouth of a river leading toward revolutionary action.

Woodrow's star rises in the Liberian Government and he becomes involved in the fate of Samuel Doe — and then Charles Taylor, who would, in turn, overthrow Doe. Hannah becomes enmeshed in Taylor's fate when, on a trip home in the mid-1980s, an old Weather Underground comrade says that Taylor — then locked up in an American prison on a Liberian extradition warrant — needs help.

Unlike Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, which mirrored Africa's jungles with a prose style so dense and unrelenting it formed a canopy over the story, The Darling is not a book notable for its language.

Hannah narrates in clean, unremarkable prose that only occasionally displays the lyricism of nostalgia — she is narrating from the future, at age 59.

Employing a first-person narrator who is opinionated and certain of her knowledge enables Banks to dump several brief history lessons about American involvement with Liberia into the story.

The fact that The Darling never so much as buckles under the weight of these history lessons is nothing short of remarkable. Banks creates a heroine every bit as complex and flawed as someone out of Jane Austen, plops her down in West Africa, and then explores how she confronts the legacy of US involvement there.

Anyone who has ever been in deeply over their head will feel for her as she tacks toward true revolutionary activity. What must one sacrifice in order for opinions to become beliefs? Is political violence ever excusable?

These are just a few of the questions Banks raises in a novel that would feel like medicine were it not so grimly exciting.

* John Freeman is a writer in New York.

* Bloomsbury, $35