Bernadine Evaristo shoulders weighty themes lightly: Girl, Woman, Other reviewed

It’s a slippery word, ‘other’. Taken in one light, it throws up barriers and insists on divisions. It is fearful and finger-pointing: them, not us. But looked at in another way, it is rangy, open and expansive. It suggests horizons, not walls.

That first meaning has done much heavy lifting in discussions of Bernardine Evaristo’s Booker-winning Girl, Woman, Other. As the first black British woman to be awarded the prize, this was perhaps inevitable. Evaristo cuts an unmistakable dash through the ranks of past winners: they have been, on the whole, more pale and — damningly — a lot more male. The Booker judges hardly steadied the debate with their controversy-courting decision to share the prize between Evaristo’s novel and Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments — against the rules and the wishes of Gaby Wood, the Booker literary director. It was a clumsy move, which encouraged hair-splitting rather than inclusivity.

Most popular

Ian Williams

What is Xi Jinping planning?

But this hullabaloo is a distraction, as Evaristo’s vital, joyous novel is grounded in that second, roomier definition. Told through the voices of 12 — mostly black — women, it daisy chains with warmth, wit and genuine depth of feeling across the span of recent black British history. We begin with Amma, an avant-garde theatre director whose play The Last Amazon of Dahomey is premiering at the National. She has spent decades in the theatrical wilderness, ‘a renegade lobbing hand grenades at the establishment that excluded her’. Now, though, tastes have changed and her work is in demand. When she unexpectedly finds herself washed up inside the establishment, she experiences dislocation, muddled with a fierce, furtive pride.

From there, Evaristo broadens her canvas. The Last Amazon’s first night becomes the pivot around which her other characters orbit — sometimes directly, more often in a pleasingly elliptical way.