In her keynote lecture for a conference on ‘The Muse and the Market’ in 2015 Aminatta Forna mounted a powerful advocacy for the political novel, challenging the assumption that politics or ‘subject’ undermines literary aesthetic. ‘A political novel can fail as a work of art as much as any other novel,’ she argued, ‘but the fact that it is political does not sentence it to failure.’
Her own approach to fiction is something like Paul Klee’s approach to his art: where Klee talked of taking a line for a walk, she says: ‘When I write a novel it is like taking a thought for a walk.’ In Happiness, Forna’s fourth novel, the thought up for consideration is that in the West many people’s lives are so sheltered they have become terrified of suffering, pathologising even ordinary loss or grief as trauma. Perhaps this desire for safety, she speculates, has also led to a fear of incomers — a fear expressed in blindness to the many migrants at work across the city, or in anxiety when confronted with wild creatures in urban territory, with the sudden ‘opalescent eye shine of an animal’ in the road.
These fears are scrutinised, and countered, in Happiness by Attila, a debonair Ghanaian psychiatrist visiting London for a conference on PTSD, and Jean, an American wildlife biologist in the capital to study urban foxes.
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