Mysterious reading: "Song of Solomon" by Toni Morrison

I had been meaning to read something by Toni Morrison for a while now. I was most recently prompted do so by the lavish praise heaped on her in his latest book by Mohsin Hamid, who studied on her creative writing course. So when looking for some audiobooks to accompany me home and alighting on an internet recommendation of her own reading of Song of Solomon, I downloaded the book immediately and looked forward to the second part of the journey (the first being pre-booked by Alan Johnson), when I would listen to it. For the sake of disclosure, I should reveal I had been looking for a shorter book, to fit into a Colmar-Brussels drive, and that Song of Solomon qualified, clocking in at only three hours, arguably rather too little, indeed. This means it was an abridged version, something I generally prefer to avoid, but I reckoned that if Toni Morrison herself were reading it, then it would at least do the book justice.

First things first, Morrison writes beautifully, evocatively, every word doing its work, having its value. This much is obvious from just listening to the sentences go by. Her writing is also allusive, somewhat oblique, coming in on what it means from an angle, as it were. Song of Solomon is a story of a family, and in particular one of its members, Macon "Milkman" Dead III (yes, there are reasons) to trace his roots and work out who he really is. It starts in a mid-sized Midwestern town, in the orbit of Chicago, and takes us, in an inversion of the classic African-American journey, from North to South (Virginia), where Milkman encounters the past of his family and the truth about who he is - not a simple thing.

This may however be my first "failed" audiobook. The dense, sideways allusiveness of Morrison's prose, even when she is reading it herself, may not lend itself to the format. The natural mode of the audiobook, it seems to me now, is the relatively linear narrative - the story which progresses with some degree of limpidity. This is not to say it can't deal with complexity (think Life After Life or Mothering Sunday, two recent audiobook gems which are highly literary and I think actively benefit from the format), but that Morrison's style, dense and oblique, may fare better when one has the leisure of taking the time needed on the page. It is also possible that the abridgement caused some damage (strange interstices from a different male voice perhaps filled in some gaps?), though my feeling is that it runs deeper than that. In any case, to cut a long story short, I found it hard to follow precisely what was going on at any given point, not always sure who was in action or how exactly the situation in which the characters found themselves arose. I wonder whether listening to this as a spoken narrative, while simultaneously accommodating the necessities of driving a car, was simply to place too many demands on the format, ultimately not allowing me sufficiently to appreciate the wonders wrought by Morrison here. 

Toni Morrison, allusive

For wonders they are, and I need to be clear that, in spite of the vagueness I felt about narrative, I enjoyed listening to Toni Morrison. Her writing is, as I said, beautiful, even on a sentence-by-sentence, paragraph-by-paragraph basis, and though I feel I maybe missed out on some of this book, I got much else.  For me Song of Solomon was a succession of impressions, a series of moments, a wealth of characters which had their own power and presence. 

I will be back for more Morrison for sure, but next time it will be a book.

Meanwhile, if you want a proper review, here's a contemporary one from the New York Times.