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    The Darling
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    The Darling
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    The Darling
    Ebook483 pages8 hours

    The Darling

    By Russell Banks

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    “After many years of believing that I never dream of anything, I dreamed of Africa.”

    Over a decade after leaving her three sons behind in Liberia, Hannah Musgrave realizes she has to leave her farm in the Adirondacks and find out what has happened to them and the chimpanzees for whom she created a sanctuary. The Darling is the story of her return to the wreckage of west Africa and the story of her past, from her middle-class American upbringing to her years in the Weather Underground. It is also one of the most powerful novels of the decade, an unforgettable tale of growth and loss, and an unstinting exploration of some of the most troubling issues of our time: terrorism, race, and the contact between the first world and the third.

    Hannah Musgrave, the narrator of The Darling, tells us she first travelled to Africa in the mid-1970s, to escape prosecution for her radical political activities with the Weathermen. Arriving in Liberia to work in a medical research lab, Hannah – also known by her alias, Dawn Carrington – meets Woodrow Sundiata, an official in the ministry of public health, and they fall immediately in love. Courting with Woodrow, an intelligent, ambitious man, means encountering his other life in his ancestral village of Fuama – a life that could scarcely be more different from Hannah’s affluent childhood as the daughter of a bestselling pediatrician. Hannah and Woodrow start a family, but she feels herself to be somehow estranged from her life in Liberia and curiously detached from her husband and three sons. Still in search of herself as her children grow older, Hannah develops a closer and closer bond with the chimpanzees at the lab, whom she calls “dreamers.”

    During the early 1980s, Liberian society grows more unstable, until an illiterate soldier named Samuel Doe brutally overthrows and assassinates the president. Hannah’s courageous intervention with Doe leads to Woodrow’s release from detention, but at a price: she must return to the US, leaving her family behind. Hannah feels that her dreamers will feel her absence more deeply than her family will.

    In the US Hannah briefly reconnects with her parents after years of estrangement before returning to her friends from her underground years. One of them, Zack Procter, is involved with a plan to spring Charles Taylor – an attractive Liberian politician – from jail, and Hannah involves herself with the plot, genuinely believing that Taylor will bring social democracy to west Africa.

    Hannah gets permission to return to her family in the mid-1980s, and decides that this time things will be different: she will take charge of her home life, ousting Woodrow’s young cousin Jeanette, and she will build a sanctuary for her chimpanzees. But Charles Taylor has also returned, and his slow and bloody rebellion against Doe leads, eventually, to a night of horrific violence in which Woodrow is murdered and Hannah’s teenaged children disappear. Amidst chaos and almost unbelievable bloodshed, Hannah has time only to move her dreamers to Boniface Island before facing the heartrending decision to escape Liberia, leaving her children behind. More than ten years will pass before she can return to discover their fate, and understand her own.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRandom House Publishing Group
    Release dateJul 23, 2010
    ISBN9780307368409
    Author

    Russell Banks

    Russell Banks published ten novels, six short story collections, and four poetry collections. His novels Cloudsplitter and Continental Drift were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. Two of Banks's novels have been adapted for feature-length films, The Sweet Hereafter (winner of the Grand Prix and International Critics Prize at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival) and Affliction (which earned a 'Best Supporting Actor' Oscar for James Coburn). His work has won numerous awards, among them a Guggenheim Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships, O. Henry and Best American Short Story Award, and the Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. One of America's most prestigious fiction writers, Russell Banks was president of the International Parliament of Writers and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He passed away in January 2023.

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    Reviews for The Darling

    3.5/5

    207 ratings16 reviews

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    • 3/5
      Hannah Musgrave, a member of the radical Weather Underground, flees to Africa when she thinks arrest is imminent. She marries a member of the corrupt Liberian government, has three sons and flees again - back to the U.S. when the government collapses. Upon her return to Liberia life is normal until it isn't, her husband is beheaded and her teenage sons join the current revolution. Hannah has spent much of her time in Liberia saving and caring for chimpanzees, but like many ardent animal lovers, hasn't much left over for other people. She returns to the U.S. for good, alone and older, having achieved little of lasting value.
    • 5/5
      rabck from sweet sangria; Set mostly in Liberia, Hannah is a fugitive in the US and emigrates first to Ghana and then lands in Liberia, where she interviews for a job with Woodrow, whom she eventually marries. She likes her position as the white American wife of a black politician, but after her husband is murdered during the civil war and her children become boy soldiers, she is forced to flee. Very good, but the author tried to tidy up the ending too much. The video of her boys and the revelation that the CIA was manipulating her wasn't needed.
    • 1/5
      This author's most spectacular failure to date. The main character is whiny and strange, and the minor African characters with whom she interacts are inscrutably vicious stereotypes of the "uncivilized other."
    • 3/5
      Russell Banks is a fine writer with excellent pacing.
      While this book was not really my cup of tea, the story was fairly interesting.
      However, the book was written in the first person from the perspective of a protagonist I couldn't relate to or empathize with.
    • 4/5
      Really pretty brilliantly put together.
    • 5/5
      "The Darling" by Russell Banks, is a dark novel about the injustices perpetrated on the inhabitants of West Africa, most specifically Liberia, seen through the eyes of a white woman, Hannah Musgrave, or Dawn Carrington, the alias she finds it necessary to give herself. Hannah is a political activist, not a leader, but a worker, eagerly participating in the mundane tasks necessary to keep a revolution from sinking into oblivion. Passing out pamphlets, attending protests, recruiting members are only some of the activities she takes part in. Not on the Top Ten wanted list, she does however, feel that she must stay "underground" to protect herself and the movement she is part of, secret. Eventually, her activism brings her to West Africa, where she meets her future husband, a low-level bureaucrat in the Liberian government. In a few short months, they are married. The novel begins with Hannah returning to West Africa to find her sons, who disappeared many years before. Hannah begins the story of how she ended up on a farm in the Adirondacks, a widow, with missing sons, working hard with several other women on the farm, to keep their way of life going. She has a distinct voice, as always Banks creates a character the reader can believe in, a person with flaws, occasional bravery and fearlessness, always questioning the motivation behind their actions, even when they are successful. His characters are vividly drawn, both physically and psychically. The book is dense with information about the region in which it takes place, the political climate, and people who inhabit the villages and cities of West Africa. Banks never bores me, I can honestly say he is on the top of my Top Ten list of favorite authors. His "Angel on the Roof" first introduced me to Banks. It is a book of short stories that intertwine so that we come to know the inhabitants of the trailer park where the action takes place. His characters are so vividly drawn, not only do they entertain us but we share in their trials and tribulations, we connect with them and recognize ourselves in them. I didn't want "The Angel On the Roof" to end, and while "The Darling" is a more complex read, and requires closer attention, it is still utterly delightful. I intend to read everything Banks has written, and in fact, have the novel "Cloudsplitter" on my TBR list. If "The Darling" sounds in the least bit interesting, don't hesitate to read it, although you could start with any of his books and be happy with it.
    • 1/5
      Disturbing scenarios, disengaged main character, and factual errors (there are no sloths in Africa; they live only in South America).
    • 5/5
      love this my first Russell Banks novel, once I completed the story, Loaned the book to a friend.When Found the novel , read the back cover. Laid book down walked away. Few moments later, picked the book back up. Started story immediately, loved every page , for me, Could believe in the character, of Hannah. As She grows older, what matters, changes. Some of her choices were poor.Were the sex scenes, a reflection of her changing feelings toward her husband. She wil also have an interests in women-could that be why, her time with a man, was wrote as it was. Will not write her of what happens in the story, others have done that- Read this story, decide for your self- Why Russell Banks wrote the sex and letter scenes, the way he did. Story moves quickly and is easy to follow. Your will learn some about liberia, during Charles Taylor watch.
    • 4/5
      Russell Banks is full of surprises. Great to see him moving beyond New England in this one and really stretching himself as a writer. No more third-generation-loser male protagonists (although he captures their lives of not-so-quiet desperation with exquisitely painful detail, they do tend to be depressing). This is one of my favourite Banks' novels.
    • 5/5
      My review is that this book rules! What I learned from this book is that Russell Banks is a fucking awesome writer and that The Darling is an awesome book! The narrator is a woman, a wife and a mother but she just doesn't give a fuck! I truly appreciated Mr. Banks' work revising and adding complexity to a female narrator in this regard!
    • 5/5
      It's a political thriller, a sweeping epic spanning the decades of one woman's life, and a social commentary on Africa, racism and greed. It's all of these things. Dawn Carrington is Hannah Musgrave who is also "Scout." Dawn/Hannah/Scout is a woman with a past as complicated as her many names. Brought up by affluent, almost snobby parents as Hannah she is drawn to the underworld of political terrorism as Dawn. On the run after being indicted for a bombing gone bad, Dawn flees to Liberia and, by marrying a government official, becomes Missus Sundiata, her fourth recreation. Told from future to past and back again Dawn/Hannah takes you on her unapologetic journey through deceit, corruption, power and humanity.Part of the reason why I liked The Darling so well is because it was written by a man. Russell Banks is able to capture the voice of a woman as a wife, mother, and an individual fiercely protective of her independence and individuality. Even if she doesn't know who she really is. The first person voice is reminiscent of Barbara Kingsolver's Taylor Greer or Margaret Atwood's Handmaid.
    • 3/5
      Somehow, I was expecting a bit more from this book. The story focuses on a woman named Hannah Musgrave, aka Dawn Carrington, aka Hannah Sundiata. During her college years, she works for civil rights in the south and for other causes, and then, just before graduating from Harvard Medical School, becomes a radical activist, and works sort of on the sidelines for the Weather Underground. She finds herself on the FBI's most wanted list, and after her friend puts her in a tough spot, she takes off for Ghana. But after a disturbing revelation, Hannah moves onto Liberia and finds herself eventually married to a minister in the current government, and much later, finds herself in the thick of civil war. Hannah's character comes off as being totally unbelievable -- she goes from radical wanted fugitive to living this sort of bourgeois lifestyle that was seemingly everything she was against before leaving the US. I just couldn't buy it. It even seems like Hannah couldn't figure it out either. I really didn't find Hannah a very well-drawn character...more like a shadow of what she could have been according to her own ideology.Banks is a fine author, and the basic story here is good, but some of the situations in which Hannah finds herself, and more importantly, her reactions to them, just don't come off as realistic. Also, since the story begins with Hannah returning to Liberia, I assumed that there'd be more to that particular storyline than just a few pages. I would recommend it, because I think it's a good glimpse into the Liberian political situation and a brief look at what happens to the US aid money that finds itself going abroad. If you're interested in either of those topics, you might enjoy it. Otherwise, it has sort of a falsity that might leave you cold.
    • 3/5
      Banks tried to write and think like a woman, didn't quite get it, but story is fascinating peek at what happened in Liberia under Charles Taylor
    • 4/5
      As in his previous novel about John Brown, Cloudsplitter, Banks combines personal intimacy with political insight in a gripping drama that gets preachy only briefly a couple of times. Immediately in the wake of the 9/11 attacks (barely mentioned but prominent as a backdrop), a woman in her 50s narrates her story from the time she goes underground as a member of a Weatherman cell until she winds up in Liberia, marries a minor government official, has 3 sons, is exiled to the U.S. for a few years, then returns to Liberia again until she is forced out by Charles Taylor's rise to power, in which she is complicit. While in Liberia, she cares for chimpanzees, which provides many occasions for her reflections on her engagement with her family, her world, & her past. Set largely in Liberia, it says a lot indirectly about American life & politics in the past 40 years.
    • 3/5
      Banks veers away from his usual topic of working class New England men and writes tells the story of a fictionalized bit player in a Weather Underground like organization who accepts, and then self imposes, exile in Liberia and falls in love with and marries a Liberian politician/rebel. The strength in this book lies in the development of the main character as a fearful rebel from a wealthy family and private school who clings to and defines herself by her youthful rebellion, even though it was by Weatherman standards minor, and in the present day, irrelevant. Her attempts to reject her wealthy northeast past and fit into Liberian society are a predictable failure. Somehow the sense of difference she derives from her radicalism are more important to her than anything else.The plot, however, tends to touch on the unbelievable and fails to draw you in.
    • 3/5
      This is the first novel I have read by Banks, so others may be better. My issue is that I just did not believe the author understood the character he created. How can an principled women with ideals so strong she leaves home and sacrifices her whole identity, morph herslf so easily and conveniently as Hannah does in this novel? I just didn’t buy it and felt somewhere the story went wrong. I loved reading about the complexities of Africa, but I truly hated this character for being written in such an un-trusworthy voice. I couldn’t ever get over how she takes the job working in an animal experimentation lab and then turns into someone trying to save the same animals. How could she somewhat randomly meet and marry a government official (Woodrow) after being so independent, so anti-government, and so clearly unmotivated by feelings or intellect? As, I wrote before…I just was never convinced by the author and I didn’t “get it”.