The Temple of My Familiar

So, it's been an age since I've written a blog post. I have still been chipping away at the 1,001 books but this is marking a new and concerted effort to get back into the habit of writing. The book that I decided to do this with is The Temple of My Familiar by Alice Walker. I feel, in retrospect, this was a poor choice.

I found the book so hard to get into. It's a mish-mash of multiple characters and their stories, all of which are linked in the loosest of ways, rather than any conventional narrative.  There were times upon finishing one story that I had no desire to keep reading and move on to another character. The stories are too up and down, too loosely linked to make the thing unputdownable or to make me want to go back to it when I wasn't reading it. It's a shame, really, because the bits that are good really are very good.  I am going to do my level best to concentrate on those bits.

Let's start with Fanny.  I like Fanny. She is free spirited and fun and the best character by a country mile.  To be honest, the whole book would have been better if it was just about her.  Fanny, we find out 100 or so pages into the book is the granddaughter of The Color Purple's Celie.  Raised by Celie and Shug from that book she is fantastically outspoken and comfortable defying convention.  She divorces her husband, Suwelo- not because she doesn't love him but because she doesn't want to be a Married Woman any more.  She leaves her academic career teaching Women's Studies because she is sick of explaining her femininity to men and her blackness to white people.  All I can say is that she is one of the few characters who ends up with a real narrative- her story is by far the most interesting.  Fanny feels like a breath of fresh air in the book, I can think of no other way to describe it.

Well, I'm sort of out of the bits of The Temple of My Familiar that I enjoyed and I don't think that I expressed exactly what I enjoyed particularly well.  On to the bits I didn't like. I can probably write more eloquently about them anyway.

One of the characters, Lissie, has had thousands of past lives.  These come out in photographs- she is never the same person twice on film.  Lissie's story is essentially just that of the lives she has led and while some of them are good and interesting none are more so than the life she is currently living.  Her past lives seem like a distraction from who she is rather than a part of it.  She is the trope of 'wise old woman' and she plays it easily enough that Walker's reliance on the supernatural feels like a cheap and unnecessary trick that I am not convinced works. Yes, part of Lissie's character is how her husband Hal and multiple men over the years have accepted and been fascinated with her past but these moments just made me wonder why Lissie on her own wasn't enough.  I would have preferred Lissie with one life: not trimmed down but distilled- with superfluous stories about the time she was a lion.

There were a few parts in the book when it seemed like the characters were only acting to shock.  Lissie has past lives, Arveyda has an affair with his wife's mother, said wife ends up sleeping with Suwelo.  There are great moments in the book but they are few and far between. This is a sort of sequel to a book that I have a great affection for- one that I studied for my A-Levels.  I care about Celie and Shug too much to really enjoy a book that doesn't use their potential and instead relegates them to the sidelines as dotty old ladies.

Next time it's JG Farrell's The Siege of Krishnapur... hopefully with less of a hiatus.