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The second novel is of crucial importance, publishers are often heard to warn writers still flushed with the success of their debut. Polygamy is the third novel from Cork writer Gaye Shortland, but it takes on a similar importance in that it is her first step away from the justly acclaimed madcap comedy of her first two books, Mind That 'Tis My Brother and Turtles All The Way Down. And what a giant step it is; one cannot help but admire the sheer courage of an author who can turn her back on a successful formula and strike out so decisively for completely new territory. Polygamy also represents new territory in a more literal sense, as Shortland transfers her attention from the previous novels' carnival of Corkonian eccentrics to the Tuareg nomads of northern Nigeria. Despite - or perhaps because of - this geographical distance, Polygamy sees Shortland's writing at its most personal, ruthless and rapturous to date. For readers familiar with the exuberant burlesque of her earlier novels, the sense of raw immediacy which leaps out from the opening paragraphs is shocking: "So here I am at last, facing a blank screen, my breath coming short. The screen is the blank surface of a pool. I am afraid of the plunge". Nonetheless, the ensuing narrative takes this plunge with a devastating honesty and a lyric beauty.
Drawing on its author's own experience of Tuareg culture, Polygamy immerses us in the world of these semi-settled vestiges of a proud nomadic people, reduced to the status of despised migrant labourers, or "Buzu", by the droughts that destroyed their herds and centuries-old lifestyle. Our view of this subtle and complex people is filtered through Katherine Rutherford, an Irish teacher whose passionate love-affair with Khassim, a Tuareg, and his people, dramatises culture clashes in terms of a vividly-evoked sexual relationship. It is facile to draw parallels between the plot and Shortland's own marriage to a Tuareg man; what pervades every sentence is her sheer insight into this society. Shortland doesn't patronise her readers with laboured explanations, or hit them with indigestible chunks of information. Her intimate knowledge - of language, custom, gesture - is woven into the very fabric of the novel, in Proustian descriptions of the graceful movements of the tea-ceremony, the smears of blue dye left on the skin by the Tuareg |
veil, or, more disturbingly, snatches of sexual play between adults and children, the suffering of women under polygamy. All this we see through the eyes of an outsider desperately struggling to comprehend, but who can never pretend to impartiality because she too is implicated. Polygamy is an engrossing anatomy of a society, a tour de force of supple prose and an entrancing trans-cultural love story. This novel is a convincing argument that Gaye Shortland is ripening into one of our best writers of sexual rapture and regret. In itself a thoroughly satisfying novel Polygamy is also exciting in the development it shows on its predecessors and in what it presages for the future. Sinéad Mooney
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