As an art student, I was generally drawn to more abstract work, and in grad school critiques, my fellow students often labeled me a formalist – meaning I was far more concerned not with the content of my (or anyone else’s) work, but rather the form that work took: its dimensions, its medium, its materials, the way the paint was applied to the canvas, the color palette, the shapes, the quality of a line, or the tension where one mass of color meets another. Mark Rothko was my favorite painter.

Another of my favorites was a guy called Ad Reinhardt. In the 1950s and 60s, he engaged himself in great big, minimal canvases, consisting largely of stark geometric shapes of color. Sometimes it was a single color – often just black – and the rectangular forms on the canvas were only discernible by their edges, where maybe the brushstrokes (as invisible as they were) changed direction. (Browse here to see some of his work: http://www.artcyclopedia.com/artists/reinhardt_ad.html) The pleasure, for me at least, derives not from the "picture" - there's really no picture to speak of - but rather in the slow finding of where two fields of equally rich, equally saturated blackness meet and conflict with each other.

Like an Ad Reinhardt painting, the real drama in Tanzanian-British writer Abdulrazak Gurnah’s latest novel, Desertion isn’t in its story, but in its form and construction. Narrated by a Tanzanian academic called Rashid, who left his homeland for a prestigious British education and never really returned (though we really don’t even meet him until late in the book), Desertion is divided up into a simple, minimal geometry. Its eight chapters are divided up into three parts. They are also bisected by what Rashid calls “An Interruption” – the four chapters preceding detailing the circumstances surrounding a forbidden love affair in early 20th Century in British colonial East Africa, the four latter describing a love affair involving Rashid’s more homebound older brother Amin, taking place at the moment when Great Britain (and by extension, all of Europe) was abandoning the nations of Africa to their shaky independences. Rashid punctuates the book with a brief present-day “Continuation.”

Each of the eight chapters is titled with a character’s (or a pair of characters’) name(s), and none of them really tell a story so much as offer a picture of the character or relationship within the context of the world (and vice versa). The chapters are uniformly thick and rich, saturated with all sorts of physical, emotional, and historical detail – at times, so dense with it that it becomes almost hypnotic, and begs to be re-read. Nothing much happens in the chapters themselves. Instead, what keeps the reader going (or doesn’t) is the sense of tension at the edges of each of these character studies; the way the colors in one chapter vibrate against those of another. And ultimately in the way two doomed love affairs speak to each other across generations; and finally inform Rashid’s own relationships – to women, to his family, and to his heritage.

It’s not a fast read. In fact, even at a compact 260 pages, the book has the quality of a family epic, spanning nearly a century of extraordinary change. But part of what I love about it is its bracing slowness; the richness of its prose which often reminded me of Joseph Conrad (an author who admittedly bored me to tears the first time I read him), and finally the wholeness of its form; the way it invites readers to meditate on the way its stories, its characters, and its themes of love and imperialism, and abandonment and loss resonate against each other. Gurnah doesn’t pose big questions, and he certainly doesn’t issue any big answers or pass any grand judgments. Like the painter Reinhardt, Gurnah doesn’t even really give us a single focal point or a climax, but rather creates big fields of characters and ideas and history, and hard, tense, geometrical boundaries between those fields, and sets the reader loose on the long, slow finding of the story. It’s certainly not for everyone, but Desertion is likely to captivate those who enjoy the simple act of reading as much as (or more than) they enjoy whatever it is they happen to be reading.

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OF FURTHER INTEREST:

Alberto Manguel - Stevenson Under The Palm Trees (2004)

Recommended: Yes