The White Woman on the Green Bicycle - Monique Roffey

[bookgazing]

Monique Roffey’s ‘The White Woman on the Green Bicycle’ is a portrait of how claustrophobic marriage could be for women in the 1960s. George Harwood and his wife Sabine are first introduced as an ageing, unhappy couple living in a large house in Trinidad. George interviews local celebrities for a newspaper, while Sabine sits home all day drinking and talking to Jennifer their maid. Both of them are painted as ridiculous, irrational, barely functioning human beings who favour one of their children over the other and seem incapable of listening to each other.

The book then flashes back to their arrival in Trinidad in 1960. They come because George’s job has offered him a three year contract and he is sure Trinidad will suit him better. Sabine is determined to love Trinidad, but finds that she can’t; the heat drains her, people find her riding around on a green bicycle funny and she finds it impossible to understand the country. Meanwhile, the island seduces her husband. Aware that George is having affairs and that he loves the island more than her Sabine attempts to get him to leave, but he ignores her wishes and Sabine despairs. As we know from the earlier section they never leave Sabine says ‘something had eternally shifted between me and George.’.

The novel is also a book that wants to educate the reader on the political history of Trinidad and Tobago. It manages this with great subtlety, by making Eric Williams, the leader of the PNM political party almost an admirer of Sabine’s, while his career becomes an obsession for her. Eric William’s brief involvement in Sabine’s life is used to connect the Harwoods to the big events in Trinidad’s history in much the same way that Barbara Kingsolver connects her character Harrison Sheppard to important figures in Mexican history, but Roffey achieves her purpose with much less obvious artifice on the whole. Scenes that instruct readers, like Sabine’s encounters with Williams lecturing in Woodford Square, are awash with passion and fear propelling the reader through the facts so that they feel they are living history rather than learning about it.

The writing is wonderful and assured. Her descriptive passages are just beautiful and atmospheric, reflecting the strong emotions of her characters:

‘The sky that day was unusual. A vast expanse of white puckered cloud which had spread low, very low, over the Gulf of Paria. Here and there, a vein of greyish-blue cracked through, but that was all. The white blanket reflected the sea’s brutal glare back down on itself so that you felt trapped under it.’

Roffey uses the interesting conceit of making parts of the landscape, like the hills behind Sabine and George’s house personalities which speak to the characters. The hills, which Sabine sees as a green woman lying on her side, become her confidant and her rival:

‘It was then that I had my first conversation with the hills.
Feel better now, I spoke in a whisper.
Yes.
Feel relaxed?
Yes.
Well I don’t. I’m on edge.
Relax, she soothed.
You’re beautiful, you know that.
So are you.
I hate you. My husband loves you.
They all love me.’

The pace of the writing is furious, especially in the second half of the book, as readers are pummelled with the dark emotion of failed lives. By the end of the novel a heady mix of violent emotion, longing and beauty has accumulated that will make readers as drunk on Trinidad as George is on rum.

So, why didn’t I enjoy reading ‘The White Woman on the Green Bicycle’? Well there’s one main reason which isn’t to do with the book as an individual book, so I feel a little shady bringing it up. That text above this paragraph is about the book, this stuff here is all about my feelings based on what I’ve previously read and what I see getting published. See ‘The White Woman on the Green Bicycle’ feeds into a publishing trend that I’m kind of sick of and while with my objective hat on (see above) I can appreciate the merits of the novel as an individual piece of literature, with my subjective hat on it becomes the kind of book that I go out of my way to avoid.

I think my feelings about this book are similar to the ones Coleen expressed last week. A kind of story fatigue. A feeling that I’d heard the main thrust of this story before, leading to wonderings about whether we need this story, told in a similar way again. Here is the main underlying plot of Roffey’s novel, the one I feel that I’ve heard all too often before: white woman travels to a foreign country because of husband - hates the heat and finds that the locals do not like her for some indefinable reason - husband turns out to be a jerk – woman explains the great historical changes she sees unfolding before her eyes, changes that are almost certainly linked to racial struggle.

This story is a perfectly valid story to tell. White people experienced the political change and upheaval in Trinidad, in South Africa, in whichever country you choose to focus on. Their story is also important, as is the story of white women trapped in unfulfilling marriages forced to live in countries where they never felt at home. But I can’t help but feel that white experience of political events, that have a significant effect on black people, has been given plenty of space in the publishing world, perhaps too much space. I’m afraid that my reading experience with ‘The Woman on the Green Bicycle’ suffers because the novel is part of a publishing world that often does not embrace diversity and is obsessed with pushing books that follow trends until we all beat our heads against walls. If ‘The Woman on the Green Bicycle’ existed in a world where its perspective was part of a diverse range of perspectives I would have been more open to what it had to tell me.

Let me try to explain better by comparing this aspect of the book to other Orange long listed books that deal with racial tension, ‘The Help’ and ‘Black Water Rising’. The fantastic thing about those books is that they give the black characters, who were the people most deeply affected by the racial issues of the day, a voice. ‘Black Water Rising’ is narrated by Jay, an older black man who was once a young man involved in the Civil Rights struggle. ‘The Help’ may include a white main character with her own separate first person narrative, but it also allows some of the maids their own first person narratives. Aibileen, a black maid, writes her own portion of the book created in the novel. She also helps to create the book, that becomes the black women’s voice.

In ‘The White Woman on the Green Bicycle’ Sabine’s white first person narrative filters the black characters narrative and the story is squarely focused on how she feels about the injustices they experience, how afraid she feels about the rise of black power, how the rise of black power affects the white settlers of Trinidad. Now there’s no law saying that you can’t make white characters the focus of a storyline about racial tension, every author makes their own choice and like I said it’s a story that’s there to tell. There were some pretty unpleasant things that went on in the name of racial equality and no one deserves to be pelted with stones, or have their dogs poisoned because they turned up to live somewhere they weren’t wanted. It’s important to highlight that, but it’s not the only story and as much as I think Roffey tries to show the other side her efforts are drowned out by making the only direct access to the story through Sabine’s first person narrative.

By focusing on Sabine, Roffey also makes black anger at the white population seem...not unjustified (as Sabine clearly recognises they have real grievances) but it makes black anger all about how it affects white people. I know that I’m not expected to totally sympathise with Sabine, but we are meant to find her more sympathetic than George at least. She’s quite unpleasant, but she’s given a first person narrative in the second half of the book, which gives her a chance to justify how she turns out and she’s shown to at least attempt to understand the problems the black population faces. So, when Sabine finds herself sneered at, frightened, guilty, the focus isn’t on why the black population feels so badly towards Sabine and other white people, it’s on how terrifying the situation must be for Sabine. Again it’s the author’s choice to tell this story and she intends to focus on Sabine’s emotions as a character not as a symbol of all white people. If the stories available from the publishing market were more diverse this choice wouldn’t bother me at all. Since they aren’t I end up feeling not just that I’ve heard this story before but that this story contributes to an overwhelming, stifling trend which presents black struggle through a white focus. And this is what I mean by it being the kind of story publishers love to put out there, stories about big episodes in the history of black political struggle (hurray look at us doing our part of highlight the racism of history) that really focus on how these movements affected white, rich or middle class people by making them feel guilty, or afraid, or angry.

It’s not Roffey’s fault that I’ve heard this kind of story so many times before. Nor is it her fault that it seems to be the kind of story that publishers love to publish in bulk, disregarding all the other ways the story of claustrophobic racial tension and political change could be (and probably has been) told. Everyone is capable of bringing something new to an old story and Roffey has stepped up to deliver that something new in her setting, her writing and her use of inanimate landscape as active persona. And therefore it is absolutely unfair of me to say that I didn’t like Monique Roffey’s ‘The White Woman on the Green Bicycle’. Both the dialogue and the descriptive passages in Roffey’s novel are extremely well written. The novel enables the reader to easily navigate an important period of political history. It betrays a deep knowledge of human cruelty and unhappiness. I can recognise all its technical success, recognise that it wrapped twisted vines around my emotions and gained control, but still I didn’t like it and I feel kind of bad about that.

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