assembly by Natasha Brown
Assembling the evidence
6 June 2021
Assembly is a very short novel, or a novella, that delivers a real punch. Its length, some 100 pages, allows it to be read in one sitting and I for one am already planning to read it again. It made me think, that is for sure. And the thinking started with the title.
This is a narrative that does not appear to be addressed to anybody in particular but the narrator herself. A reckoning with herself. The storyline is absurdly typical and topical in its conception: a protagonist who has gone from rags to riches so to speak... but with a particular caveat: she is a Black British Woman, and the landscape is that of Britain now. The narrator provides a succinct, dry, assemblage of data (education, expectations, a City career, chauvinism, class, politics, privilege, race, love, post-empire...) that is questioned to the core by an unexpected fact personal to the nameless narrator. This event actualises her predicament in a radical manner (the way it is introduced and how it functions in the narrative makes it a truly great idea, properly new, I felt, even if, again, it is on the surface yet another stereotype). The writing is serious, allusive, with a hint of irony or perhaps it is just the tone borne by the exhaustion alluded to again and again by the narrator.
I thoroughly enjoyed the reading game proposed by Natasha Brown. The reader has to work hard to get into this material gathered in front of us as if it were a bunch of clues in a mystery, or the evidence for a trial. There is a mystery and a trial - an individual's plight, society's amnesia. No solutions. It is hard.
With many thanks to Penguin via NetGalley for allowing me to read this timely, great, sad novel, which is asking to be discussed aloud.