The first Not the Booker prize shortlistee for consideration this year piles on the agony for the reader with impressive force
Flies. War. Pollution. Sewage. Divorce. Adultery. Alcoholics. Mercenaries. Puppy torture. Haemorrhage. Stillbirths. Dead mothers. Cancer. Assault. Rape. Murder. Switzerland. The miseries come fast, and thick, in Melanie Finn’s Shame. It’s relentless, hard to take and all the better for it.
At first it isn’t clear what has driven Pilgrim Jones (that’s right, Pilgrim: we’re told her parents were hippies) to Tanzania. We know there’s something wrong – more wrong than just a failed marriage and unfaithful husband, but Melanie Finn does a fine job of holding off the details until we have spent a little time with her shattered narrator, watching her as she tries to come to terms with her new reality and new surroundings. She has left an organised safari to stay first of all in Magulu, a small town near the Kenyan border and far from anywhere else, which is hot, messy and miserable. She is told she should not stay “because you don’t understand”, cannot come to terms with children who grope her and try to rob her. Who are “without shame” and, according to a local policeman, “like animals”. She moves on – but remains all too aware that she does not fit in. But as we learn from a gradually interwoven past tense narrative, she has no home anymore either. She has caused a dreadful accident and is now trying to flee the consequences … But of course, those consequences start to catch her up.
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