When is a novel not a novel? When it is, as here, a collection of loosely related narratives, or a “collage of well-composed individual stories” as one reviewer described it, without much in the way of plot. Is the distinction an important one? I think so, but let’s come back to that question.

Girl, Woman, Other tells the stories of the lives of the novel’s 12 principal characters. Most the large cast of characters are black and mixed race women, and of course their stories focus on this aspect of their lived experience. The book is divided into four chapters each telling the stories of three women who are connected to one another in some way. Although each story is a separate and often compelling narrative in its own right, they slowly interweave to create the overall narrative. The novel’s focal point to which it returns from time to time is the opening night of a ground-breaking new play, The Last Amazon of Dahomey. The implicit point is that all of the women portrayed in the novel are one way or another Amazons themselves, warrior women who have had to fight for everything they have achieved.

While GWO has been widely lauded, and of course won the 2019 Booker prize (jointly with Margaret Atwood’s sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, The Testaments), the author’s choice to not use capitals and full stops to signal the start and end of sentences has upset some readers disproportionately. A good example is this passionate post from the Orangutan Librarian. For me, this wasn’t really an issue. Rules are there to be broken by writers and I found I quickly adjusted to the convention the author used to signal a new sentence, namely a line break. To an extent this made the choice to abandon full stops etc fairly pointless (sorry). I assume the author was aiming for a free-flowing representation of the characters’ internal monologues, something akin to stream of consciousness. Because my mind reconstructed the sentence structure fairly easily, and after while without noticing, this effect was largely lost.

It is hard to write this without sounding spiteful, but my main concern with GWO was not the choices around punctuation, but the quality of the writing. As an experiment I opened my copy of the text at random half a dozen times, and noted the following:

“he sold the farm for a song” (178)

“the two love-birds sat holding hands on the sofa” 269

“over time Shirley became an experienced schoolteacher who remained committed to giving the kids a fighting chance” (sorry forgot to note page number!)

“Mummy went through the roof, literally exploded like a rocket” 205

“it’s way too early for the youngsters to begin their death-defying leaps and twists without helmets or knee-pads” (23)

“apparently Tyrone, Section Manager of Electronics and Appliances, has a thing for her” (213)

(Incidentally, I can’t resist pointing out that the author’s rejection of capitals doesn’t extend as far as names and job titles!)

The weight of cliché here is, for me, problematic. Of course it is difficult to represent people’s internal monologues without using cliché if that’s how you think they would express their thoughts. But do people really think in clichés? In any event most writers would try and find a way around that issue rather than just weighing down the narrative with an accumulation of stale expressions.

The text only really takes off and becomes lyrical and expressive when political views are being discussed. Some reviewers have found this aspect of the novel didactic. I didn’t see it that way – each character represented is shown as having their own prejudices and biases, and there is no single perspective that is endorsed as being definitive, simply that we all carry our own burden of experiences and ideas, which change over time. That’s not to say the novel is entirely neutral, respectful of all views. Right wing readers will struggle with the representation of the progressive portrayal of oppression in all its forms that the women in the novel experience. The discussion of white privilege between the students in the novel is entertaining as well as being informative:

People won’t see you as just another woman any more, but as a white woman who hangs with brownies, and you’ll lose a bit of your privilege, you should still check it, though, have you heard the expression, check your privilege, babe?
Courtney replied that seeing as Yazz is the daughter of a professor and a very well-known theatre director, she’s hardly underprivileged herself, whereas she, Courtney, comes from a really poor community where it’s normal to be working in a factory at sixteen and have your first child as a single mother at seventeen, and that her father’s farm is effectively owned by the bank
Yes but I’m black, Courts, which makes me more oppressed than anyone who isn’t, except Waris who is the most oppressed of all of them (although don’t tell her that)
In five categories, black, Muslim, female, poor, hijab bed
She’s the only one Yazz can’t tell to check her privilege
Courtney replied that Roxane Gay warned against the idea of playing ‘privilege Olympics’ and wrote in Bad Feminist that privilege is relative and contextual, and I agree, Yazz, I mean, where does it all end? Is Obama less privileged than a white hillbilly growing up in a trailer park with a junkie single mother and a jailbird father? Is a severely disabled person more privileged than a Syrian asylum-seeker who’s been tortured? Roxane argues that we have to find a new discourse for discussing inequality

While many characters are well rounded in all their flawed humanity, others are more lightly sketched and less convincing. One example is Roland, Yazz’s father, who at one point describes his partner’s disturbing way of rejecting homophobia:

“Sylvester shouting Take that, Maggie T! at the point of ejaculation was quite off-putting” (407)

Did anyone ever call Mrs Thatcher “Maggie T”? Surely it was either Maggie or Mrs T? This lack of authenticity in a novel grounded in attempts to accurately reflect the experience of black and mixed race women growing up and growing old in the UK was disappointing but probably the exception, although this lack of authenticity is echoed elsewhere by some of the exchanges on race and feminism:

“We should celebrate with that many more women are reconfiguring feminism and that grassroots activism is spreading like wildfire and millions of women are waking up to the possibility of taking ownership of our world as fully-entitled human being how can we argue with that?” (said after two bottles of red wine and 4 lines of coke!) or elsewhere “Her mother was unthinkingly repeating patterns of oppression based on gender”

To return to the question I posed at the start of this post, is the novel taken as a whole greater than its constituent parts? I can certainly see each portrait as a separate sketch being published in serial form in a magazine without any loss of impact. (And to be clear, I mean no disrespect by this. Dickens published his novels in serial form in magazines, and he was a fairly good writer!). Part of the problem is a failure or inability to draw the stories together – the links between them are fragile, and the attempt to introduce a surprise ending falls flat given how clearly it has been telegraphed earlier in the novel (one mixed-race character is adopted as a baby and doesn’t know anything about her birth parents; another has her mixed-race baby removed from her by her parents and placed for adoption – who could guess how this development would be resolved? One review described this approach as:

“too many delicious starters without a truly satisfying main course.“

Which I think is about right.