A Matter of Complexity

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Last night at the Sydney Writers' Festival opening night ceremony, the Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie spoke about the importance of putting forth multiple stories into the world. She told us about growing up in Nigeria and reading children's books from Britain and the United States. In these books, she said, all the children were blonde and blue-eyed, the pigs were pink, there was snow on the ground, and the parents liked to drink ginger beer. Adichie said she began writing when she was seven, and her earliest stories were about blonde, blue-eyed children who lived in a place where it snowed, the pigs were pink, and the parents drank ginger beer. Adichie's point was that she had been given a single story of childhood that had warped her earliest perceptions of what subjects were suitable for literature. This also shows, she said, the dangers of limiting the number of stories to one.

Recently I've been thinking about this idea - the limits and dangers of the single story. Since THE 19TH WIFE came out I have received hundreds of emails from readers and spoken to just as many at signings and other public events. Every once in a while a reader will tell me that he or she preferred the historical part of my novel, the story about Ann Eliza Young, Brigham Young's nineteenth wife, over the contemporary narrative, the one set in present-day Utah about a young man named Jordan Scott. But just as soon as someone tells me this, I hear from someone else who will tell me how much he or she loved the novel's contemporary narrative, but the historical story was for some reason less interesting. Sometimes the person who tells me this adds politely, I hope you don't mind me saying that? In fact I expected it. Any time you put two (or more) stories together, inevitably some readers will prefer one over the other. It's human nature to choose a favourite. As I wrote the novel I understood some readers would respond this way, yet at the same time I believed - and still do - that the two stories put together were more powerful than either on its own.

Of course many of my favourite books are single stories. Some of the greatest works of literature are just that, The Stranger by Albert Camus being a good example. But Adichie's point is worth considering seriously as we read and as we write in this age of Google and an infinity of web pages. Multiple stories can add complexity, and complexity is the path to understanding. (Of course in the wrong hands it can lead to nothing more than confusion). It seems that this is one of literature's significant movements in the first decade of the 21st century. Some of my favourite novels of the past nine years play with this to full effect: Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin, Ian McEwan's ATONEMENT, Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, and Beautiful Children by Charles Bock, to name just a few. Certainly for every trend, there is a counter-trend. And trends by definition are trendy, or, in other words, fleeting. Even so, this one strikes me as one of the ways novels are making themselves relevant in our interlinked, Internet age.