While Frank has been away at war, his sister Cee has made a disastrous and short-lived marriage, then gets a job working for a doctor, who conducts medical experiments on her. Custom is as real as law and can be just as dangerous.”
As a pastor’s wife warns Frank as he begins his journey home to ruralGeorgia: “Maybe you think up North is way different from down South. And this world has more in common with the past than the future which is only around the corner. It’s the last period in which Morrison can set a historical novel before the huge legal and social shifts of the sixties. Furthermore, away from the glossy surfaces of the world of advertising, segregation was in full force, and the Civil Rights movement was still a decade away from action. The Korean War, overshadowed now byVietnam, was a first attempt by the States to prevent the spread of Communism across the globe. It was also of course the time when the Cold War was raging. It’s a million miles away from recent popular recreations of the period – like the TV show Mad Men, which reinvents the early fifties as an era of glamour, fabulous fashion and free flowing liquor. They are brutalised by segregation and poverty. Frank, his sister, and their friends and relations in this story have not escaped the legacy of slavery. Just as the dead baby reappears in human form in Beloved, for example, the blue suited gentleman in Home appears real, but we understand that he is Frank’s hallucination – Frank is suffering from what we would now be recognised as post traumatic stress syndrome. Readers of her earlier works will recognise in Home the rhythms and patterns of her language, and her wonderfully recognisable voice. Home is the Nobel Prize winning writer’s tenth novel, and follows a stream of extraordinary and accomplished work over the last forty years, including Beloved, her powerful tale of slavery, which features the ghostly presence of a murdered baby.
Visualising a blank sheet of paper drove his mind to the letter he had gotten – the one that had closed his throat: “Come fast. “Everything reminded him of something loaded with pain. As he lies on his hospital bed, faking sleep, Frank tries unsuccessfully to focus on any “single neutral object” to keep him calm. Home, her latest novel, opens with Frank, a Korean War veteran, contemplating escape from a state mental hospital to find his sister, Cee, who is seriously ill. A sweet bay tree, and a gentleman in a pale blue zoot suit: Toni Morrison creates wonderfully concrete symbols that she skilfully weaves into the pattern of her stories.
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