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The Strength of Bone

by Lucie Wilk

In a hospital in Blantyre, Malawi, Henry Bryce, a Canadian doctor on the run from a family tragedy, discovers the limitations of his brand of Western pragmatism. At the same time, Iris, a local nurse who has left the comfort of her home village to work in the city, is forced to examine what being single and childless means in a country where traditional values abut a society in transition. If you suppose that what follows is a love story across racial and political lines, you’re underestimating the inventiveness and grace of Lucie Wilk’s meditative debut. Wilk eschews traditional tropes, especially the romantic, and instead works with what is unspoken, hinted at, and left to the imagination.

This is not to say the novel isn’t deeply rooted in an historical moment or personal experience. It begins in 1995, the same year Wilk herself travelled to Malawi to practice medicine. The biographical connection explains the author’s intimate knowledge of the country’s topography and customs, but also helps Wilk avoid the trap of using broad strokes of famine and disease to describe the continent. (Some cultural critics refer to this narrative tendency as the “performing Africa” syndrome.) There’s sensitivity and restraint in the way Wilk presents the struggles with AIDS, poverty, and political violence.

The Strength of Bone is more preoccupied with the inner workings of its characters than their physical surroundings. The psychological and the physical intersect when Henry gets lost during an off-site visit. The experience may finally teach him what a fellow expatriate describes as the need for emotional flexibility.

Not every aspect of the novel is as successful. There’s an occasional but unmistakable self-consciousness in the writing: the overtly literary language takes up valuable narrative space and eclipses the supporting characters (a child named Jakob is all but forgotten during the novel’s bulky middle section). The tendency toward overwriting is a typical first-novel problem in a book that otherwise is anything but typical.

 

Reviewer: Kamal Al-Solaylee

Publisher: Biblioasis

DETAILS

Price: $21.95

Page Count: 312 pp

Format: Cloth

ISBN: 978-1-92742-839-9

Released: Oct.

Issue Date: 2013-11

Categories: Fiction: Novels