Another Morrison read and as ever I’m in awe of her rich prose, nuanced characters and multilayered narrative. It’s the 1970s, and follows many characters during their time in the fictional, all-black town of Ruby as well as their lives before, and is a beautiful blend of classic storytelling and magic. I loved that aspect of Beloved and Morrison wields her subtle use of magical realism and mysticism just as artfully in Paradise.
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The opening line is so powerful, setting up the shocking events to unfold later on, and you spend much of the book on edge, waiting for the inevitable violence to erupt as the utopian town takes a dark turn. As usual, heavy themes are deftly tackled such as the fear of integration and change, tension between older and younger generations, and hierarchies within an all-black town, where the lighter skinned ‘mixed’ residents are looked down upon by the original, ‘8-rock’ families.
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There are a LOT of characters in this novel, all of which have a variety of different nicknames, so it gets a bit confusing at times (I learned the hard way, it’s not really a book to pick up and put down on a commute), but if you stick with it, the pay off is worth it. A few family trees might have been useful though! But even with so many characters to keep track of, each one is as layered as the next and I could have read full-sized novels on many of them.
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The women in this book are particularly compelling, as is the almost character-esque house, The Convent, which holds a dark glamour over the rest of the town, sitting way out into the country, attracting the women of the town like moths to flame...
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One of those books that just screams for a reread further down the line to catch all those things you didn’t on your first run.