We have encountered Bina before. She appears during an episode in Anakana Schofield’s first novel Malarky (2012), “taking a hammer to the plane that time during the protest at Shannon Airport” as she now recalls in Schofield’s fourth novel Bina. She also says, “I swear I’d no clue what we were protesting about” and “The reason I attacked the plane was nothing to do with politics or protest or war at all, it had everything to do with Eddie.” The 74-year old Bina has had enough of everything, especially Eddie (“the Son of Satan”), her quasi-son, a lodger who had plagued her for ten years before decamping to Canada, perhaps fleeing. They met after Eddie crashed his motorcycle into a ditch near Bina’s house in County Mayo, Ireland; she cared for him but he turned out to be a thief, a batterer, and shady in his dealings. Bina’s fear is that Eddie will return. But also, Bina’s best friend Phil has died; each woman had been plagued by male behavior. (Phil is the main character of Malarky.)
The basic premise of the novel is that the fed-up Bina has retreated to her bed where she writes her testimony on the back of receipts, invoices and other slips of paper. Thus, what we encounter are fragments that proceed haltingly into focus. Her urgent scribblings comprise declarations, fleeting mentions of events old and recent, complaints, hunches, stubborn confusions, frustrations, and advice. She believes the authorities are snooping on her – but she may simply be frightened, lonely and befuddled: “I’m fading to remember why I do the things I do and who is at war with whom. The only memory I unfortunately cannot seem to unthread is Eddie’s forty-gutted face.” Meanwhile, the “Crusties” are camping in her yard — anti-war protestors who have arrived to protect their plane-smashing idol. (Bina had served a week in jail earlier, acquiring some notoriety.) And also, there is Bina’s involvement with a clandestine group advocating for and conducting assisted suicide; Bina had been visited regularly by their representative, “the Tall Man,” but now he has vanished.
Here is a sampling of the prose from early in the narrative:
I always found fellas very difficult. I never got tangled up in them for that reason. I put my head down and lived a reasonable life. Or rather once I put the head down, I lived a reasonable life.
Women are no easier. So don’t be fooled thinking otherwise.
They are all awful, awful, awful.
All humans are awful.
Be very suspicious.
Stick to cats or carp.
Goats are less trouble than humans.
He’s mad as a goat, they’ll say. Yet I never met a goat as mad as a man.
Goats never caused me mounds of grief.
Everything I’ve mentioned above is an answer to the question: What can we know about this narrative? But there is a better, more demanding question: What does this narrative allow us to know? An ideologically-oriented response to the first question leads to regarding Bina as a survivor of misogyny (which she is), driven to her bed by violence, exploitation and a lack of empathy, when all Bina wanted to do, or what her culture expected a woman like her to do, was to bind Eddie’s wounds and offer shelter, help the distressed end their own lives, and live in peace in her own house. The second question demands that we listen to the sound of what she actually says and how she says it. If all people are awful, then who are we, the readers? We try not to think of ourselves as intruder or voyeurs, we try to understand her predicament. We flatter ourselves. We figure out how to read her tersely jumbled remarks. But her warnings to us are statements about us. And despite the grief caused by Eddie, her situation – and ours – comes off as darkly comedic.
In bed, withdrawn from her meals-on-wheels volunteerism and everything else, Bina no longer dispenses the generosity and caring expected of a woman in her culture, gestures that have led only to perplexity. “This is the most frightening state a woman can enter,” she says, “because if you are in bed you are suddenly no use to anybody and it’s only then they realize how much use you were. If I were to warn you in relation to going to bed, I would only advise not to wait too long to do so, but hold out as long as you can once supine. Do not budge or they won’t take you serious. And you won’t take yourself serious either.”
But as she says, all humans are awful and “I’m here to warn you, not to reassure you.” Bina’s septuagenarian charm derives from her intimacies with us – but they are misplaced intimacies, since had Phil not died, our presence would not be necessary. Aside from disclosing her discomforts, Bina presents to us an unchanging, unimprovable, unfair human condition. Bina says, “All over this country, there are people waking up day by day beside people they are disappointed to discover aren’t dead. I don’t care. I’m going to say it. You can think what you will. It’s factual talk.”
Among the many diverting footnotes Bina adds is this: “Always create a spectacle – it can be a very useful thing. Better still have someone else create it and stand there and watch with your arms crossed.” Anakana Schofield has created a spectacle of language in Bina – and despite all of the warnings she offers, Bina regards us, warily, with her arms crossed.
[Published by New York Review Books on February 2, 2021, 313 pages, $17.95 paperback]