GEORGE AND RUE

From Canada, the unremittingly grim story of two black brothers, bound from birth for the gallows.

Clarke is a seventh-generation African-Canadian poet who traces his Nova Scotian roots back to the War of 1812; this first novel is based on the lives of distant cousins (“I embrace them as my kin”). These darker-skinned people found Nova Scotia to be oppressively white. Opportunities were few. Clarke’s story begins in the 1920s with Asa Hamilton, a meat-cutter. His wife Cynthy bears him two sons fast: George and Rufus (aka Rue). The marriage has turned sour; the midwife foretells a hanging. Asa whips his wife and sons, determined to destroy his family while he drinks and whores about. By 1942 both parents are dead, Asa murdered by his wife’s lover, Cynthy a victim of a heart attack. The boys drop out of school early and dabble in crime. Rue is the city slicker; George is more country. There’s a hopeful moment after the war when George takes his bride Blondola to New Brunswick, to escape Rue’s bad influence, but it’s short-lived. Rue, hardened by two years in the pen, inveigles George into killing a taxi driver for his cash. George won’t wield the hammer (he knows the guy, an unprejudiced white man, quite a rarity) but is an accomplice. They leave a trail of blood, are arrested, tried and hung in 1949: “their stars were always a ceiling of nooses.” Clarke’s account often seems at war with itself stylistically, oscillating between a lyrical, filigreed prose and a blunt, no-nonsense report, sometimes in black vernacular. The womenfolk get the full treatment. Cynthy is “a gold-leaf Cleopatra,” Blondola “a perfumed gold seam.” The brothers must battle racism all their lives, but Clarke never makes that an excuse for their crimes; if anything, he comes down on them too hard, the clownish, no-account George and the sinister, gangster-cool Rue.

Despite its stylistic dissonance, a powerful debut, with a visceral understanding of pain and anger.