Girl, Woman, Other controversially won the Booker Prize in 2019. It was not that the book was thought undeserving. In fact, there seems to be a wide opinion that Bernadine Evaristo was most deserving of the prize, and that her status as the first black woman ever to win the award should have been the story for that year. Instead, the judges also awarded Margaret Atwood the prize for The Testaments, a sequel to her classic Dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale, forcing the two women to share the limelight and the prize money. My own opinion is that The Handmaid’s Tale should have beaten out Kingsley Amis’ The Old Devils back in 1986 when it was also shortlisted. Time has been kinder to The Handmaid’s Tale, whereas I have never heard anyone speak about or reference Amis’ book. Sam Leith, a former booker judge, wrote of the decision to award both books in 2019:

The suspicion in the reading public’s mind will be that one or other of these considerable authors was being patronised; that something extra-literary had entered into the considerations of the panel, that the judges were trying to have their cake and eat it. Had they given it a single one, that would not have been possible in the same way. They could have said, simply: this book is first among equals.

In my mind it was Atwood who was patronised in this scenario and that ‘extra-literary’ something that Leith attests rested with the judges’ desire to right a wrong perpetrated upon Atwood in 1986. In doing so they perpetrated a second wrong upon Evaristo in 2019. At least, that’s how I interpret Leith. Even so, Leith overcooked his criticism when he called the decision a “rotten precedent”. This was the third time in Booker Prize history that two books had been announced as the winner.

Regardless, both books in some way reflected the zeitgeist when they won. Atwood’s novel was reinterpreted in the light of Trump’s presidency, while Evaristo’s book is set during the years of Trump and Brexit. Though a British novel speaking of the lived experience of women in modern Britain and their historical forebears, it also spoke to the cultural mood. It gave voice to issues about feminism, as well as transgenderism and identity that had become the cultural and political battlefront for conservative and progressive agendas.

One of the first things to note about this novel is its structure. It is divided into five chapters and an epilogue. The first four chapters are divided into three, each representing a different character. Each story is interconnected with the broader story of the novel. The first chapter tells the stories of Amma, Yazz and Dominique. Amma and Dominique run an independent theatre together, although their professional association is sundered when Dominique migrates to America with the overbearing and controlling Nzinga. Yazz is Amma’s daughter.

This first group is linked to the group in the third chapter. Amma is a lifelong friend of Shirley, a more conservative woman, who has entered the teaching profession years ago with high ideals, but now struggles with the restructuring of the profession, prioritising curriculum over the individual needs of students. Chapter three also tells the story of Winsome, Shirley’s mother, and Penelope, a biology teacher who initially dislikes Shirley as a colleague, but with whom she eventually feels an affiliation.

Chapter two links to chapter three through Carole, a former student of the school in which Shirley works, who has entered into a successful career in banking. Shirley feels pride in Carole’s achievements, believing that it was her mentoring that was the critical factor in Carole’s success. Chapter two is also the story of Bummi, who has escaped the strictures of a traditional marriage and has done whatever she has needed to in order to make a success of her cleaning business. Penelope has also been one of her customers. The third part in this chapter focuses on LaTisha, a school companion of Carole, who has been fated to intergenerational poverty, her prospects limited by a series of unlucky pregnancies to bad relationships and rape.

Finally, chapter four is an intergenerational story. Megan, who is questioning her sexual identity, decides she no longer wishes to identify as either male of female – non-binary. It is also the story of her grandmother, Hattie, who still works the family farm into her nineties, and her own mother, Grace. The death of Grace’s own mother led to her institutionalisation in a girls’ home, until her marriage to a farmer, Joseph Rydendale, whose family has had slave associations in the past. How this fourth chapter connects with the rest of the novel is best left to a reading of the novel, itself. But the four story strands work cohesively, and in their totality present a nuanced evocation of lives that are representative of issues around feminism, racism, as well as gender and identity.

Traditionally, this is going to be a book that will appeal more to women. All its main characters are women. Yet most of these women are black with an African background, many of them are lesbian or in the case of Megan/Morgan, questioning their sexual identity. These are life situations and experiences outside the scope of most readers. As a white middle-class male, I assume I’m not the imagined audience. Yet Evaristo is generous and the tenets of her novel are inclusive. The structure of the novel helps to achieve this.

Because it is a peculiarity of this novel that it is possible to pick it up and treat it like a short story collection: sampling a single story to enjoy rather than reading the book whole. In fact, most of the individual character stories can stand pretty well on their own, despite their allusions to other parts of the book. And for those wondering whether they wish to read the novel, this may be a good way into it. I could identify with aspects of the characters’ lives, even though they were so different to my own, because on a basic level, most people want similar things: a meaningful life; respect; opportunity; fulfilling relationships. I think I identified with Shirley’s story most, not because of Shirley – she was not my favourite character – but because as a former teacher I identified with her situation. Her work as a teacher and the issues of change in education reminded me of issues I faced while still a teacher. They seemed real and I felt Shirley’s disillusionment. Had I been handed Shirley’s story, alone, I could easily have read it and felt like I had read something complete. It seems reasonable to assume that others will identify with different aspects of the novel as I did, even if much of it is outside a reader’s experience.

Evaristo is inclusive not just because her main characters are relatable, but because there is a diversity of opinion attached to the characters. There are despicable minor characters like Trey, who is a rapist, and bad husbands like Giles who refuses to allow Penelope to work. But women have their share of peccadilloes too. Winsome sleeps with her daughter’s husband and Nzinga, Dominique’s lover, is obsessive and controlling. The very worst aspects of patriarchal society have twisted her into a misandrist: “bank their sperm when they’re virile teenagers than castrate the bastards”. Yet Nzinga is just as oppressive as any man when it comes to her relationship with Dominique. Dominique can’t leave their relationship. She has to escape.

There is an even-handedness to the cultural questions of race, sex and identity which make this novel readable. Megan/Morgan is an advocate for trans-genderism and trans-sexualism, and makes a case for the importance of pronouns, an issue that is often a flashpoint in the debate around LGBTQ+ issues. Yet Evaristo allows that the issue is not an either/or position: that people of good faith and sympathy can also struggle to honestly accept these emerging concepts. Hattie, Morgan’s grandmother, loves Morgan more than anyone in the family – Morgan will be the sole beneficiary of her will – but cannot understand Morgan’s position:

… I was born in the nineteen-twenties, you’re expecting too much of me to even begin to understand what you’re going on about

Just be who you want to be and let’s agree not to talk about it

Dominique, a lesbian, is against trans-women attending her festival. She insists she is not transphobic, but says there is a psychological difference between a man raised as a man who becomes a woman – the assumptions made about him, the privileges given etcetera – and a woman born as a woman. Amma responds “the trans community is entitled to fight for its rights, you need to be more open-minded on that score or you’ll risk becoming irrelevant”. Although, even Amma admits she has not grasped everything around the issue. Her daughter, Yazz, and her friends see her as “an old-school has-been who’s part of the problem, they don’t respect me”.

It’s this kind of approach that makes Girl, Woman, Other a dialogue rather than propaganda. Evaristo addresses issues around feminism, sexuality and identity from a variety of perspectives and she treats her characters with respect. This novel doesn’t explain what its readers should think or believe. Rather, it showcases ideas and encourages us to ask fundamental questions about ourselves, in turn. Essentially, each of these characters, whether they are lesbian, trans, straight, or whatever level of wealth and social status they may enjoy, face the problem of how to define their lives on their own terms. Carole proactively seeks help at school, knowing she wants to rise above the socio-economic class that would otherwise define her. Evaristo balances her story against La Tisha, a school friend. Both girls are raped by the same man, yet Carole becomes a successful banker, while La Tisha is unlucky with three accidental pregnancies. Then there is Grace, a black woman, who emerges from the prejudices remaining from an era of slavery to become the owner of a former plantation. A common thread in the novel is the difference between allowing oneself to be defined through relationships, or allowing oneself to be defined through race or gender, and proactively defining one’s own sense of self.

It’s an issue that is finely balanced on the third word of the book’s title: ‘other’. The first sense of the word is to allow oneself to be ‘othered’: to be defined against the ‘norms’ and standards of traditional patriarchal values. Or to be moulded by a partner into something other than yourself. But there is also the sense of the word as a challenge to traditional concepts. To reject traditional notions of gender, as Megan/Morgan does, as a social construct around biological sex. Several characters in the novel have to decide between a sense of their own identity and marriage, for instance. For Penelope, she is aware that her mother sacrificed a career for her marriage, and she ends her own marriage to escape the strictures of a dominant husband who believes women should not go to work. The opportunities afforded Carole in her career can be traced back to her grandmother’s decision to flee her life to prevent a traditional marriage for her daughter, Bummi. This is what ties characters together in this novel, apart from their interpersonal relationships: their desire to define who they are.

The novel is about contemporary society, but it delves into the past as well. We see where characters are now, but often we see from where they have come since childhood. Contemporary society and its attitudes towards race and sex are a product of the past, whether that is the outmoded beliefs in patriarchal power, or the racial violence of slavery. Evaristo ties her characters to their heritage through the use of Akindra symbols at the head of each chapter. There a approximately two hundred Akindra symbols. They are traditional African symbols originating with the Akan people who lived in what is now present-day Ghana and parts of Ivory Coast and Togo in West Africa. The symbols have long been used in clothing and pottery. Each symbol has a meaning, like an aphorism, and it’s interesting to contemplate why Evaristo has associated a particular symbol with each character. For Megan/Morgan, for instance, a character who chooses to identify as non-binary, Evaristo has chosen Sesa Wo Suban, a symbol which represents the desire to change or transform oneself. For the title page of the novel Evaristo has chosen Funtunfunefu-Denkyemfunefu, otherwise known as Siamese crocodiles. These two conjoined crocodiles symbolise democracy and unity. I’ve included each of the symbols in the sidebar, which will be most useful to anyone who has read the book or plans to read it.

Other than that, all I can say is that this is a book well worth a read, even if you only sample it at first. I was initially put off by the presentation of the sentences, which appear to be set out like poetry. Evaristo has used line breaks rather than traditional punctuation to capture the rhythm of her writing and, I assume, to give it character outside the traditional written form. But I found this style highly readable. Having initially been reluctant to read the book, I was surprised to find myself really enjoying it.