Home »
Babylon Rolling will challenge you
Book Review
By Derryll White
Boyden, Amanda (2008). Babylon Rolling.
This novel is about a woman’s love for a city that she hates. It is a serious exploration of one of North America’s most legendary urban landscapes, the levied city at the mouth of the mighty Mississippi River. Boyden explores, pokes, probes at the underbelly of New Orleans, the city synonymous with jazz and blues.
She takes chances with reality, turning the pain of real life into loose moral dilemmas. Philomenia looks after her dying husband Joe, at home. She avoids him, although he is confined to bed. Real life, in my experience, is that you cannot ignore your dying partner who alternately makes your sun rise or condemns it to an eclipse of darkness you think you cannot survive.
Reality is sometimes ignored in this magic, fantastic novel. Boyden explores the complexities of class and race, and what random events can do to preconceived notions of these values. This is not an easy novel to read – it challenges, it wanders, but it constantly explores humanity and the ways we relate to each other. Read this one if you like to work at your novel and ask questions of your own concepts of reality.
Excerpts from the novel:
MARDI GRAS – “We shoulder the rummy, pissy weeks before Lent when our city goes into heat. Squawking for titties, wearing cameras, the magpies come in throngs, overload branches, mate and shit, everyone swooping at glittering strings of nothing worth fighting for. After Ash Wednesday a chain of doughnut shops accepts grocery bags of beads, and we trade is sacks of greasy sins for a dozen glazed each. Sprinkles, mixed. So many mistakes get repackaged for next year.”
NEW ORLEANS – “We acknowledge that spores of racism and mold grow here, recede, disappear to hide behind wallpaper. We keep track. Do nothing. We are good at watching. On a dark summer night, a pack of feral dogs shreds a girl’s pet bunny in her backyard. At the start of his second grade, a poor boy kicks a pigeon that cannot fly, spits at it, and kicks again. New Year’s Eve, a rotted balcony buckles and spills drunk tourists onto pavement splatted with sticky blots of their own daiquiris.”
TOURISTS – As hard as he tries, Ed cannot find a way to see the tourists sympathetically… the youngsters are tonal, whiny, rude, often fat.
PLACE – Move away from your people and you have exactly not much at all. You need family and friends around you. Circled, like wagons.
FAMILY – ‘Goo’night, Daddy.’ Same as always, Ed’s heart melts. Something about a daughter, they say, softens a man’s heart forever.
ILLNESS – She realized last night that she will be at the mercy of the nurses for a long time to come, will be humiliated, bathed and wiped after the toilet, fed and have her teeth brushed by strangers. Roy has never had to clean her bottom, and Cerise is determined to never have him do such a thing all the rest of his days.
– Derryll White once wrote books but now chooses to read and write about them. When not reading he writes history for the web at www.basininstitute.org.
