He’s nameless because, like her, he cannot truly be said to exist outside that narrative, these pages outside black and white. The narrator comes to realise she is the “contrast”, the “sharp, black outline” he, and by extension his race (conceived of as a race), cannot live without. The boyfriend also remains nameless, the yin to our narrator’s yang. There’s also her rich home counties-grown boyfriend who thinks he’s already got it because he’s got her (which is far from “it”). Besides them, there’s her ex-boss Lou – who she was, in fact, sleeping with, but aimlessly – who thinks he “gets it” because he’s an immigrant who grew up poor (which is not quite “it”). It never occurs to them, of course, that this might just be their hallowed meritocracy at work. She’s at an advantage because she’s a woman, who can simply sleep her way to the top. “ It’s so much easier for you blacks and Hispanics”.
She’s at an advantage because she’s Black. When a push for diversity at work sees her seemingly float above her colleagues to a top managerial role, they simply can’t resist telling her how it is. Strangers, too, who freely dispense racial slurs at her on the Tube, in the street -– although, strictly speaking, in these cases we don’t so much learn as get to confirm what we already know.īesides the everyday people who seem to resent her presence, there are the suited and booted men who resent her success. We learn much more, even in passing, about those who surround her: friends, neighbours, acquaintances. It tells us nothing about this story, this storyteller. Illuminated, yes, but hardly illuminating.
It’s not my life, but it’s illuminated two metres tall behind me and I’m speaking it into the soft, malleable faces tilted forwards on uniformed shoulders. There’s hard work, pulling up laces, rolling up shirtsleeves, and forcing yourself. You get the impression our narrator has always been, if not above, then over it. Disillusioned is perhaps the wrong word for someone who has never been, at least in one sense, under any illusions. It looks like hymns and barely secular thoughts-for-the-day have been swapped out for inspirational, aspirational presentations packaged and delivered by young, gifted and disillusioned City workers, such as the narrator of Assembly, Natasha Brown’s debut.
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