Thirty Days

Annelies Verbeke

World Editions, £11.99

Review by Nick Major

READERS of Jackie Kay’s work will be familiar with the question “where are you from?” It seems an innocent utterance, but Kay shows how it can have a sinister edge. One of her earliest published poems, So You Think I’m A Mule, is a conversation that begins with a similar interrogative. When the black narrator says "Glasgow", it is not the answer the white antagonist wants to hear.

Likewise, in Annelies Verbeke’s novel Thirty Days, Alphonse, a Senegalese immigrant working in Westhoek, rural Belgium, is asked the question everywhere he goes.

“These days,” he thinks, “people usually add the word ‘originally’: ‘where are you from, originally?’ Also quite common is ‘really’: ‘But where are you really from?’ ” The question is used, intentionally or not, to establish who belongs and who does not. Even the liberals in Westhoek think Alphonse is someone whose real home is elsewhere.

Alphonse was born in Dakar, Senegal. In his early years, his mother worked for two married diplomats from Belgium. When he was 12, the female diplomat fell pregnant. Alphonse’s mother moved to Mexico to be the nanny or ‘m’bindan’ to the baby girl, called Cat. Alphonse was sent to live with his uncle in Brussels. Later, Cat and Alphonse fall in love. At the beginning of Thirty Days they have moved from Brussels to Westhoek. Cat is recovering from cancer and her parents live nearby. Formerly a musician, Alphonse is now an interior decorator. Over the course of a month he moves from client to client. As he does, we get snapshots of their lives. Many of these people are petty, small-minded, and racist. Some are what we would call nimbyists. The liberals despair at the parochialism of their neighbours. But all of Alphonse’s clients, ridiculously, need more than just a new lick of paint in the hallway.

The emotional flaws of these characters are nothing compared to the faults of the novel itself. Thirty Days is full of cliche, simplistic characterisation – the drunken journalist, the mad spinster – and redundant sentences. Sometimes the plot is outrageously funny, but only because the coincidences that drive it are absurd. At first, the central extended metaphor seems clever – the disrepair of the houses reflects the psychological state of their inhabitants, and Alphonse provides a curative for both. But the conceit is banal. Why does every person in Westhoek need therapy, and why do they all think their decorator, a man they have only known for a few hours, should be their psychiatrist? Seeking advice, they ring Alphonse up in the evenings and he rushes to their aid without question. As the novel progresses, you start to feel affection for the saintly decorator. But he is impossibly good. Attractive, charming, gentle, and a talented musician, he tends to the sick, he helps out at a refugee camp, and he calls his mother regularly. Altruists are usually – behind the blinding light of their halos – as selfish as the rest of us. Not so Alphonse.

Verbeke, who now has four novels to her name, can write excellent comic vignettes. Some of them had this reader snorting with laughter. One of Alphonse’s more well-adjusted clients is a doctor whose son is in the habit of unexpectedly launching into the haka, a Maori war dance. “It’s a syndrome,” his mother explains. “In the summer holidays we were in New Zealand, et voilá. If we travel somewhere else it will be some other thing. He’s very, very suggestible, especially in a geographical sense…according to his psychologist he’ll have to work on it for himself.” Alphonse and Cat also have a neighbour called Willem who talks non-stop about the “post-war fate of the tirailleurs sénégalais’”and eventually convinces Alphonse to go on a tour of the thousands of Second World War military graves in the area.

Willem’s over-zealous interest in what he sees as Alphonse’s origins is the light-hearted side of the question “where do you come from, originally?” The darker side is on display when, for example, clients cancel their renovations when they find out that Alphonse is black, explaining that they don’t like “multiculti claptrap”.

Alphonse refuses to accept that Westhoek is as racist as it is. He has too much hope in humankind. His denials are met with a brutal riposte in the last chapter, which includes an unexpected scene of brutality that does not fit the novel’s overall tone. It is a horrid ending to a disappointing novel.