The Color Purple

Alice Walker

Pulitzer Prize winner, fixture on university, college and school reading lists the world over, a milestone in black empowerment feminist literature, voted no. 18 in Waterstone's 100 Greatest Books of the 20th Century. What more can I say?

It sucks.

Well, maybe not sucks. There's a story in here trying to get out, but, in the opinion of this humble reviewer, it's got a struggle on its hands.

You'll probably have an idea of the storyline: black girl incestuously raped and abused, has her kids taken away from her, forced into a lousy marriage, starts a lesbian relationship with her husband's lover etc. etc. Sounds powerful; must have something going for it. But...

1. If Ms Walker is trying to portray a sympathetic picture of the black condition in the South in the early decades of the 20th century, she fails. Read it and see for yourself why.

2. The use of blackspeak grates. I started to mentally transpose pages of it into 'normal' English, and found (in my opinion) that the story didn't lose out. As it stands, the constant - in many places - use of blackspeak, coupled with the absence of all but the most basic punctuation, often makes it nigh-well impossible to distinguish thought from speech, character from character etc.

3. The book really only starts to move in the letters from Africa. They say more about Whites, Blacks, exploitation etc. than the 'main' part of the novel.

And above all...

4. There are chunks of this book which, had they appeared in a skin mag or cheap airport paperback, would have been dismissed as cheap filth. Hey, I'm as broad-minded in my reading as anyone, but some of the stuff in here is just gutter material. Strikes me as strange that this volume continues to colonise high school shelves while less offensive stuff (Harry Potter!!) is banned. If some people feel that they must ban books, maybe they want to start with this.

But they won't, for the reasons I mentioned at the start. And that's the sad thing. Of all the 'great' novels to have appeared in the last couple of decades, this is the one which probably lends itself least to divergence from the accepted p.c. view. And that's not what literature's all about.

THE COLOR PURPLE goes into the Major Disappointments box. My abiding memory of it will be the profound sense of relief I felt when I finished the damn thing.