Aminatta Forna’s novel, Happiness, is so good that, when I finished, I just had to sit for a bit in the afterglow. It’s not just that this book has so many of the things that I love—non-standard plot structure with plots woven in and out of each other, set in London, flawed characters who slowly fall in love with each other. What I loved most about this book is what it has to say about suffering and resilience. Over and over, the characters face adversity but come through to the other side, sadder but wiser.
Our protagonists meet near Waterloo Bridge in London when they literally bump into each other. Dr. Attila Asare is a psychologist who specializes in treating civilians who’ve survived war zones (Bosnia, Sierra Leone, Iraq, etc.). He’s in London for a conference where he is to deliver the final keynote. Jean Turone is an urban biologist, who is currently studying London’s foxes. At first, they don’t have much to do with one another, but they keep running into each other. It’s only after Attila’s great nephew goes missing that their friendship starts to develop,
(Image via Consumerist)
Each chapter contains a short introduction where we see critical junctures in Attila and Jean’s lives. We see the traumas Attila has himself experienced. We see Jean’s fights with people who want to kill the coyotes she used to study in America. Their past struggles with grief and environmental destruction are repeated in their present. Attila, who has saved many peoples’ lives, is watching his oldest friend and former lover succumb to early onset Alzheimers. Then, he has to find his nephew. After that, he is asked to diagnose a woman with PTSD to help her legal defense. Meanwhile, Jean is trying to educate people about London’s foxes and head off plans to cull their population.
Attila and Jean are impressively resilient people. They can fight the same battles, over and over again. Even though it takes a lot of strength, they get out of bed every day to keep working toward their sometimes quixotic goals. I think this book might have been less hopeful than my summarizing so far might have indicated if it weren’t for the foxes and coyotes’ examples. These animals are so adaptable, they’ve been able to thrive in unexpected places. Culling doesn’t get rid of them; they just come back in greater numbers. Every time they come up against a boundary, they find a way around it. They may be out of place, but I couldn’t help but admire them.
Attila’s keynote at the end of the book beautifully sums up the lessons of resilience in Happiness. I’ve had my own traumas, so I find the idea that trauma doesn’t irreparably break most of us incredibly comforting. We’re not what happened to us. And, as Attila argues with his fellow psychologists, without sadnesses and setbacks and traumas to season us, as it were, can we really fully experience happiness? These ideas are why, when I finished the last page, I didn’t really want to move on to the next book like I usually do. I wanted to bask in Happiness for a while.
I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration. It will be released 6 March 2018.
I’m reading this at the moment, your review has sent me back to reading it! So glad to hear you enjoyed it, love her work.
I love this book so much I not only bought a copy for my library, I’m planning on buying copies to give people for their birthday.
So great, now I’ve finished and reviewed it, I too was struck by those themes of suffering and trauma and adaptability, whether it was the coyote, the fox or the West African immigrants feeling war zones and then those who battle against nature, the politicians, the firearms license holders, there’s so much more to reflect on that this novel provokes in the reader, I also found a couple of interesting articles that I’m sure informed her work, especially the work of the French psychologist Boris Cyrulnik, his book ‘Resilience’ and its theories.