The Book of Harlan - Bernice McFadden

It's February and for Black History Month, I wanted to read something from an African American author and also something about Black History. The Book of Harlan is written by Bernice McFadden, an award winning African American author of nine critically acclaimed novels. The average Goodreads score on this book was 4.1 which is pretty fantastic. 

So let's start with what's working in this book. McFadden's prose is well done and the first 1/4 of the book detailing Harlan's parents, Sam and Emma Elliott, who meet in Macon, Georgia and then after becoming pregnant with Harlan (much to the displeasure of Emma's preacher father), move around the country looking for the right fit, while the grandparents bring up Harlan. Finally, in Harlan's fourth year, Sam and Emma return to Macon for Harlan, having found their niche in 1920s Harlem. The pacing and the writing in this section of the book was the best part about the entire book. Even the parts that followed about Harlan's childhood and early adulthood in Harlem, playing in jazz bands and travelling the country was well done. And then, well then stuff started to get weird.

So about the midpoint of the book, when, in 1940, Harlan goes to Paris to play the jazz clubs there, unkowningly having fathered twin sons in Brooklyn, the suspense of the book started to ratchet up. When Harlan and his bandmate Lizard are picked up after curfew during the Nazi occupation of Paris, they are swept off to Buchenwald. Here I thought the book was going to settle in, and really delve into what it meant to be a black American in a German concentration camp. So I was completely surprised when this only took up a little more than two chapters. Much of this section of the book was Lizard's back story, which came a little too late as we'd already been introduced to Lizard for several chapters and well, then like many characters in this book, we never see him again. And although what happens to Lizard is terrible, he's in a concentration camp, you can probably figure it out, and it's supposed to be incredibly damaging to Harlan, there's something that is missing in the elements to give it a great emotional weight. 

When Harlan returns to his parent's home, he's completely broken and suffering from PTSD for several years, until he isn't and all of a sudden is out womanizing again. He moves to New Jersey with his parents, plays in some clubs, then all of a sudden his parents are killed in a car accident and he's once again devastated. He takes a job in Brooklyn as a superintendant of a building. Great, I thought, he's going to end up meeting his children finally, since the book spent a significant portion of time on the mother of his children and her family, but no. Instead of his children, Harlan finds Ilse Koch, the notorious wife of a Nazi administrator of Buchenwald who took sadistic pleasure in torturing prisoners in her husband's camp. Ilse Koch has taken refuge in the United States, disguised as recluse Andrew Mailer. (Except Ilse Koch in reality was tried twice for war crimes in Germany and committed suicide in prison in 1967 at the age of 60). 

Harlan, upon finding Ilse, strangles her to death and then turns himself into the police. Conveniently, the police detective who takes his statement has a wife who was also a prisoner at Buchenwald so he takes Harlan out the back door and sets him free, giving him all the money in his wallet and telling Harlan to make a new life somewhere. Harland decides to go to Macon, and then the book ends. YES! It ends there! 

So about what kind of fell flat for me: the book takes on too much. There are too many characters who show up to ground the story into factual time and place, but their factual stories get distorted by the narrative into untrue endings (Ilse Koch). 

There are also too many characters who are included, described in detail, only to be never seen again. The fact that we never know what happens to Harlan's twin sons was kind of a big gaping hole in the narrative. Yes, okay Harlan never met them, so if you take the story from only Harlan's perspective, then he didn't know what happened to them either, BUT in that vein, he never knew they existed in the first place, and he certainly didn't know anything about the family of the woman he slept with to make those children in the first place, but we had loads of details about those individuals in the story. It's almost as if they ceased to exist after the interesting portions of their own narratives were used up. 

The dialogue at times worked against the story. McFadden can get into a good rhythm of prose wherein the story flows well and the plot is driven forward. When dialogue is used for this purpose it has less effect and comes out awkwardly. 

Lastly, the scope of time taken on in this book was too great. Less time was spent on really interesting or complicated issues than were probably warranted given their weight and importance in the life of the characters. 

Basically I thought the first half of the book was pretty good and the book would have rated higher if the second half would have included mostly Buchenwald with a bit of the later life wrapped up at the end. The murder of Ilse Koch in the final chapters seemed an effort to create a dazzling ending where one wasn't really needed. This is a man who survived four years in a concentration camp, that struggle, and the changes it made in him, and how it redefines how we look at victims of the Holocaust should have been enough. That it wasn't is somehow telling on how this book fell short.

2/5 Stars.