Esi Edugyan, _Washington Black_

OUR BOOK CLUB selection for November, and one about which I had no particular expectations. I had never heard of the author. The novel had made NYT Best Books of the Year list, but many a book has made that list without necessarily being my cup of tea. So...no expectations. Then I was hooked by the first chapter. This book is a gem.

Washington Black, the narrator, is an 11-year-old slave on Barbados; Titch Wilde, his owner's brother, a gentleman scientist and aspiring hot-air balloonist, takes Wash along with him as he heads to the United States, and then to the Arctic, where he hopes to find his rumored-dead father, also a gentleman scientist. The father, it turns out, is alive, but Titch inexplicably abandons Wash, leaving him with Titch's father while vanishing into a snowstorm.

On his own, Wash lands first in Canada, then goes to England, becoming an amateur scientist himself, but continually fearing capture and re-enslavement. He falls in love; he and his beloved, Tanna, follow a trail of clues to Morocco, where Titch is rumored to have wound up. Sure enough, there he is.

Edugyan skillfully and convincingly evokes the worlds of 19th century fiction. As a boy in  the care of a feckless, kind but unreliable adult, Wash is in an utterly Dickensian situation. The picaresque plot takes him all over the world, as in a Jules Verne novel. The description of the Arctic reminded me of Shelley's Frankenstein, and Titch and Wash seemed for the first half of the novel an ingenious re-imagining of Huck and Jim, with ethnicities switched.

The prose is beautiful--and I don't mean it is some oily, overstuffed Victorian pastiche, either, but really beautiful, as when Wash gets to the Arctic:

   I had been warned by Mister Ibel that snow was white, and cold. But it was not white: it held all the colors of the spectrum. It was blue and green and yellow and teal; there were delicate pink tintings in some of the cliffs as we passed. As the light shifted in the sky, so too did the snow around us deepen, find new hues, the way an ocean is never blue but some constantly changing color.

Or when he dives to seek aquatic specimens:

   How luminous the world was, in the shallows. I could see all the golden light of the dying morning, I could see the debris in it stirring, coming alive. Blue, purple, gold cilia turned in the watery yellow shafts of light slicing down. In the gilded blur I caught the flashing eyes of shrimp, alien and sinewy.

The novel's ending is stunning, a sudden Moroccan sandstorm matching the snowstorm into which Titch disappeared, a parallel realization that what children feel for the adults in their lives and what those adults feel for them is not necessarily reciprocal, and Wash suddenly understanding he is at the crossroads of his life.