First published in France in 2013, The Living Days is the 12th novel by the Mauritian author Ananda Devi. Set in London, it tells of the sexual abuse of a 13-year-old black boy by a 75-year-old white woman. Mary has lived a loveless life ever since losing her virginity to a soldier during the war: he went away to fight and didn’t come back, and she never moved on. Jeremiah, who goes by the nickname Cub, lives on a council estate in Brixton. His mother is very hard up, so he skips school to earn money doing odd jobs at Mary’s house in Notting Hill. Mary becomes obsessed with Cub; he starts sleeping in her bed, and things get worse from there.
Devi is not the first contemporary novelist to depict a female paedophile, but whereas novels such as Alissa Nutting’s Tampa (2013) and AM Homes’s The End of Alice (1996) foregrounded the psychopathology of sexual predation, the emphasis here is more social than psychological. The abuse scenario recounted in The Living Days prompts a meditation on urban inequality, in which the politics of race and class loom large. We learn that Cub had idealised white women: “He envied them their elegance, their affluence. Their modulated voices, their discreet accents so unlike the shrill shrieks of the neighbourhood girls … At night, he dreamed of them … They’ll be my way out of Brixton.” Mary’s adoration of Cub is described by Devi’s third-person narrator in startlingly dehumanising terms: Mary wonders at “this pure, animalistic marvel of his body”; he is “a glorious monster” and “the most elusive of creatures”.
This fetishistic language underlines the essentially neocolonial nature of their relationship: in its sordid and exploitative dynamic, it symbolically evokes the history of social relations between white and black, between metropole and empire – the legacy of which, Devi suggests, persists in the violence of 21st-century city life. The story is set in 2003 and features several allusions to violent crimes from the 1990s and early 2000s, including the murders of James Bulger and Damilola Taylor; these are pointedly juxtaposed with references to George W Bush’s wars and the horrors of Abu Ghraib to paint a picture of a world mired in cruelty. In addition to being abused by Mary, Cub is set upon by a gang of white fascists in an attack reminiscent of the murder of Stephen Lawrence.
Devi has lived in France for the past 30 years, writing novels heavily influenced by feminist and post-colonial thought. The French literary establishment is notoriously conservative in its tastes, but Devi’s profile has benefited from several government-funded initiatives to promote francophone culture globally, most notably winning the prestigious Prix des cinq continents de la francophonie for her 2006 novel Eve Out of Her Ruins, published by Les Fugitives in 2016. To the extent that such programmes can be said to be implicitly neocolonial – seeking to sustain national influence through transnational cultural outreach – there is a kind of poetic justice here: the husk of empire, sorrily bankrolling its own damnation.
Devi’s talents were impressively showcased in Eve Out of Her Ruins, which explored everyday violence and misogyny in the slum districts of the Mauritian capital, Port-Louis, with a smart blend of lyricism and sociological insight. The Living Days is a somewhat disappointing follow-up, comparatively lacking in subtlety and trading rather too heavily on shock value. There is a conspicuous strain of Victorian paternalism in Devi’s ruminations on the nexus between poverty and violence, which occasionally lapse from well-meaning solicitude into crass condescension. There’s a surprise cameo from Anne Robinson, whose brutal treatment of contestants on The Weakest Link is cited as a symptom of a society in which compassion and empathy have run dry.
These tonally awkward moments diminish the novel’s moral force, as does the abundance of cliches in Devi’s prose: some allowance must be made for the ambiguities of translation, but the surfeit of corny phrases such as “the dregs of humanity” and “the ravages of time” is cloying. While Mary’s loneliness is rendered with a certain degree of conviction – her home, with its “curtains pock-marked by mites, the carpet reeking of urine”, is a picture of pitiful self-neglect – the character of Cub is two-dimensional: we are told that he listens to Bob Marley (of course!) and that his “heart still belonged to those shadows from which he had emerged”. When the narrator remarks that Cub “seemed to have come from nowhere, as if he had been created out of nothing with no obligation to anyone”, the reader can only nod in agreement.
• The Living Days by Ananda Devi, translated by Jeffrey Zuckerman, is published by Les Fugitives (£11.99).
