Review: "Augustown" by Kei Miller

I had a great time reading Kei Miller’s Augustown. It is an engaging novel filled with precise prose and crackling dialogue that flows easy across the wrinkles in my mind. But what it gives us in those regards can’t distract from what it doesn’t have, and that is a firm grip on story and narrative. It attempts to cram a lot of mythos, history and a wife range of people into the small space of a 239-page novel. It has been done before and has been thought provoking in other books, but that is not the case here. I always felt Miller was playing with big ideas, and by the end I can’t help but think he held back quite a bit. I picked this book up based on its settings and its recommendation on the back from Marlon James, and sure enough it is very much like his first two novels John Crow’s Devil and The Book of Night Women, both all right books that pale in comparison to his flash of brilliance that was A Brief History of Seven Killings. The novel tells two stories that, now that I think of it, really should have been one. First, Miller trains his eye on the character of Ma Taffey, an old blind woman who acts as a godmother to the rest of the town and a lynch pin of the book’s events. Kaia, a young boy, comes to her door crying because his beloved dreadlocks have been forcibly cut off. She sits him down and tells him the story of The Flying Preacherman, a local legend of a preacher who claimed to fly who was oppressed by the local government. This section feels quite out of place, and it isn’t until we leave the past and focus on the present, which takes place in a single day and tells the tragic story of Gina, Kaia’s mother and what leads to the book’s violent final few pages. This is a book full of wonder with a firm grip on the past and present, and something worth looking at.

Rating: 4/5