Review

Goodbye Lucille

By Segun Afolabi

Published by Vintage

Set in West Berlin sometime in the 1980s, Afolabi’s first novel (his short story ‘Monday Morning’ won the Caine Prize for African Writing in 2005) is an initially perplexing experience.

While engagingly readable, for pages and pages it seems far too lightweight to ever metamorphose into the book the blurb on the back claims it is: ‘a moving novel about the personal politics of identity and a gentle exploration of the nature of true love’.

Then, somewhere about page 250, the promise hinted at in earlier chapters finally begins to be realised. Vincent, the novel’s protagonist, stands in his aunt’s kitchen and listens to her as she tells him that ‘when you leave a place, if you move away in favour of another, you can never completely forget the first…It is like a stone tied around your heart. It keeps you from floating away from yourself’. It’s a precise summary of the lesson that Vincent has tried to avoid learning for most of the novel, if not his entire life thus far.

This isn’t to say that the first two thirds of the book are a waste of time or even poorly executed – far from it. What is happening instead is that we are witnessing a man turn away from the (expertly rendered) aimless wandering that has characterised his existence, which the novel’s structure reflects this perfectly. The moment in his aunt’s kitchen represents a decisive shift for both Vincent and the novel, but Afolabi is a subtle (and realistic) enough writer that it’s a slow turn rather than a sharp break, and it takes until the last chapter for the lesson to have been absorbed.

Up until this point, Vincent has drifted, having abandoned his girlfriend in London (the Lucille of the title), and spent the last fifteen or so years avoiding all contact with the aunt and uncle who assumed responsibility for him and his elder brother when their parents were killed in a car crash. Maintaining a long distance relationship of sorts with Lucille (who he periodically cheats on), he drinks heavily and works infrequently as a freelance photographer. One long, hot summer, during which he skips from Berlin to London to Nigeria and back again, proves to finally be the making of the man.

As the responsibilities that he has always sought to avoid press in on him, Vincent – often a mystery even to himself – is forced to acknowledge certain truths: ‘I knew I simply wanted things to revert to the way they had been, for certain events never to have taken place. And I realised that was something I had always done; flee from an unmanageable present to an imagined perfect past.’

This struggle with the difficult realities of life is shared by all of the novel’s characters, both major and incidental. For some, the ‘sheer exertion of living’ eventually overwhelms them, and for others, the claims made upon them are strong enough to hold them in place. One of the novel’s strengths is that it doesn’t overstate this disparity, with each character equally subject to the whims of fate and chance – yet what differences there are become decisive. Vincent is a heavy drinker, but not an alcoholic; a wanderer rather than a refugee. It’s as a result of these careful distinctions that what could have been an unconvincing or mawkish tale of love and belonging is instead thoroughly credible and moving.

An emotional exploration of the concept of ‘home’ for a man who believes he has never truly known one, Goodbye Lucille is also a satisfying novel about the tangle of everyday human interaction, the confusion of modern life, and the quiet surprise of discovering what you truly desire.

Reviewed by Rosa Anderson, Booktrust literature promotions officer

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