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Salvage the Bones

Jesmyn Ward

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Nov 19, 2017 Louise rated it really liked it

At the time of writing this review,

there are news reports galore about
the sandbagging and boarding up activity happening in the United States Carolinas in preparation for hurricane Florence. In Salvage the Bones , the Batiste family, preparing for what we know will be hurricane Katrina, do not have the 'luxury' of timber or metal sheeting to protect their meagre home; they must resort to stealing or making do with wholly inadequate substitutes. This event is but one in the Batiste family st At the time of writing this review,

there are news reports galore about
the sandbagging and boarding up activity happening in the United States Carolinas in preparation for hurricane Florence. In Salvage the Bones , the Batiste family, preparing for what we know will be hurricane Katrina, do not have the 'luxury' of timber or metal sheeting to protect their meagre home; they must resort to stealing or making do with wholly inadequate substitutes. This event is but one in the Batiste family story which illustrates the disadvantage and hardship the family experiences living as they do on the “trash-strewn, hardscrabble Pit, where everything else is starving, fighting, struggling” (p.94)

It is unconscionable that individuals and families anywhere in this 21st century world should be reduced to living as precariously as the characters in Jasmyn Ward's novel but the lives of people described in non-fiction works such as Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity by Katherine Boo and Deep South: Four Seasons on Back Roads by Paul Theroux unfortunately illustrate that the injustice and deprivation of the Batiste family situation can certainly be believed.

Salvage the Bones is certainly not a ‘feel good’ story with its accounts of the Batiste family living hand to mouth and its themes of sexual exploitation and highly questionable treatment of animals. On the other hand, loyalty of family and friends, perseverance in the face of extreme adversity and most emphatically, the crucial role played by women in fostering and maintaining family cohesion go some way to dispelling the novel’s negative mood.

Ward has skilfully created significant tension in the novel with destructive personal events playing out against the backdrop of the approaching hurricane; her descriptions of the might of the storm and its devastating aftermath are exceptional. Ward’s lyrical, poetic writing style (complete with allusions to classical Greek mythology) is distinctive and accomplished; it is the antithesis
of the futility and justified discontent which characterises the lives of almost all the characters in Salvage the Bones . ...more

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