TONI CONQUERS ALL

Love: a novel by Toni Morrison(Chatto, (pounds) 16.99) The late critic Lorna Sage once described Toni Morrison as a writer "with the authority of someone who understands there's no safe place to write from". She captured an essential paradox about Morrison's work - the combination of authority with a lack of security - that has been played out in all her novels since The Bluest Eye in 1970. It is not an easy combination to live with, nor does it make her work easy to read. It unsettles many, making them offer their admiration grudgingly.

Accordingly then, Love: A Novel, a more delicate book than her previous ones, has garnered mixed reviews. It's been accused of being a "minor" work (just over 200 pages, it is shorter than the others), and of lacking grittiness. Morrison is no stranger to controversy - when she won the Nobel prize for literature in 1993, the first African-American to do so, some male African-American writers objected, accusing the Nobel committee of political correctness in giving the prize to a woman who had published, in their eyes, so little (Morrison had written only five novels by this point, but that list did include the 1988 Pulitzer prize-winning Beloved).

It was argued too, that her characters were one-dimensional, occasionally even stereotypical, another charge that has been levied at this latest novel.

Morrison's authority comes from being part of the establishment. She was educated at the black-only Howard University in Washington in the late 1940s and now occupies a professorship at Princeton. She was also the first African-American woman to appear on the cover of Newsweek and had her 1981 novel Tar Baby on the New York Times bestseller lists for four months.

Her lack of security comes from being a member of a marginalised race and, as a result, for some time she has managed to upset both sides with her unsettling books. Her poetic, slightly mythical approach to controversial subjects such as slavery, infanticide and incest has infuriated those who want a direct, unequivocal approach; her popularity with white readers has caused some to accuse her of pandering to European models of writing.

Love: A Novel won't silence those critics any more than her previous novels have. Here she tells once more of secret loves thwarted; of the abuse of women and children by the men closest to them; of deep racial divisions and oppressions. The multiple stories that make up Love: A Novel - there are many narrators - all centre around one man, Bill Cosey, who epitomised the successful, middle- class blacks of the 1950s. These people prospered through segregation because they became lawyers, teachers and doctors in their own black communities, quite happy to ignore, and be ignored by, whites. Cosey, the son of a police informer, has built his own business, a classy, blacks-only hotel in the coastal suburb of UpBeach. It is an expensive place, which only the most well-to-do can afford to frequent.

After the death of his only son, however, he falls apart, and it is left to his daughter-in-law, May, to keep the hotel going, with help from L, the female chef. May also has a daughter, Christine, to bring up, and one day, when Christine and her friend Heed, are out playing, Cosey runs into them. When Heed reaches the age of 11, Cosey marries her, causing a split between the two little girls.

We hear from L herself who is, the story transpires, now dead. We hear from an elderly Heed, reclusive, fearful and waited on by a vengeful, equally elderly Christine who delights in feeding her things she doesn't like; we hear from Christine herself, who reveals much of her relationship with her mother, May, whom she disliked; we hear from Sandler Gibbons, who used to go fishing with Cosey, and whose grandson, Remon, is mixed up with a bad crowd of young men whose speciality is gang rape. And we hear from Junior Viviane, a girl from the Settlements a forgotten, wild area, who comes to work for Heed and becomes involved with Remon.

To Morrison fans, there's much here that is familiar. The issue of women (or girls) divided by a man has been covered in the 1973 novel Sula; the abuse of women and children is present in just about every work, and the issue of segregation was raised also in Song of Solomon (1977) and Tar Baby.

The shifting time frames, the beautiful musicality of the writing - "In unlit places without streetlamps or yelping neon, night is profound and often comes with ease" - and the need for self- invention are all present here too, along with those other themes.

Dominating them all, however, is the sense of home - a home which Christine and Heed fight over (Cosey has left everything to "his sweet Cosey child", whoever that may be); a home that Junior fantasises about, never having known one; a home which Cosey himself tried to build then damaged when he took an 11-year-old as his wife; a home which L never really belonged to. Set against the backdrop of the beginning of the end of segregation, it shows a home built on shifting sands - literally. The Cosey Hotel and Resort has been covered by water for years as the coastal landscape shifted, just as the political sense of "home" changes in the years following integration.

Sometimes the lack of a home produces the best writing - one only need think of those writers in exile, like Joyce, who wrote great works while separated from their homeland. To be in exile within one's homeland, however, is something altogether different, and it produces work that is no less great. To those critics who may feel that Toni Morrison has produced something lesser, or something all- too-familiar, I would echo Lorna Sage's words and point out that the lack of "a safe place to write from" will always be a staple of Morrison's work. And perhaps we'll always need reminding of precisely what that means.

Copyright 2003 SMG Sunday Newspapers Ltd.
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