FICTION
Claire Lowdon
There Are More Things
by Yara Rodrigues Fowler
Fleet £16.99 pp464
Yara Rodrigues Fowler’s
debut, Stubborn Archivist,
was longlisted for the Dylan
Thomas and Desmond Elliot
prizes, and shortlisted for the
2019 Sunday Times Young
Writer of the Year award.
There Are More Things is
that rare second novel that
more than delivers on the
substantial promise of the first.
In The Observer, Stubborn
Archivist was lazily hailed as a
book for “anyone looking for a
thoughtful, witty successor to
Sally Rooney”. (Why Rooney,
born 1991, needs a successor
born in 1992 is unclear.) The
two novelists share little more
than their generation, their
gender and an interest in the
effects of trauma on the body.
Rodrigues Fowler, a south
Londoner, has a British father
and a Brazilian mother, and
Stubborn Archivist was a
nuanced exploration of that
dual heritage. The most
dialogue with the Oresteia and
The Tempest. It is a novel that
keeps a straight face while its
characters quote from
Wikipedia. Perhaps it seems
decadent to be calling for
more humour in a book with
such serious subject matter:
oppression, immigration,
corruption, racism, Brexit,
the impeachment of the
former Brazilian president
Dilma Rousseff, systemic
privilege, educational
inequality. But it could lose
some of its earnestness
without losing any of its power.
The fairly explicit assumption
that British readers will be
left-wing Remainers feels like
a literary misstep too.
So, you might not crack a
smile, and you’ll have to payattention — this is a sprawling
narrative — but the effort will
be rewarded. Nothing feels
forced: the various storylines
overlap like tributaries in a
delta, crisscrossing on their
way to the sea. Whether
Rodrigues Fowler is zooming
in on Melissa’s first kiss with
her best friend Ruth (“After
thirty seconds they pulled
away. Breathless. It was warm
like egg yolks”) or zooming
out to give us an overview of
four generations in as many
pages, she always knows
exactly what she’s doing.
Odds are we’ll be seeing There
Are More Things on several
shortlists this year: it’s a
serious accomplishment
from a talented writer with a
gloriously untethered style. cprofile left-wing family counts
a governor of Pernambuco
state and a revolutionary aunt
Laura, now dead, among its
members. Melissa, a software
developer, is the only child of
a single mother, brought up
in south London with the help
of three “grandmothers”,
Jean (from Ireland), Jasmine
(from India) and Janine (from
Trinidad). Melissa’s mother
is Brazilian too, but Melissa’s
cultural inheritance is
complicated: she has never
been to Brazil and knows
nothing of her mother’s life
before her birth.
The London of 2016 and the
ex-council-flat-share in Mile
End where Melissa and
Catarina meet are evoked
with delicious precision, as
are scenes from Melissa’s
adolescence. Rodrigues
Fowler has the power of
imposition — of letting the
reader really see the yellow
fake wood flooring in an
open-plan kitchen, or the
tense grey canvas of a
trampoline in the garden of
a Victorian townhouse. Soon
we are further back in time:
to the newly democratic Brazil
of Catarina’s childhood, then
to the dictatorship of the early
1970s and the underground
world of leftist guerrillas as
we learn the truth about
Catarina’s aunt Laura.
Rodrigues Fowler has an
intuitive feel for pacing, for
when to tell and when to
show, when to deploy detail
and dialogue, or song lyrics,
or Portuguese, or even
recipes. And when to say
nothing at all: as in Stubborn
Archivist, she makes striking
use of blank space in sections
where the narrative nearly
nudges over into prose
poetry. Her ear for speech
is particularly impressive.
I found myself thinking of the
Zadie Smith of Swing Time,
the Chimamanda Ngozi
Adichie of Americanah, the
Bernardine Evaristo of Girl,
Woman, Other.
One important thing
Rodrigues Fowler could learn
from those three writers is the
value of comedy. There Are
More Things — which takes
its title from Hamlet — is an
JADE JACKMANardent, learned novel inexciting feature, however,
was Rodrigues Fowler’s bold,
free style. Hopping around in
the novel’s chronology, she
confidently juxtaposed the
twentysomething narrator’s
present-day experience
with childhood memories
and fragments of Brazilian
family history.
The same bravura
approach to storytelling is
on display in There Are More
Things, which is a more
ambitious book: a larger cast
of characters, a longer time
span, heftier themes, a
broader, explicitly political
outlook. We begin with two
young women. Catarina is an
academic who has come to the
UK from Brazil. Her high-Zadie meets Bernardine
This talented young writer’s second novel is confident, complex — and puts her in great company
One to watch The writer
Yara Rodrigues FowlerHer ear for
speech is
particularly
impressive
1 May 2022 27