Extract from Soul Tourists - Analysis

The writing on this website is excerpted from my new book Soul Tourists. It was quite a challenge finding an extract because the book is so varied in its use of form that no one extract is representative of the whole book.  I call Soul Tourists a novel-with-verse as different from the novel-in-verse genre which I’ve used for my two previous books. This novel is a real mix of forms: prose, poetry, prose poetry, scripts and other non-literary devices such as a death described through a coroner’s certificate, a relationship row described through budgets (excerpted) and a character’s inner dilemma expressed through a self-addressed Q & A format.

Soul Tourists is about a British couple who meet in London. There is Stanley, a quiet, placid banker of Jamaican parentage who meets the charismatic and extrovert Jessie, an ex-singer and comedienne, who is of Ghanaian extraction. They embark on a European odyssey by car which also features ten historical figures of colour who have lived on the continent and who appear to Stanley as ghosts. The ghosts include Pushkin and his African great-grandfather Gannibal,  the Jamaican nurse Mary Seacole who was famous for her work in the Crimea, Princess Louise Marie the illegitimate daughter of Louis XIV’s wife Queen Marie Therese and her black dwarf Nabo, Hannibal who crossed the Alps with forty elephants over 2500 years ago, and the notorious Alessandro de’ Medici of the Italian renaissance. 

So the novel is therefore a re-imagining of European history as well as a novel set on the road. The extract entitled 'Letter for the Court of Jessie at Ölüldeniz' is set at a point in the novel where Stanley and Jessie’s relationship is deteriorating. The following extract of the budget, 'Summer of 1989: Court Budget', is the most extreme example of experimentalism in the novel which is why I’ve chosen it.

Stanley and Jessie have been camping in Turkey where Jessie is the centre of attention at the campsite. Every night the other campers gather at what Stanley calls ‘The Court of St. Jessie’, to be regaled by her exaggerated anecdotes and bawdy songs. Stanley feels overlooked yet he is acutely aware that he has funded the whole trip and this prompts a row. Before Stanley met Jessie he was a man on an excellent income but he hadn’t done anything remotely interesting or adventurous with his money. Jessie is the one who has taken him out into the world, on an adventure across Europe, but it is with his money. This worked so long as they were getting on, but when the relationship begins to deteriorate Stanley expresses his anger at her through money. He places their relationship in a financial context. What is Jessie costing him? He comes up with the answer, his budget,  which clearly shows his resentment. But it must be noted that the sum total of what he pays out is not actually exorbitant, even for 1989. Stanley does have a mean streak but of course money is not really the issue. Jessie, on the other hand, in her corresponding budget,  shows her value in terms of what gifts she brings to him, which are not, needless to say, financial. Gifts which cannot be bought such as unconditional love and complete loyalty. The irony is that Jessie’s love for Stanley (if she does love him, we are never quite sure) is very conditional. She tries to control him completely, a stranglehold from which he tries to escape. The budget can be interpreted as showing two people who are opposites: Stanley values money and Jessie values experience. Yet it is not that cut and dried. Jessie can only get her experience through Stanley’s money and Stanley money has brought him extraordinary experiences. The last extract, 'A Trip Down Memory Lane', shows the end result of this row; Stanley is running away from Jessie, and it also shows the emergence of one of the ghosts, Mary Seacole, and how her story is woven into the novel.

Soul Tourists was originally written as a straightforward prose novel of 90,000 words which didn’t work. The story was messy and the writing too prosaic. Once I began to experiment with the form of the novel, turning the prose into poetry and scripts and so forth, the language and story began to come alive. It took another three drafts for this final mixed-genre form to emerge, a novel of 50,000 words – I had shed 40,000. I found that the prose and poetry did not always have different functions within the narrative, as might be expected. Yes, the prose was often used to move the story along while the poetry was often used to dip into their emotional worlds, to discover their inner landscapes and secret personal histories. Yet there are times when the poetry is also used simply to drive the narrative along and to encapsulate dialogue. The script form was also used to capture conversation while at the same time conveying their inner thoughts. The budget was originally several pages of prose describing the tension in Stanley and Jessie’s relationship. I don’t know how I got the idea of creating the budget which expresses the argument in this unusual way, but once I did I knew it was the right form for the content. Writing is full of moments like these, ideas which seem to come from nowhere and when they arrive there is a certainty that they will work. It gives me such a buzz. 

With Soul Tourists I dared to be more different than I have been before although the form as it evolved grew out of the content, it was not imposed as an intellectual exercise. The novel is not easy to categorise but I hope that it breaks down the boundaries between prose, poetry and scripts and that readers will easily follow the novel through these blurred borders and switches of character and voice.

I never intended to be a maverick, but that is what I’ve turned out to be. I simply have not been able to write a novel-by-numbers, and it is a curse and a blessing – trust me. I  always want to do things differently and when I try to slot into traditional forms I end up abandoning them. My novel-in-verse Lara was originally a straightforward prose novel too which I changed into poetry. The Emperor’s Babe was originally a few poems which grew into a novel-in-verse.  So I’ve written plays that were poems, prose that became poetry, poems that became novels and now I’ve written a novel which has all sorts of weird things in it. I guess this is one of the reasons why I do it – to surprise myself.

© Bernardine Evaristo

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