Russell Banks, a writer who balances story with justice, talks to Eileen Battersby about 1960s radical groups, being political, and saying the things that need to be said
An American in Liberia; a white female with an FBI listing courtesy of her radical student past in the US, settles in Liberia. It takes Russell Banks, author of Affliction (1989), The Sweet Hereafter (1991), Rule of the Bone (1995) and The Angel on the Roof (2000), to balance the themes of 1960s US culture and foreign policy with that of one woman's complex personal history. With the publication of his excellent new novel, The Darling, the unobtrusive Banks yet again confirms that among major US writers he is one of the most consistently concerned with the role of "writer", as opposed to that of the more image-conscious "writer as public man".
Yet whereas US reviewers have concentrated on the central character, Hannah Musgrave, the "darling" of the title, European-based reviewers have looked more at his treatment of the politics of colonialism and US foreign policy. "We in the States have decided to live in a form of denial, it's easier," says Banks, a serene, down-to-earth individual of strong opinions tempered by a low-key delivery. Of all the major living US writers, Banks remains the quiet truth-teller, the voice of reason, an artist who balances story with justice.
This is a convincing book of immense courage and, put bluntly, the finest novel yet written about Africa by an American. The creation of the artificial west African republic of Liberia in the 19th century to facilitate the easing of liberated slaves out of America is a chapter of US history that officialdom has tended to dress up in idealism. It is a travesty of a geographical place, a part of Africa blatantly shaped rather than merely influenced by American culture.
Much of Banks's finest fiction to date has concentrated on contemporary, blue-collar hell in his native New Hampshire and Vermont. With his ambitious historical saga, Cloudsplitter (1998), he demythologised and humanised the complex figure of anti-slavery terrorist John Brown, mad man or saint, or both. Banks, a writer of uncluttered, measured prose, proved in that novel he had no difficulty in confronting his country's past - even if many of his fellow Americans remain reluctant to review the colonial legacy. The Darling compounds this candour.
"I have always been political, since my student days and still am. I've always had things to say, and said them." He makes the point that there is less freedom of expression than one might expect in the US. "Oh I can write the comment pieces I want to do in leftist publications such as the New Republic, or the Village Voice, but there's no point in writing a toned down article in the New York Times, I'm better off writing for Libération, or Figaro."
There is no aggression, no defiance, no self importance. Banks is calm and unassuming, a man with a moral voice who deals in realities, not polemics. How does he feel about the current US administration? "Don't get me started," he says with impressive reserve.
Returning to that long-held national reluctance to look at the realities of the slave culture and its impact on US history, he praises Toni Morrison's Beloved (1986) and its courage in tackling the long-concealed horrors of slavery. "Yes, she was the first major US writer to confront what is a highly sensitive subject. Writing about a mother having to resort to infanticide as the only way to protect her child, that's a powerful response to what was a horrific treatment of our own people."
The Darling is a novel of metaphors as well as a compelling study of a woman reviewing her past. Hannah, approaching 60, reflects on a youth spent in revolt and a marriage shaped by ambivalence as the white wife of an African politician. Although she is not particularly sympathetic, Hannah is convincing and real, never an idealised heroine.
"She is a person who has made many mistakes through good intentions gone wrong," says Banks. "Even when she puts the chimps on the island where they are killed, she was only trying to save them. It's a life of good intentions gone wrong." She is tough, and the Liberia she observes is ugly, as she recalls: "The country was a money-changing station. Corruption at the top trickled all the way down to the bottom."
The Liberia that Banks evokes is chillingly accurate. It is the Liberia I experienced in 1991; when was Banks there? "The closest I got was Sierra Leone, I was never in Liberia. But I've been there in my mind," he says with a smile.
To someone who was there, his sense of the place is uncanny. Hannah experiences the Liberia I saw. Does he regret not having actually been there? "I tried to get in. But then I thought: 'I'm a novelist, not a reporter or a historian. Why am I going there? What am I looking for? The smells? The speech?' I had reads lots of books and spoken to Liberians and to other people who had lived and worked there." Later Banks mentions that while readers who have been to Liberia agree he has caught the place, "it is the critic who has never been there who decides I've got the country all wrong". Banks is confident he has got close to the sense of place destroyed by outside influences and all the consequences of being devastated by one more forgotten war. Liberians also had to contend with famine.
He has travelled through several African countries in recent years. His sense of injustice has never left him. "I was and remain political. By the time I went to college, I was 24 and married with a child. I was older than most and my college - I was at Chapel Hill in North Carolina - was the Berkeley of the South. It was very cosmopolitan."
Among the many metaphors and symbols in The Darling are the chimps, Hannah's "dreamers". When she discovers how badly they are being treated as part of a bogus science project, she sets out to help them. It is interesting to see this woman, who has difficulties relating to the people around her, engage with them. "Her sons are Africans like her husband. She can't penetrate their culture," he says. There is a wonderful sentence in the book in which Hannah the former revolutionary describes her time as a wife and mother. "And so began the period when my life made no sense to me. I stayed home and shopped and cooked with Jeannine and supervised her care of my sons, the care of my house, even the care of my husband . . ."
Banks is also fascinated with chimps. "I became very interested in them over the years, through my wife, who is an animal lover. I'm attracted to chimps not because they are so like us, but rather because we are so much like them."
Throughout his travels in Africa, he has seen exploitation and the effects of colonialism, particularly the legacy of US foreign policy. Was it anger that drove him to write The Darling? "No, it was sadness and forgiveness," he says unexpectedly. "I remember women, women like Hannah, who did try to make a difference, and I see them now, 60, and teaching in high school, or involved in inner city school projects, still trying to do things, but keeping carefully quiet, almost underground."
In the novel, Hannah is a member of a terrorist group called The Weather Underground. Is this the fictional counterpart of a real life 1960s organisation? Without laughing at the generation gap, Banks, who was born in New Hampshire in 1940 and lived through the 1960s, explains The Weather Underground did exist. Looking back on that era he speaks about the social changes, the campus revolutions and the civil rights movement.Many of the young revolutionaries were, like Hannah, from privileged homes. Banks, studying English literature, was different. "I was from a working class background and by the time I had entered college, was already a published writer."
He is serious - there is always a lingering sense of the violent family life he experienced in his youth. But he is not without humour and is amused by my reaction when he says he has been married four times, "although my fourth marriage has been going on for what, 17 years. My wife [poet Chase Twichell] refers to herself as my 'last wife'. I have four children, all grown. I'm a grandfather".
Banks turns 65 on the day of the interview. Dressed in a neat white shirt, sports coat and long green scarf, he is also wearing what appears to be a dressy pair of wine-and-black leather cowboy boots. Less intense than he photographs, he looks younger, more like a health-conscious fiftysomething and mentions climbing Mount Kilimanjaro in January "for the second time".
The Darling is a fine novel but then so are all his other books. Affliction, a powerful story of a divorced loser haunted by his relationship with his father, is one of the finest late-20th-century US novels, as is The Sweet Hereafter. Both transferred into outstanding movies.
Banks agrees. "I've been become increasingly involved with film, both as a writer and producer. We're casting Rule of the Bone now, and also working on Continental Drift." Another exciting project is preparing Cloudsplitter for a three-hour television drama with Robert De Niro. Each of Banks's books demands lengthy discussion, as do the dazzling stories that make up The Angel on the Roof collection.
In one of the brilliantly interlinking stories a disappointed father "studied his son's face carefully, as if seeing something there he had never seen before. When you love someone for years, you lose sight of how that person looks to the rest of the world. Then one day, even though it's painful, you push that person away, and suddenly you can see him the way a stranger sees him . . . Tom stopped looking at his son and instead looked at the ground."
Few writers see as clearly, and write as candidly as does Russell Banks. As expected, The Darling is a novel which must be read. But then, the same should be said of each of his books. Russell Banks is an inspired storyteller, whose medium is truth.
• The Darling by Russell Banks is published by Bloomsbury (£17.99)