‘Second Life’ upends an immigrant’s tale

“The SECOND Life of Samuel Tyne,” by Canadian writer Esi Edugyan, reads with such a strong authorial tone that it’s hard to believe it’s a first novel. Told with a narrative confidence of a writer twice her age (she wrote the novel when she was 25) it’s easy, initially, to be entranced by Edugyan’s competent storytelling abilities and deft use of language.

Set in 1968, the novel features Samuel Tyne, an emigrant from West Africa’s Gold Coast (renamed Ghana in 1957 when the country won its independence), who’d been considered an intellectual prodigy in his younger years. After the death of his parents, he was raised by his uncle Jacob who renounced his own Gold Coast chieftaincy in order to shepherd Samuel through a British education and resettlement in Canada.

The novel picks up when Samuel is 40, wasting away as a government economist, wondering what happened to all his early promise. His wife, Maud, constantly berates him, and his twin 12-year-old daughters, Yvette and Chloe, treat him with minimal respect. When Jacob dies and leaves Samuel his house in Aster, a small backwoods town in Alberta founded by former slaves, he takes this second chance at life, quitting his job to open an electronics repair shop and work on his early computer invention. He hopes to turn the clock back to simpler times, when immigrant blacks helped one another and his own early potential was strong. “Exile,” the author tells us of Samuel’s outlook, “is hard to overcome. Aster, with its black origins, became a surrogate homeland, a way of returning without returning.”

Samuel’s plan works well at the beginning. His shop is successful and investors offer him cash to work on his invention. But quickly, his life spins out of control as his twin daughters take on increasingly bizarre and dangerous behavior. They set fires to homes and businesses in the area, stop talking, attempt to poison their father and to drown a playmate, try to kill each other and succeed in breaking their mother’s leg. At this point, the author’s control of the work seems to lose traction and the novel, like Samuel’s ideas for a new life, begins to break down

To her credit, Edugyan’s confident timbre never wavers, even as the novel loses its sense of direction. What began as a tale about Samuel and his dreams of a new homeland, illuminating the subject of second chances and the immigrant experience, soon transforms into a confounding puzzle about what’s the matter with the twin girls, a mystery overshadowing all other plot concerns.

Were the twins touched somehow? There’s a scene when they’re only 6 weeks old hinting at some kind of possession or metaphysical powers. Or, the author hints, the girls’ disintegration may be the result of Samuel’s neglect of tribal funeral rites due his uncle Jacob, an impression shared by the family’s neighbors, Saul and his Ghanaian wife, Akosua. Still another possibility is that the girls are suffering from a mental illness.

It’s one thing to have an open-ended finish to a novel, allowing readers to draw their own conclusions, but in this situation, Edugyan does not give readers the information necessary to draw substantial assumptions about the twins’ supposed madness, an element that pulls readers away from the course of Samuel’s life, which, we assume from the novel’s setup and title, is meant to be the central concept.

Still, it’s an amazing feat to write with such self-assurance, to have the confidence and voice to so compel readers. Even with the plot’s missteps, this is a very well written and highly competent book.