Woman seeks fulfillment in war-ravaged Liberia

In “The Darling,” Russell Banks depicts with considerable empathy the turbulent recent history of the Republic of Liberia. Banks, author most recently of “Cloudsplitter,” a portrait of the fiery abolitionist John Brown, thrives on conflict. Nevertheless, the real subject of his latest novel isn’t that chaotic sub-Saharan country but the emotional terrain crisscrossed by its white American protagonist, Hannah Musgrave, in pursuit of her identity. Now in late middle age, on the upstate New York farm she acquired after returning from Liberia, Hannah takes stock of her past, having freed herself of men and the radical ideology she maintains victimized her. With his trademark painterly consideration, Banks instills the lush landscape of war-torn Liberia and the bleak upstate farm (where Hannah grows organic vegetables and raises free-range chickens) with a brilliant intensity. These tableaux contrast ironically in tone with Hannah’s self-absorbed recollections.

Her militancy dates to her college days, when she spends a summer registering black voters in the South. Though acutely aware of life’s inequities, her rebelliousness is rooted not in the racial divide of the ‘60s but in her battle with her father, a prominent supporter of liberal causes, and her overly dependent mother. Hannah’s evolving combativeness leads her to join the Weathermen, where her skills (math, mechanics, linear thinking) prove invaluable for making bombs and producing fake IDs. She and Zack, a fellow upper-middle-class radical, are mismatched, despite mutual attraction: Each is eventually drawn to a world supposedly more authentic than their privileged past -- she to the working class and dangerous men, he to drug dealers and intellectual Jewish women.

When Zack warns that the FBI is closing in, she obligingly accompanies him to Ghana, where he once served in the Peace Corps. There they part, and she decamps for Liberia, colonized in the 1820s by freed American slaves whose descendants, having become the elite, rule with an iron hand. President William Tolbert is soon to be overthrown by Samuel Doe, an illiterate master sergeant at the head of a dozen enlisted men.

Woodrow Sundiata, the assistant minister of public health, hires Hannah to work in a rundown plasma lab that supplies samples of chimpanzees’ blood to a U.S. pharmaceutical company. When he proposes marriage, she accepts as she accepts most offers, diffidently, and metamorphoses into a compliant wife, bearing three sons and entertaining Liberians important to Woodrow’s career with the steadfastness she once applied to making bombs. Eventually, feeling extraneous and learning that the family maid has all along been Woodrow’s mistress, she makes the lab chimpanzees her substitute family.

Once Doe is in power, he regards Hannah as a liability. Pressed by Woodrow, she agrees to return to the U.S., where Zack easily enlists her help in springing Charles Taylor, a Liberian planning Doe’s overthrow, from a minimum-security jail. It’s just like the good old days! In a farfetched scene, Hannah visits Taylor in jail and, swayed by his visionary plans, sizes him up as a romantic possibility.

However ardently Hannah reinvents herself, she is consumed by guilt for abandoning her family. Her introspection is harsh, self-excoriating: “In my twenties, in Weatherman, I so severely attacked what we think of as natural instincts, so pruned and cropped them, ... that in my thirties and forties I was nearly incapable of cultivating them.”

With his eye for conflict, Banks lingers on gruesome detail. Hannah’s dispatch of her chickens for market foreshadows a human decapitation and other gratuitous mutilations some chapters later, in yet another brutal Liberian war, waged largely by teenage soldiers -- like Hannah’s three sons, who live up to their noms de guerre (Fly, Demonology and Worse-Than-Death).

Neither Woodrow nor her sons question their identity, rooted as they are in their tribe, in Africa. Hannah, though, is imprisoned by her past. At the outset she exclaims, “The truth is ... I don’t want to tell my story. Not to you, not to anyone” Yet, by appealing to the unnamed “you,” who recurs throughout, she seems to seek one more chance at happiness. For Banks, “The Darling” is a remarkable leap into the consciousness of a troubled mind.

Walter Abish, a novelist and short-story writer, is author of “Double Vision,” a self-portrait.