Within the years since #MeToo, an outpouring of fiction by writers akin to Emma Cline, Sophie Waterproof coat and Rachel Yoder has grappled with what it means to be a sufferer, and what it takes to be an abuser. Montreal-born, Scottish-based writer Sarah Bernstein’s second novel, Examine for Obedience, spins a rigorously woven net of culpability and criminality – of which gender is one high quality thread – in answering its central query: if assaults on minority teams are unrelenting, in what methods do these teams internalise blame?
The narrator’s encounters with modern-day antisemitism are captured acutely and absurdly
“I knew they have been proper to carry me accountable,” professes Bernstein’s unnamed narrator on the outset. “They” are the native residents of an unspecified distant northern nation the place her entrepreneurial elder brother lives in a lavish, former gentry-owned manor home. After his marriage breaks down, she drops the whole lot and travels to be at his beck and name. The crime of which she stands accused is begetting a sequence of native environmental catastrophes on her arrival: a canine’s “phantom being pregnant”; a depressive sow crushing her piglets; and a herd of crazed cattle.
There’s a basic paradox in Bernstein’s narrator – or non-narrator. The youngest of many parasitically needy siblings, since childhood she has been “skilled” by her brother to “reorient all my needs within the service of one other”. It’s hinted that he as soon as abused her, and there stays a hint of one thing virtually incestuous between them (“I did like to decorate him,” she mentions passingly).
However extra is amiss: she and her brother belong to “an obscure although reviled individuals who had been dogged throughout borders and put into pits”. The nation to which her brother has emigrated is the place this persecution of their Jewish ancestors befell. The narrator’s encounters with modern-day antisemitism are captured acutely and absurdly. She is pointedly made the money-handling treasurer of organisations, and the townspeople recoil at her each transfer, whether or not a benign look, “whats up” or consuming within the city’s diner – which provokes a scream.
Then again, regardless of her sympathy relating to the townspeople’s resentment after the unlucky latest occasions, the narrator can not resist divisive hobbies such because the weaving of “reed males” – her ancestor’s craft, she believes – which she deposits on the doorsteps of residents (“One by no means knew how one’s items is likely to be acquired”). By way of the cracks of a narrative advised by a narrator who typically evades and reels again her account, we glimpse the phobia she evokes in others – and might solely ponder whether we should always take her at her phrase.
As in her first novel, The Coming Dangerous Days, Bernstein paints from a palette of dread, her fickle narrator imagining that the land itself is attempting to “expel” her. Little really occurs, however, mirroring the protagonist’s each day ramblings by means of the woods, the novel is made up of philosophical, typically rhapsodic meanderings logged in meticulous, measured prose. Bernstein was lately named certainly one of Granta’s finest younger British novelists of 2023, and it’s little surprise. This masterly follow-up to her debut acts as a meditation on survival, the risks of absorbing the narratives of the highly effective, and a warning that the self-blame of the oppressed typically comes again to chunk.