Toni Morrison's "Song Of Solomon" is like every other novel I have read by her: Proof that she is one of the greatest writers I have ever read. In the same class, in my opinion, as Joyce, Conrad, Dickens, Virginia Wolff, Hemingway, Baldwin, the Bronte sisters, Mann, and Jane Austen. She, like Joyce and Yeats, is able to connect and intertwine the history, mysticism, and spiritual culture of black Americans with a realism is that is both frightening and at other times beautiful.

Years ago, while watching a baseball game on the TV, the announcer said, "that it made him extremely distraught that as an African American that so many of today's young and brilliant black stars had no idea who Jackie Robinson or Roy Campanella were... That they were oblivious to the struggles and discrimination they encountered and simply took it for granted that what they had now was due them, without acknowledging the sacrifices of past generations.

On one level, Ms. Morrison, without using the baseball analogy takes this issue head on and it is not until the lead character Milkman goes on a journey to discover his past that he becomes a full and inspiring person. History matters to this amazing writer and together with her sublime writing ability she flies high and far, like Solomon, and teaches us profound truths about all of us... Black, white, Indian, Hispanic, Christians, Jews, Muslims, etc. Etc.

"Song of Solomon" is writing at its very best and Ms. Morrison is a treasure whose works and brilliance will last forever and as the poet Yeats writes, "nor time, nor place nor art will move it."

A rich full story that speaks to self discovery. This book takes you to places and make you question a lot about yourself and your past. A well rounded full novel. I recommend it.

4.5

Reread

In The Source of Self-Regard, Morrison says of this work: “…into these spaces should fall the ruminations of the reader and his or her invented or recollected or misunderstood knowingness.” During this reread, my “recollected or misunderstood knowingness” landed on clues—fairytale elements—I choose to believe Morrison scattered as a key to the subversive, communal, familial folksong that arrives later in her narrative.

In the first chapter Ruth, nursing her son who’s nicknamed Milkman, thinks of herself as the “miller’s daughter” of the Rumpelstiltskin story, she who has the power to turn straw into gold. Gold will be the lure that takes the adult Milkman from a pampered existence toward the almost-ludicrous trials he puts himself through to reach the legendary cave of his father, Macon Dead, and Macon’s sister, Pilate (and the siblings’ dead father). Like Hansel, though without a Gretel, he also visits the crumbling house of a “witch” with “golden-eyed dogs.” His many trials lead him toward an understanding of what is fool’s gold and what isn’t.

Like a benevolent godmother, Pilate once sat and sung at Milkman’s crib. She is quickly banished by his kingly father, who believes his sister has hidden stolen wealth in her home on the shameful side of the tracks. He poisons his son with this belief, as if it’s “Jack and the Beanstalk…some fairy tale mess.” When Milkman is old enough to venture to Pilate’s house unbeknownst to his father, he is bewitched by Pilate’s voice and the smell of her wine-making, but the choices he makes with the Ophelia-like Hagar, his cousin, are still those of a privileged prince.

Set during the time of Malcom X and the Birmingham church bombing, Milkman’s journey, from home toward a truer home, and there and back again (like the hobbit), is that of a mythical hero. It makes for a gripping tale, one that Morrison has made relevant to the time period and to all time: Women and children, left behind, grappling with the reality of flown fathers and lovers; women of wisdom whose life-choices are slim to nothing; coldblooded revenges that turn inward, sickening the perpetrators; true names that lie unrecorded— suppressed under wrested, false power.

‘Song of Solomon’ is a coalescement of a variety of different literary styles; a pinch of magic realism with a dash of Faulkner, synthesised with African folklore and the Western narrative form, leaves us with a style which is both a synthesis of various influences and wholly original.

‘Song of Solomon’ follows the story of Milkman Dead, an insouciant and at times conceited young man, whose birth coincides with the suicidal attempt of flight by the lachrymose salesman, Mr. Smith, whose attempts to fly are captured in a wonderfully poetic vignette of images;

“When the dead doctor’s daughter saw Mr Smith emerge as promptly as he had promise from behind the cupola, his wide blue silk wings curved forward around his chest, she dropped her covered peck basket, spilling red velvet rose petals. The wind blew them up and down and into small mounds of snow”

The spectre of Mr. Smith’s suicide subconsciously follows Milkman around for the rest of his life-there is something weird and unconventional about him, something slightly unsettling, a feel which is exacerbated by the eccentricities of his family-from his authoritative and peremptory father Macon, whose sole concern is money and property and his long-suffering wife Ruth, for whom Macon harbours an insatiable malevolence due to the incestuous nature of her relationship with her father or Macon’s messianic sister Pilate and her bellicose grand-daughter Reba, whose love for and desire to possesses Milkman sends her into a murderous frenzy, the grandiose and Biblical undertones of the family story and dynamics underpins their difference to most of the other African-American characters who populate the novel.

Monied and well-educated, the interactions between the Dead family and other Black characters symbolises the growing divide between different sectors of African-American society as some groups were becoming closely assimilated within American society, other groups, who lacked their money and therefore status were being pushed further towards the fringes of society, dehumanised not only by the White population but by those from their own community who used their wealth and privilege to parrot the prejudices of the White population. Milkman’s journey to and around Pennsylvania is symbolic of this-he believes that the poor country-folk he meets are in awe of his wealth and status, reducing them to a collection of simplistic clichés and blind to the anger cause by his condescending and arrogant air. Morrison is exploring how the core values of American society-land, power and money, are at the core of the racial divide.

There is something Biblical about the story, from the characters, to the themes and prose style it’s mythical and magical undertones and is one of the seminal novel about the African-American experience in American literature.