Review: Assembly

Natasha Brown, Assembly, (Penguin, 2022)

https://www.goodreads.com/review/edit/56646330

A subtle, poetic insight into racism and class differences

This beautiful novel is hard to get into at first. You can’t tell who the protagonist is or who the narrator is.

A few chapters in, we understand that it’s about a woman, her relationship and her emotional journey. She, the narrator, is of Jamaican heritage, ‘socially ascending’. She has cancer. She is the effort her company makes towards ‘diversity’. He is from ‘old money’. He ‘loves the stories of monstrous men doing hideous things in glossy offices and Michelin restaurants’. His parents welcome her into the family’s grand manse; she is testament to their woke-ness, an ‘exotic, exposed other’.

Minor characters are mentioned—Rach, Merrick, Lou (is he the boyfriend?)—whom we don’t know much about.

The scenes give us her emotions, but not much story. This is actually quite powerful. We feel that she’s narrating the story as if watching it from afar, showing us how she feels about things without telling us what those things are. She admits that ‘to protect [her]self’ she ‘considers events as if they’re happening to someone else’. I feel as if the story is happening in slow motion, like a perplexing dream.

The writing is beautiful, enigmatic, almost like poetry. There is a deep sadness to the tone. Most remarkable is the profound insight into the nuances of the emotions embedded into racism and class differences. This is a subtle, unique masterpiece.