The Darling (55 page)
Authors: Russell Banks
S
PECIAL THANKS
are owed to my assistant, Nancy Wilson, for her help with much of the research; to my agent, Ellen Levine, whose support and friendship have sustained me for, lo, these many years; and to my editor and friend, Dan Halpern, whose tact, intelligence, and trust guided me throughout the writing of this book.
Also, heartfelt thanks to Bela Amarasekaran of the Tacagama Chimpanzee Sanctuary, Freetown, Sierra Leone; Sally Boysen at Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio; Gloria Grow of the Fauna Foundation, Chambly, Quebec; and the many other individuals around the world who have dedicated their lives to saving chimpanzees from medical experimentation, abuse as entertainers and pets, and outright extermination.
“Russell Banks’s work presents without falsehood and with tough affection the uncompromising moral voice of our time. You find the craziness of false dreams, the political inequalities, and somehow the sliver of redemption. I trust his portraits of America more than any other—the burden of it, the need for it, the hell of it.”
—M
ICHAEL
O
NDAATJE
“Russell Banks’s twentieth-century Liberia is as hellish a place as Joseph Conrad’s nineteenth-century Congo. The only creatures that behave with humanity are the apes. A dark and disturbing book.”
—J. M. C
OETZEE
“Hannah [the narrator of
The Darling
] is a descendant of Joan Didion’s alienated, terminally detached women … and she is a relative, too, of Graham Greene’s quiet but not so innocent Americans and V. S. Naipaul’s Western war tourists, who somehow imagine they are exempt from the chaos and violence they witness in their wanderings abroad.”
—
New York Times
Affliction
The Angel on the Roof
The Book of Jamaica
Cloudsplitter
Continental Drift
Family Life
Hamilton Stark
The Relation of My Imprisonment
Rule of the Bone
Searching for Survivors
Success Stories
The Sweet Hereafter
Trailerpark
THE DARLING
A Novel
ISBN 0-06-095735-2 (paperback)
ISBN 0-694-52423-9 (unabridged CD)
A political/historical thriller of terrorism, political violence, race, and cultures
CONTINENTAL DRIFT
ISBN 0-06-095673-9 (paperback)
A story of love and sex, racism and poverty, and the failures of the American dream. American dream.
THE SWEET HEREAFTER
A Novel
ISBN 0-06-092324-5 (paperback)
A small-town morality play that asks: when the worst thing happens, who do you blame?
CLOUDSPLITTER
A Novel
ISBN 0-06-093086-1 (paperback)
A dazzling re-creation of the political and social landscape before the Civil War.
THE ANGEL ON THE ROOF
The Stories of Russell Banks
ISBN 0-06-093125-6 (paperback)
Thirty years of Banks’s best short fiction, including eight new stories.
RULE OF THE BONE
A Novel
ISBN 0-06-092724-0 (paperback)
A journey of self-discovery through a world of magic, violence, betrayal, and redemption.
AFFLICTION
ISBN 0-06-092007-6 (paperback)
Spellbinding and inexorable as a fuse burning its way to a stick of dynamite.
FAMILY LIFE
ISBN 0-06-097704-3 (paperback)
Transforms the dramas of domesticity into the story of a royal family in a mythical contemporary kingdom.
HAMILTON STARK
ISBN 0-06-097705-1 (paperback)
A thoroughly engaging story of life on the cold edge of New England.
THE RELATION OF MY IMPRISONMENT
ISBN 0-06-097680-2 (paperback)
A work of fiction utilizing a form invented in the seventeenth century by imprisoned Puritan divines.