Valerie Martin has set Property in the Deep South of America in the
early 19th century. Firmly based on primary sources, the novel
tackles the mighty injustice of regarding people as chattels.
Narrator Manon Gaudet is the unhappy, childless wife of a dull,
brutal and inefficient owner of a Louisiana sugar plantation. Her
husband, significantly, is never named, but his character is
created via Manon's observations through a spyglass, and via the
monotony of his concerns. The novel's pivotal character is Sarah, a
house slave given to Manon as a wedding present: she becomes the
mistress of Manon's husband and mother of his two children. In
compressed and vivid style, Martin evokes both the suffocation and
the cruelty of plantation life, with its concealment, hypocrisy and
secrecy and its emphasis on money. This was a violent world geared
to the buying and selling of helpless people: they could be sold
and thus separated from their children, spouses and homes on an
owner's whim. Slaves not unnaturally sought their freedom through
running away or by means of uprisings, but a whole class of people
made a living tracing runaways and any uprisings were ruthlessly
dealt with. The stories of Manon and Sarah are parallels concerned
with political and personal freedom. Both women feel themselves to
be powerless, Manon because of her sex, Sarah because of her
colour. Both are bent on escape; predictably it is Manon who
achieves a degree of freedom, albeit at a price. Yet Sarah is the
one who has the experience of seeing a wider world in which black
people are at least nominally free. Through Manon's unvarying and
unwittingly ironic narrative voice, Martin brilliantly exposes the
moral blindness of a world in which absolute power tends to corrupt
absolutely. Forget Scarlett and Rhett: Martin tells it the way it
really was. (Kirkus UK)
Manon Gaudet is unhappily married to the owner of a Louisiana sugar plantation. She misses her family and longs for the vibrant lifestyle of her native New Orleans, but most of all, she longs to be free of the suffocating domestic situation. The tension revolves around Sarah, a slave girl who may have been given to Manon as a wedding present from her aunt, whose young son Walter is living proof of where Manon's husband's inclinations lie.
This private drama is being played out against a brooding atmosphere of slave unrest and bloody uprisings. And if the attacks reach Manon's house, no one can be sure which way Sarah will turn . . .
Beautifully written, PROPERTY is an intricately told tale of both individual stories and of a country in a time of change, where ownership is at once everything and nothing, and where belonging, by contrast, is all.
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