The Chequer Board

TRIGGER WARNING coming up.

I never thought I’d have to start one of my book posts with one of these, but it’s impossible to write anything sensible about this novel without using an obnoxious and offensive racist word.

So here we go.

The main character of this story learns he has only a few months to live. So he decides to track down the men he once shared a hospital ward with during the war - the story takes place in the late 1940s - and find out what happened to them. One of those men was an African American soldier or, as the characters in the novel so blithely refer to him: a nigger.

But here’s the thing: the book isn’t racist. It’s about racism and, in the sections about that character, paints a most sympathetic portrait of the experiences of black American soldiers sent to England to build a military base prior to the arrival of white US troops. They do their work, they go the local pub, they’re polite and courteous, and everybody in the village likes them. Then the other soldiers arrive and within days they’re demanding that the black troops use a canteen on the base and that the pub become Whites Only.

What I find so startling about this book – apart from its immensely impressive narrative fluency; Nevil Shute really knew how to tell a story and this is one of his best – is that in a book so obviously anti-racism that only a fool could miss it, the word nigger gets tossed around like a tennis ball at Wimbledon.

All the characters use it. And not just the racists. The latter use it hatefully; the sympathetic characters just use it as a description, as though it were no more than that. For them, it really isn’t intended as an insult. And you realise, reading, that it was just standard practise back in the post-war years. Just a word.

I suppose just writing this will ensure that some people never go near this book. Which would be a shame. Because for a story published in 1947, twenty years before Enoch Powell’s ‘rivers of blood’ speech generated huge waves of approval in the UK, here’s one that goes to immense lengths to paint a sympathetic, lovingly detailed portrait of racial harmony.

And all the time using a word that now denotes anything but.

(This old paperback cover gives the African American an aggressive posture, and a knife, and puts him halfway to the background. Did the artist not even read the book?)