A Review of Emma Donoghue’s “Akin”
A “Nice” Visit
Imagine this scenario. You are a 79-year-old widower living alone in a New York City apartment, looking forward to a week’s vacation in Nice, France — where said widower was born, and to which he hasn’t been back to since his childhood. You receive a mystery package of old photographs that your mother took, which may or may not have something to do with family secrets. However, just before you’re set to leave for France, you also get a call from social services noting that you are the last living relation of your great-nephew, whom you’ve never met — at least, the last living close relation who hasn’t been incarcerated. Would you take him in, and take him along with you to France? In this case, said widower — named Noah — does.
That’s the set-up for the latest novel by Canadian-Irish author Emma Donoghue, Akin. Donoghue is probably most famous for writing the terrifying abduction novel Room, but Akin is a world apart from that work. Basically, the book is a bit of a travelogue as Noah and his great-nephew Michael do a big sightseeing tour of the Mediterranean coastal city. And so we get passages where the duo duck into fancy restaurants (and argue about what to order from the menu) or museums, or visit old friends who might be able to unravel Noah’s mother’s secrets. To that end, Akin is part mystery novel, but a lot of what’s revealed is mostly conjecture because so many years have passed. Still, this marvelous work is at its best where Michael and Noah are interacting, and the generation gap comes into play. The pair essentially hate each other, until Noah becomes impressed with Michael’s keen eye and Michael finds himself growing fond of the old man as he unravels bits of history and fun stuff to Michael’s amusement.
Akin does falter, though, and mostly it does in its opening passages. Before Noah meets Michael, he does a lot of living inside of his head, and we’re introduced to a plethora of characters who have either passed on or never show up again in the rest of the novel. This causes a bit of confusion for the reader, and, to be entirely honest, the first bit of Akin runs a bit slow. Things pick up, however, when the Noah-Michael pair meet up and get the show on the road in France. Even then, some readers (though not me) may have a hard time handling the fact that this novel is two characters’ vacation to a weird and unfamiliar world. However, the bond that develops between the pair makes up for this. In fact, the ending of the novel is more than a bit sentimental, and I had to admit that I was curious about what would happen to these characters. (Opening the door for a sequel, perhaps?)
For a woman author, I was impressed that Donoghue gets men right, right down to their smug bravado. These characters feel real and alive, and I had to admit that I got caught up in this fictional world. It turns out that Noah’s grandfather was something of a famous photographer, and Donoghue deftly draws you into this world — so much so that you’d be forgiven for thinking that it was entirely real. (The acknowledgments section exposes the real inspiration for this shutterbug character.) Even though the novel is by and large a book about wandering into unexpected places, it’s a fun journey — again, made pleasurable by the bond that the old man and young boy come to share. By novel’s end, you’ll have forgiven a lot of Michael’s outbursts (and annoying frequency to take selfies of himself on a cracked cellphone all of the time) and Noah’s penchant for getting a little moody now and then.
By and large, I enjoyed Akin. It was an unexpected pleasure watching these characters grow and mature (yes, even Noah), and learning a little bit about French history. Some of the dialogue is in French (though with a translation of the text immediately following it), and it really added a fresh dimension to work — it’s the little details that Donoghue gets right that only adds to Akin’s sense of realism. In the end, this is an astonishing work that fires on most of its cylinders — once you get past the New York City section of the book, it’s a little of a page-turner. It was also a bit of a poignant book, because — given his age — Noah is facing death not too far down the road, and this glimpse at mortality was a bit sobering to read as my cat recently died. (Which accounts for a bit of a delay in getting this review to you, dear reader. Sorry. I had to grieve.)
What this means is that Akin may not be a perfect book, and it doesn’t have the imposing feeling of claustrophobia that Room had. Yet, this is a very different book, and a difficult one to pull off as well as it does. You can tell that a great deal of research went into the telling of this tale right down to a little detail such as a cannon being fired off every day at noontime (a bit of a running joke in this work). For those who are looking to read up on France, Akin is a little like taking a trip to the country without needing to leave your own bedroom, or wherever you read. This is a novel that you can savour (some of the food that Noah eats may even get you drooling a little) and perversely enjoy as a bit of a trip without needing to board an airplane for. This may be a book about tourists, but, in the end, Noah and Michael are no longer tourists to each other — and that might just be this book’s greatest feat. All the more reason to discover Akin in all of its dazzling glory for yourself.
Emma Donoghue’s Akin will be published by Little, Brown and Company on September 10, 2019.
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Get in touch: zacharyhoule@rogers.com
