It would make sense to describe Queenie, the debut novel by Candice Carty-Williams, as an important political tome of black womanhood and black British life, a rare perspective from the margins. It is both those things, but primarily it is a highly entertaining, often very moving story about one young woman’s life as affected – in fact, almost destroyed – by her love life, with the politics of blackness permeating the pages. It is rare. It’s still so rare that even its most simple, nondescript moments are something to celebrate. Queenie, for example, taking off her coat and putting it through the strap of her rucksack in a London street while flat-hunting. Her Jamaican grandmother calling: “I’m putting the hot water on. Come down for your porridge and wait for it to warm.” How often do we get to read of black people in novels making porridge for each other and negotiating their rucksack straps? It’s a thing of joy to witness the everyday within a familiar yet still relatively hidden context, particularly when that context has often been shackled to hefty racial themes, its mundane humanity hardly given space to breathe.
South London millennial and budding journalist Queenie is, as she herself admits, a “catastrophist”: someone who worries about worst-case scenarios, unbearable outcomes, general humiliations and the perpetual lead weight of anxiety. The novel opens with a gynaecological examination introducing three causes for worry: the possible loss of her coil, an undetected pregnancy and a preceding sexual episode bordering on abuse. So begins a difficult and painful journey through Queenie’s unfortunate choice of men. There is the Pakistani Muslim BMW driver who addresses her as “big batty” and wants to experience the “forbidden fruit” of sex with a black woman. There’s the sex addict she meets at a party who gives her internal bruising; the neo-Nazi encountered on a dating site, also interested in exotic black-girl sex; and the relatively normal nice white boyfriend, who becomes an ex-boyfriend, which is what leads to the flat-hunting, during which she is groped by a Polish estate agent. “Is this what growing into an adult woman is,” Queenie asks, “having to predict and accordingly arrange for the avoidance of sexual harassment?”
Predictably enough, the novel has been hailed as the black Bridget Jones, and it does bear loose similarities in its portrayal of the conventional female quest for the love of a good man and the realisation that self-acceptance and self-sufficiency are more important. But Carty-Williams goes much deeper than that, casting a full glare on the damaging reductive stereotypes, born of slavery and colonialism, that surround black women’s bodies, sexuality and psychology. The gynaecological beginning seems to make a point in itself, and likewise the sexual frankness throughout is refreshing, smartly and accurately rendered by a voice fully in command of its own narrative and intent on setting the record straight.
During her schooldays, Queenie was accused of being “white on the inside and black on the outside like a coconut”; her friend Kyazike assured her that she can “be any type of black girl” she wants to be. Ripped to shreds is the enduring stereotype of the “strong black woman”: this heroine flails and weeps in a whirl of panic attacks, sleep paralysis and depression, for which her therapist prescribes various cognitive behavioural exercises. There is a touching theme of women supporting each other, and the camaraderie and empathy Queenie gets from her WhatsApp group of friends “The Corgis” are especially affecting. Their text-speak is hilarious, peppered with “KMTs” (kiss my teeth, Jamaican slang), while sometimes the group’s varied backgrounds necessitate translations from white-posh to multicultural London English. Kyazike herself is one of the most alive characters I have come across in any novel; she must be read to be believed.
Amid this centralising of female experience and friendship there is a sustained awareness of surrounding social and political issues, such as race hatred and gentrification. What happened to that old Caribbean bakery there used to be in Brixton? And how is it that Queenie feels so conspicuously out of place at her local pool, the Brockwell Lido, where she overhears two middle-class white women complaining about the tenants in their second homes? The Black Lives Matter movement crops up several times, and we are called on to mourn the black men dying in droves at the hands of US police brutality. This is an important, timely and disarming novel, thirst-quenching and long overdue: one that will be treasured by “any type of black girl” and hordes of other readers besides.
• Diana Evans’s Ordinary People is published by Vintage. Queenie is published by Trapeze (£12.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
