Almost English by Barbara Sibbald

Reviewed by Deborah-Anne Tunney

Reading the novel Almost English, a homage by Barbara Sibbald to her great-grandparents, I came to feel an endearing closeness and sympathy for its central characters. Although set in another country with other cultural references, the story highlights the similarities between their ambition for a fulfilling life and how it is the same as our ambition and countless other people world-wide. Generally, we all want to have close family relations, to know love, to achieve worldly success, in short to have a sense of belonging. But as the story of Lily and Stephen (the characters based on Sibbald’s own great-grandparents) unfolds we come to see how the restrictions of the time limit their possibilities.

Living in India in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, if you were part native (in Stephen’s case, one quarter) meant that certain careers were not open to you, that certain people would not consort with you, and that generally you were destined to a life of less opportunity. The novel shows how wearying such constraints can be, and we cannot help but come to see the injustice of such a system. Individuals had a choice: they could recognize the customs as being fundamentally unfair (represented in the novel by the character of Stanley, Stephen’s brother) or learn to adjust and live within it, as Stephen does. When he tells Lily of his ancestry, he says:

“You know I am committed to the Raj, to uplifting the people of India with education, faith and better health. Despite all this, what matters most is that though father was British, mother is half Parsi.”

So much of the novel hinges on the strength of Stephen’s and Lily’s union, and on their desire to give their children advantages. We see how a family can peacefully confront a racist system and despite their frustrations, in their own way, prosper.

Most people would agree that embedded within us all are the palimpsest essence of our ancestors. The defining characteristic of who we are physically, mentally, maybe even spiritually can be found there. Mostly it is a mystery how the seeds of our ancestors’ bloom in us, but if we are lucky enough, we may have a parent who shares stories of the past, as Sibbald’s mother did. And if we are doubly lucky enough to have the creative bent that allows us to make fiction from these stories—again, as Barbara Sibbald has—then perhaps we could also create something as impressive as Almost English.

What I found particularly masterful about this novel was the way the author inserts comments into the text, telling us how her detective work (be it from letters, artifacts or other peoples’ commentary) allowed her to find and share the story of Stephen and Lily. This form in the hands of a less skilled writer might feel like an intrusion to the flow of the novel. But in “Almost English” her comments serve to ground the story with a modernist’s perspective. The work itself is a seamless hybrid of fiction and biography, with one form supporting the other. Sibbald is on a quest, and the reader gets to enjoy the sense of accomplishment as she gathers more and more information about her ancestors and about the time in which they lived.

In the Afterword of the novel, Sibbald writes of how her mission to uncover the nature and essence of her great-grandparents’ life left her with the certainty of their existence. During her last visit to India with her mother, they were able to find the boulder in the tea garden at Kangra where Stephen lived at the end of his life. When it was discovered, her thought was:

“Unearthing this boulder, these names, made it real. They were here.”

Indeed. They were here, and now so is she, and by extension us, the reader. All of us enriched and broadened to know these characters, to know their children, to know the time and place where and when their lives were lived.

We are unlikely to read a more thoughtful and generous novel about the discovery of ancestors from another century that through their love of family were able to overcome much of the disappointments of their own time. The novel brings us to a time and place that allows us to see in the humanity of these characters our own humanity, and to garner from the experience empathy for these people who lived during a time of such personal compromise.

Almost English is published by Bayeux Arts.