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The Living Days by Ananda Devi review – a tale of exploitation

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jan/03/the-living-days-by-ananda-devi-review

The Mauritian author explores how legacies of colonialism and empire persist amid acts of cruelty and violence in London

First published in France in 2013, The Living Days is the 12th novel by the Mauritian author Ananda Devi. Set in London, it tells of the sexual abuse of a 13-year-old black boy by a 75-year-old white woman. Mary has lived a loveless life ever since losing her virginity to a soldier during the war: he went away to fight and didn’t come back, and she never moved on. Jeremiah, who goes by the nickname Cub, lives on a council estate in Brixton. His mother is very hard up, so he skips school to earn money doing odd jobs at Mary’s house in Notting Hill. Mary becomes obsessed with Cub; he starts sleeping in her bed, and things get worse from there.

Devi is not the first contemporary novelist to depict a female paedophile, but whereas novels such as Alissa Nutting’s Tampa (2013) and AM Homes’s The End of Alice (1996) foregrounded the psychopathology of sexual predation, the emphasis here is more social than psychological. The abuse scenario recounted in The Living Days prompts a meditation on urban inequality, in which the politics of race and class loom large. We learn that Cub had idealised white women: “He envied them their elegance, their affluence. Their modulated voices, their discreet accents so unlike the shrill shrieks of the neighbourhood girls … At night, he dreamed of them … They’ll be my way out of Brixton.” Mary’s adoration of Cub is described by Devi’s third-person narrator in startlingly dehumanising terms: Mary wonders at “this pure, animalistic marvel of his body”; he is “a glorious monster” and “the most elusive of creatures”.

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