Love and Other Consolation Prizes: A Novel
By: Jamie Ford / Narrated By: Emily Woo Zeller / Afterword By: Jamie Ford
Length: 11 hrs and 29 mins
Truly lovely! Mr. Ford, sir? Pleeeeze tell me the Muse will have ya coming out with a new one soon?
I do so love it when a truly loved story ends with an Author’s Note. And Love and Other Consolation Prizes does indeed do so, so Huzzah! Ford rather glibly says that now this story is over, he’ll go back to waiting for his Muses to call on him, waiting for some arcane tidbit of historical wow-ness to fall into his lap, and he’ll go back to staring at his screen, beginning to write again.
And dude! This is my second Jamie Ford, the first being the emotionally evocative Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet which did so charm me. I appreciate it when an author can throw all sorts of horrific events at his characters, have dreadful outcomes, and still manage to wind up with a heartwarming ending. I mean, huh? Howza done?
This book, which was a choice for our little audiobook club shows Ford pulling the historical rabbit outta his wordcrafting hat once again. Based on an article he found, with a bit of artistic license taken to craft his story (The person raffled off in the 1909 AYP expo in Seattle was an infant, whereas Ford has turned him into our hero, the half Chinese half white Ernest Young—his American name), Ford has transported us back to Ernest’s childhood sold from China and taken by human traffickers to America at the turn of the century and then bouncing back and forth from/to the 1962 World’s Fair at Seattle. We hear his tale of much woe with much love thrown in.
At the story’s opening, where Ernest (And I’m not eeeeven gonna try to take a stab at his Chinese name!) watches his newborn sister struggle to live but days before being buried under a mound of ash, his mother, impoverished and smelling of perpetual starvation, sells him to the not-his-uncle white man who takes him to a ship bound for America. Held below in the ship’s holds, he finds himself showing generosity of spirit to the thrown away and doomed Asian girls who are also being transported. He’s taken in by them, dubbed Little Brother, and he views and cares for each as Sister.
This particular affinity for girls/women will stand him in good stead after he’s raffled off at the Alaskan-Yukon-Pacific expo where Madame Flora wins him, after greeeeeatly stacking her odds in her favor. He’s taken back to her brothel where he’s to be Houseboy and later, the brothel’s driver. The book is no more wholly about brothels at the turn of the century any more than The Cold Millions is about panhandling. Rather, both are about the human condition and the ability to make decisions based on love… with all the ramifications THAT has in life.
While at Flora’s, Ernest meets her daughter Maisie and forms a friendship with her. There too he meets young Fahn, a Japanese girl also from the ill-fated ship. And so we have a tale about love and friendship even as the three navigate harsh realities of the time. Maisie’s fate is to have her virginity auctioned off in a grand gala, even as Fahn rails against this injustice, believing she’s been snubbed and is to have no grandeur in her life, no matter what such a gala entails. Sure there is champagne and silk gowns, other “girls” applauding and celebrating, but prostitution is just that. Flora educates her “girls”, but the reality is still as emotionally devastating as anything around.
Bounce forward to 1962 where an aged Ernest lives alone, his wife Gracie dealing with the ravages of dementia caused by syphilis. A medical miracle occurs whereby she has moments of lucidity, but that just only brings the horrors/memories of her sordid past closer to her awareness. She begins letting slip little blurbs, like she was once a whore. MUCH to the astonishment of hers and Ernest’s daughters who’ve had noooo idea of the horrific pasts Ernest and Gracie survived. The daughters have made it in this new America, notable for their Asian features, yes, but not shunned or as horribly mistreated as their parents who lived around the Exclusion Acts once were. Their image of their parents? They dunno; it’s all been so secretive, their parents so silent.
But JuJu (Judy) has found an article about a Chinese boy named Ernest raffled off in 1909, and now she has questions. 1962 is Ernest’s year to make peace with the past even as Gracie tries to deal with her feelings of loneliness, of complete shame, of utter unworthiness. Will Gracie’s girls find out she was once a struggling and emotionally scarred, misused, mistreated, violated girl named Fahn? Her fear is that they will. Along with this is the greatest desire to see Ernest, who’s always treated her with tenderness to find the happiness that he deserves.
And it all wraps up at the 1962 Seattle World Fair, where poodles were raffled at the beginning but were replaced with an outcry that this new society is too socially aware to do anything so cruel, never mind a young boy was once a prize, and nobody blinked or questioned. This new fair is also fraught with the debauched, perfectly juxtaposing the modern peekaboo titillation with the past’s reality of virgins sold to the highest bidder.
This audiobook was well-received by our little audiobook club, for its simply glorious writing and wordsmithing, and for Emily Woo Zeller’s fine performance. At first I was groaning when I saw that a woman had been cast as a narrator when the main character is male, but Zeller did the many facets of Ernest so well, his contemplative states, his outrage and bitter contempt as Maisie’s highest bidder patronizes him with sardonic benevolence. Plus she did soooo well with all Flora’s “girls’, with Maisie, and the seize-the-moment daring of a young Fahn. That she got the self-righteous indignation of the turn of the century moralizers/suffragists? AWEsome. Well done!
Beautiful, beautiful stories, well-crafted, inspired by the hideous ugliness of true history and given a copper-burnishing of love and devotion, of innocent hearts who’ve seen much, survived much, and who’ve gone on to love much. Truly touching.
And I can’t waaaaait for Jamie Ford’s next one. Write faster, Mr. Ford! Whip! Whip!
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