Review
THE TIGER CLAW
by Shauna Singh Baldwin
Knopf Canada, 592 pp.
Shauna Singh Baldwin’s first novel, What the Body Remembers, was a promising debut. Featuring two strong female characters, it told a story of how women are gauged and predetermined by culture. Her new novel The Tiger Claw (shortlisted for this year’s Giller Prize), has no clear idea as to what it’s supposed to be. It tries to be both topical and a Le Carré novel, yet ends up an unfortunately executed work that is neither of those.
The novel traces the life of the real Noor Inayat Khan, who worked as a special intelligence agent in occupied France during the Second World War. She is captured, and while in prison writes letters to her lover, a Jewish musician. When the war ends, her brother (who opposes their clandestine romance) searches France trying to find her, and the story is told both through his narrative and her letters.
This seems straightforward enough, but Baldwin defines her novel in Victorian terms – language, style and structure. Aside from any concerns about her playing puppeteer with a real-life person, the fault here is one of purpose. Is the story meant to have applicatory value, or is it a simple tale of spiritual redemption?
Take Noor herself – an intelligent, dynamic character, who ends up derailed by Baldwin’s need to describe her constant metaphysical distress in minutiae. The idea of crossing Beckett’s Malone Dies with a 1950s pulp crime novel may sound interesting, but instead Baldwin settles for a more didactic approach, and restrains her lead from finding any true and effective analysis.
For such a lengthy novel (nearly 600 pages), the narrative is further stalled with history lessons. Baldwin tells things to her readers as if they must have no idea what she’s talking about. Consistently, interesting exchanges are interrupted with stilted passages that seem to need to couch history in plain, easy-to-understand terms. Is Baldwin concerned that this context isn’t woven into the story already?
Throughout Noor’s journey, you repeatedly ask yourself, "Who thinks in such lengthy, metaphorical terms? Who litters their speech with this many adjectives?" I can’t help but wonder what sort of effective novel lies within The Tiger Claw’s pages. Baldwin is a talented writer, and I hope next time she just writes like herself.
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