Bethany Bettany by Fred D'Aguiar

Michÿle Roberts acclaims a novelist who reinvents the liberating language of childhood

Any novel worth its place on the shelf represents a necessary and compelling reinvention of the form. Fred D'Aguiar's powerful and original work employs all kinds of poetic rhythms and shapes to dramatise the dreams, struggles and desires of his protagonists. He has helped to create a new kind of novel, in which sequences of great lyric beauty express the struggle into expression of the urgent currents of inner lives.

Bethany Bettany is no exception. This is a novel crucially concerned with the role of language, both written and oral. For the child heroine, torn between warring loyalties embodied in the doubled name that she bears, a legacy from her divided parents, words have consoling and healing powers. Torn from a London childhood and returned to her large family in Guyana, Bettany, as she is henceforth called, is the outcast, frequently and savagely beaten by her aunts and uncles because she reminds them too vividly of her mother, whom they hate.

She defends herself by translating the rush of pain into silently voiced images: "Each insult adds itself to me one piece at a time to complete the puzzle of my body. Body of black and blue flowers. Red roses planted on me." Another, magical, method of escape is by "flattening" herself and flowing under doors.

Gradually, she discovers how to plunder dictionaries, make her lists of cherished or feared terms, sing calypso, chant ecstatic dramatic monologues. She puzzles at length over how to describe things: an account of eating fruit while cycling behind a truck, hanging on to the tailboard to travel at high speed, takes up pages. Her glee at verbal dexterity matches her pride in her strength and skill.

Since a major theme of this novel is people's fear of change, and their subsequent difficulties with talking to each other, dialogue is replaced by solo musings. The thought-voices of Bettany's relatives clash and soar operatically. All the action happens in the present tense, the eternal now of poetry, mysticism, psychic disturbance.

Even the border war into which Guyana plunges, and in which Bettany's family is involved, partakes of this dreaminess. This is a bold stroke: D'Aguiar's narrative method insists that historical and psychic facts, inner and outer worlds, overlap and shift about far more than we like to think. The benefit of this non-realist storytelling is that it gives the reader untroubled access to minds and hearts. The drawback, occasionally, is that one can't quite believe some scenes. Would Bettany, finally rescued by her grandmother, really feel such complete lack of rancour towards relatives who so cruelly mistreated her? In the fairy-tale version of her passage into adult life, yes, we accept she has triumphed through her healing imaginative capacity. On the level of psychological probability, we might not.

Bettany, set free of her old terrors, blessed by the passage rite of menstruation, moves toward trying to understand the war and being reunited with her missing parents and grandfather. With Fly, the boy soldier she meets, she finds love she can trust. How beautifully D'Aguiar writes about eroticism and sensuality. He reinvents it for us as Bettany reinvents herself through it. The novel, which has mused on family, solitude, community, racism and exile, culminates in a paean to love lost and found again. Tenderly, it gives that powerful, last word to Bettany's mother.

Michèle Roberts's 'The Mistressclass' is published by Little, Brown in April