All books open with a mystery. Sometimes it’s a mystery of plot—who committed the murder?—and sometimes it’s a mystery of character: what kind of a person is this? “Bina: A Novel in Warnings,” by the Irish-Canadian author Anakana Schofield, dispenses plot details sparingly, so that you hardly know what has happened or why, and yet the book’s driving enigma turns out to be of the second variety. Oddly, this is the case even though Bina (“that’s Bye-na not Bee-na”) tells us, from the first sentence, exactly who she is and what her intentions are. “My name is Bina and I’m a very busy woman,” the seventy-four-year-old narrator announces. “I’m here to warn you, not to reassure you.”
Bina is not a conventionally unreliable narrator. She’s forthright (she says she hates “roundabouting”) and practical: “There’s nothing I like more than to be useful,” she claims. That’s why she’s writing everything down—not because she wants to, or because she thinks you’ll thank her for it, but because there ought to be a way to wring some good from her mistakes. As an old woman in a country (Ireland) that, Schofield suggests, sees old women as foolish and disposable, Bina is accustomed to swallowing down cruelty and coughing it back up as aphorism. For example, if a person “highly clean & civilized is standing at your door, ask yourself what bold mischief that person could be capable of, then imagine it twice as bad,” she cautions. Or: “if you ever see a person lying in a ditch, drive straight past them as fast as you can.”
At times, Bina, for all her aversion to “mithering,” gets lost in remembrance, or else she’s forgetful, losing track of what she’s already said. She scribbles on scraps of paper lying around her house in rural County Mayo: receipts (“I have thousands of them despite having so little money to spend”), bills, correspondence. The space constraints of these media can make the narration spare and poetic, thoughts building, breaking off, or trampling one another as they march in short lines down the page.
But, little by little, the picture fills out. Bina is tormented by a man named Eddie, her “sorta son,” whom she took in after he crashed his motorcycle in a ditch by her house. (The way pieces of Eddie’s story emerge recalls another Irish novel, “Milkman,” by Anna Burns, which takes place during the Troubles and explores how a fog of fear might circumscribe one’s thought. Schofield dips into the same gnomic, traumatized mode: “The ditch was the door. / One led on to the other / Led back to each other.”) Eddie yells at and hits Bina, steals from her, and conducts his illegal business—something involving trash—from her yard. When the book opens, Eddie has fled to Canada after a ten-year reign of terror, but Bina can’t stop thinking about whether he’ll return: “You’ll not forget Eddie’s out there / until finally you or he is not.” She has also joined a secret group that offers medically-assisted suicide to the elderly. Her contact in the organization, an inscrutable figure she calls “the Tall Man,” used to stop by occasionally for tea and a game of Scrabble, but has now disappeared. Rounding out the small cast is a band of millennial “Crusties”—“the socialists, the Marxists, the laryngists”—who want to protect Bina from possible arrest, and, in an incongruously fanciful touch, David Bowie, who alights now and then in Bina’s dreams, urging escape.
Careful readers of Schofield’s work may recognize Bina from “Malarky,” the author’s début, from 2012, in which Bina, in a cameo role, attacks a plane with a hammer. The narrator of “Malarky,” Philomena, was Bina’s dear friend, and Phil’s loss permeates this book like ice melting through fabric. (This is true in a formal sense, too: were Phil still alive, Bina would likely be confiding in her, not us.) The women’s relationship—a bond forged against a backdrop of misogynist violence, sustained over tea—lends stakes and solidity to what might otherwise read as an exercise in tone, a séance to bring Samuel Beckett, with his absurdism, gallows humor, and lyrical foreboding, back to earth. Instead, Phil’s memory and the pain of her absence are the hydraulics working beneath “Bina” ’s darkness, pumping meaning into “the thing about Eddie,” which is, as Bina eventually explains, that “those who we want shut of, linger,” whereas “those who should remain, don’t.”
In 2019, Schofield had a brush with Internet virality when she wrote an essay, in the Guardian, condemning one of Marie Kondo’s prescriptions for inner peace: if your books fail to spark joy, throw them away. “Literature does not exist only to provoke feelings of happiness or to placate us with its pleasure,” Schofield argued. “Art should also challenge and perturb us.” Many readers embraced the statement as an ars poetica, the key to understanding Schofield’s fascination with difficulty, and with such topics as suicide, domestic abuse, and sexual deviance (as in her second novel, “Martin John”). But while Schofield’s themes are transcendently bleak—so bleak that the bleakness must be the point—her style feels almost decadently addictive. Bina makes for great company; her obstinacy, like Bartleby’s, is flecked with heroic resistance, and her complaints elicit a pleasing mixture of satisfaction and dread. “People think old women have nothing to do but stand around,” Bina says. “They’re very wrong and very ignorant and do take that last combination of wrong and ignorant as another warning.”
The intimacy of Bina’s direct address is the book’s greatest weapon. It underlines much of what we are meant to understand about Bina (her frankness, her loneliness) and much of what we are meant to realize about ourselves (our expectation that she will be helpful or amusing). Writing in the Drift, Marella Gayla has observed that “the much-discussed phenomenon of ‘women’s anger’ ” has grown intensely marketable. Works that “draw their authority, and sense of urgency, from the intimation that women haven’t had the chance to tell the whole story” may resonate with readers who feel similarly “overworked and underestimated.” But such tales still cater to the markets: the overlooked woman turns out to be beautiful, effective, ingenious. Bina, by contrast, has aged out of economic value and conventional desirability. Unlike someone like Amy, from “Gone Girl,” she doesn’t scheme or have creative aspirations. She’s not a capable freelancer, as in Hilary Leichter’s “Temporary”; she spends much of the day in bed, but she is not a trendy gallerist, like the protagonist of Ottessa Moshfegh’s “My Year of Rest and Relaxation.” Rather, Bina is old and, though she rejects your pity, increasingly helpless. She may issue warnings, but she is not to be feared.
It’s tempting to interpret “Bina” as a pointed challenge to the feminist marketplace: do you actually care about this lady? Bina’s untold story, short on seductive deviousness or self-destructive passion, is that a man preyed upon her vulnerability and that she misses her friend. The stubborn lack of charisma to these facts makes the novel almost as recalcitrant as its narrator—both demand, grouchily and wittily, to be taken on their own terms. In this light, Schofield’s irritation at a project like Kondo’s makes sense: where women are commodified, “if she doesn’t spark joy, throw her out” becomes a plausible position. In fact, it is everything that Bina seeks to warn us about. Whether we heed her is up to us.
