Written by Hari Kunzru, and published in 2017, this is undeniably a gripping read. It's creepy; it's page-turning; and it's highly appropriate to be writing about it today (Ghost Day in Chinese culture), because -- as its author testifies -- it's essentially a ghost story.

It's disturbing on a number of levels, and most definitely thought-provoking.

The bulk of the narrative is presented from the point of view of Seth. He's a white American student from the suburbs, awkward, nerdy, lacking in confidence, used to the absence of money. Very early on, it is suggested that Seth might not be a totally reliable narrator. After his mother died, he says, he "had some kind of break or event". This manifested itself not only as severe agoraphobia, but also in an ability "to hear the past".

He obviously recovered sufficiently to function at university. And he's relieved, when he is introduced to old recordings by (white) fellow-student Carter Wallace, that the music don't bring back these symptoms. Or so he thinks... Right from the beginning, in fact, there are lapses in Seth's consciousness. Chunks of time disappear. Connectors drop out. Localities change. Scenes no longer match. Slippage is everywhere.

And as the book progresses, this dislocation intensifies exponentially... Eventually, the reader is ricocheting between eras and viewpoints, never quite knowing what is real and what isn't.

This is uncomfortable, but it is very much the point. The persistence of the past is one of the book's most important themes: "[Giuglielmo] Marconi," Seth tells us, "thought that if he could only invent a microphone powerful enough, he would be able to listen to the sound of ancient times... If Marconi was right and certain phenomena persist through time, then secrets are being told continuously at the edge of perception. All secrets, always being told... Nothing ever goes away."

Seth has an expert ear, and he frequently goes out to record the sounds of the city: "I wanted to store the world and play it back just as I'd found it, without change or addition." This is his undoing, because one day, while out and about recording, he happens upon a snatch of a blues song, which starts: "Believe I buy me a graveyard of my own." When he listens to his recording again, he finds he has the whole song, though he doesn't remember hearing it.

Then Carter listens to the recordings, and finds the guitar accompaniment, separated in time, but fitting perfectly with the vocals. So, sound genius Seth -- somewhat against his better judgement -- splices the two together, and drowns the resultant product in "hiss", to make it sound old: "By the time I'd finished, it sounded like a worn 78, the kind of recording that only exists in one poor copy, a thread on which time and memory hang." Ambitious marketing genius Carter, meanwhile, entitles the song Graveyard Blues, invents (as he thinks) a name for the singer (apparently plucking "Charlie Shaw" out of thin air), and launches their creation into the world of internet collectors.

Who are all fired up by this new "discovery"... But one particular collector, who goes by the user name of JumpJim, contacts Seth and Carter to say he heard that song in 1959, on a real disc recorded by a real man, who was called Charlie Shaw...

Carter, unlike the geeky Seth, is very much a cool dude. He comes from a rich family (whose fortunes have risen still further from a raft of businesses related to the "war on terror"); and he's the kind of guy who's done everything, can afford anything, and is endlessly popular. He, too, has his mental issues. True, they're all airbrushed by money, but Carter -- with his watchful family always hovering in the background -- is not really a free man either. His parents and ghastly older brother (Cornelius) are cut squarely from the obnoxious cloth of the rich-and-powerful. His sister, an aspiring but not particularly talented artist, struggles to break free of the Wallace family connection that always precedes her.

When Carter is attacked in a dubious part of town, and ends up in a persistent coma, this is a bombshell for all concerned. Seth cannot help but feel that his attack is connected with Graveyard Blues: "Whatever happened to Carter had to do with the song, with the three minutes of darkness we had released into the world." When JumpJim later tells him about the rabid collector he accompanied to the deep south in the 1950s in search of old blues recordings, Seth is even more convinced: "Something had attached itself to Carter and me, some tendril of the past, and if we did not detach it, we would be drawn back into death and silence."



Over the course of the chapters the ghost of Charlie Shaw looms larger and larger. As far as Seth is concerned, there is no solid border between life and non-life: "Once you realize that, so much else unravels." Of course, given Seth's mental state, you have alternative explanations always to hand. As Kunzru puts it: "Charlie Shaw is a figure in the book who may or may not exist. He may be a projection of the narrator's imagination, or he may be a real presence from the past, trying to force his way back in a ghostly way into the future."

Either way, Charlie Shaw epitomizes absence, a gulf, a void -- and Kunzru's aim is to explore why black musicians weren't recorded, weren't recognized, weren't remembered: "They are like ghosts at the edges of American consciousness, and some of them are extraordinarily brilliant, and have had a legacy in things like rock and roll music, have had their part in mainstream global culture, but they almost vanished."

And either way, ghost or projection, Charlie Shaw is pretty terrifying. Carter is left without hope of real recovery. Leonie is murdered. Eventually, he "possesses" Seth -- "I was the horse and he was the rider" -- and the obedient white boy ends up murdering Cornelius and his parents.

So who was Charlie Shaw? And why is he out for revenge? Well, his could be the story of countless black people.

We're back in the late 1920s, and Charlie never made it to the recording session he had pinned his hopes on. Having missed his train, he gets a lift, and then ends up walking through a whites-only neighbourhood. He is arrested, and taken to the courthouse, where Judge Wilbur Wallace (yes, THOSE Wallaces) finds him guilty of vagrancy, and remits him to J.J.W. Wallace (yes, same family again...) for labour: "And just like that, I was thrown into silence and darkness. Never to have my voice recorded. Never to be remembered, never known for who I was or how I could play."

He dies, still in forced labour: "But I turn out to be stronger than death. The record I never got to make is out there, at least sometimes, for those that have ears to hear. I put it there. I kept pushing it out. And now I have found a horse to ride. This boy. This weak boy. I have found a way back up into the world."

The injustice that befell Shaw is still being perpetuated, of course.

At the representational end of the scale, as Lucienne Loh points out, "[Shaw's] broken spirit appears throughout the novel in malevolent forms as he seeks reparations and ekes revenge on the Wallace family by destroying both Carter and Leonie. But these appearances/apparitions also manifest themselves -- in various surreal settings -- as contemporary racist African-American stereotypes upon which white fear and hatred of the black other depend. Thus Charlie Shaw partially materialises in the novel as Leonie's rapist murderer and as a thuggish gangster... In this sense, the novel uses Shaw to critique black archetypes which are reinvented and resurrected through different periods, both past and present."

At the material end of the scale, the Wallaces and their ilk are still at it... With their diversification into "correctional facilities", they're doing the same things as their forbears did to Charlie Shaw, just in a globalized environment and with a greater capacity for spin: "You don't have to work 'em anymore. You don't have to walk the line with a rifle. All you got to do is get them into the system. Don't matter how you do it. Speeding ticket. Public nuisance. Once they're in, your boot is on their neck." After which, these grotesques play the other side of Graveyard Blues, which is called The Laughing Song. "It's about balance," they declare. "Fairness. You ought to hear our side of the record." But the "song" is nothing but laughter. For Seth, "it is the most terrifying sound I have ever heard." Pages and pages of ha ha ha ha...



The idea of "balance" and "fairness" and hearing another "side" brings us to the title of the book: "The meaning of the term referenced in the title White Tears is elastic, but in essence it describes the propensity of some white people (even, and perhaps especially, those who regard themselves as enlightened) to focus on their own feelings and responses in issues involving race, instead of acknowledging their privileged position." (There's more on the subject here.)

Painful though it might be to hear, there can be no "fairness" and "balance" while the system is so fundamentally skewed. That's why "black lives matter" should never be answered with "all lives matter", and why it doesn't work to just say "it's not my fault".

There are many examples of this throughout the book. Leonie, for example, speaks of harassment on the street: "What I'm saying is it's never white people... I'm not a racist, Seth. I swear I'm not... It's as if they're in communication. The, uh, non-whites... It's like they all have the same information about me. Like they've formed some kind of opinion and I can't do anything to change their minds." Seth asks whether she means she feels judged. She does, and she resents it.

Yet she can't find it within herself to try to understand. Leonie can't fathom the appeal of the blues that Carter loves: "Why would he listen to this? It's so morbid. Everything about it is dead and buried." To her, his proclivities are built on mistaken premises: "My brother feels guilty for being a rich boy. That's why his heroes are always poor or black. I told him, it's not like you're helping anyone by listening to music. No one cares if you like black people... [The fact that you respect this music] doesn't make them like you any better. It's theirs. They'd rather you left it to them. Even if you did something, I don't know, really selfless. Black lives matter or whatever. They still wouldn't like you."

Well, true, "they" probably would "rather you left it to them". But Leonie's thinking is still stuck in the Facebook-style groove of "liking" and "being liked". It's all about her.

Even those who understand -- viscerally understand -- often can't get past the protestation of personal innocence. JumpJim, recalling the experience of hearing Charlie Shaw's record during his 1950s visit to the south, grasps the problem: "Charlie Shaw's voice swoops down, and it is ancient and bloody and violent and it is coming for me, hunting for me as I sink lower and lower, into the darkness... Charlie Shaw's voice is looking for me, for what I have kept hidden, the guiltiest of my secrets. His voice is filled with such terrible pain that I can hardly bear it." But he can't get beyond his defensiveness: "I should not be obliged to hear this voice. I need it to stop. It is not right. I haven't done anything wrong. The voice wants payment, but how would I even begin to afford the price?"

Some reviewers are unsympathetic towards Seth (Seibert, for example, or Courteau). I don't find him exactly likeable, but he's certainly complex, and interesting. And he does, after all, have a mental condition that must be hell to live with. It's not surprising that he's a bit passive (right up to the end, that is, when he's horribly active).



And he does begin to learn. Perhaps.

Initially, he's all "not my fault" too. In the course of a ghostly encounter during the road trip with Leonie (undertaken with the aim of getting to the bottom of what seems to be the Charlie Shaw curse), he says: "Charlie Shaw is in the car and I need to speak to him... If he doesn't explain, I'm scared that this will go on and the next person it touches will be me. I am a good person. I have done nothing wrong. Carter was the one."

Similarly, when Seth is being pursued (or thinks he is) by "Wolfmouth Shaw", he tells himself: "All I want is to be able to reason with him. I just need to find out what it is I've done. It's not fair to blame me for things that took place long before I was even born. That is what I want to say to him: I am not the one to blame... I have my rights, I want to say. I want to say, what about MY rights? ... I just want him to understand that, whatever happened to him, I'm not to blame. He shouldn't be picking on me."

And it's true, of course. As Kunzru, points out, Seth feels guilty -- so guilty that he's driven mad -- but it is not a question of personal guilt or innocence. This is a structural issue. If, however, the discussion always ends in "white tears" -- it's not my fault, don't pick on ME, I'm not to blame -- then we'll for ever be tiptoeing around white sensibilities, and never finding a real way forward.

It is in Jackson that Seth discovers the connection between Charlie Shaw and the Wallace family. And the penny drops, as he realizes that he, too, through his poor-boy-rich-boy connection with Carter, has profited from the exploiting ways of Carter's clan: "I thought of the buildings I had lived in, the expensive things I had handled and consumed. Whose work had paid for them?" So his learning has started. He realizes that he IS involved. He is NOT just an innocent bystander.

Seth also comes face to face with the reality of powerlessness that black people have laboured under for centuries. Towards the end, constantly on the move, he says: "When you are powerless, something can happen to you and afterwards it has not happened. For you, it happened, but somehow they remember it differently, or don't remember it at all. You can tell them, but it slips their minds. When you are powerless, everything you do seems to be in vain." When you are powerless, you can't drive the narrative in the way that "they" can.

It's depressing, all this, for sure. The past eternally leaves traces in the present. The entities -- large and small -- who have gained from centuries of injustice are happy to urge those who have lost out to "move on"; and they are all too willing to shed white tears when their victims turn round and confront them. But "moving on" is impossible while the exact same system that created the rot stays firmly in place. The individual taking on of guilt, on the other hand, only ends up with more violence and injustice.

Which brings us to another key theme that's been lurking in the wings all this time. Cultural appropriation...

Carter teaches Seth to "worship" black music: "He listened exclusively to black music because, he said, it was more intense and authentic than anything made by white people. He spoke as if 'white people' were the name of an army or a gang, some organization to which he didn't belong."

They're aware of the dilemma this creates: "We worshiped music like [Lee] Perry's," says Seth, "but we knew we didn't own it, a fact we tried to ignore as far as possible, masking our disabling caucasity with a sort of professorial knowledge." Appropriation by the liberal back door...

But the superficiality of the passion is evident in multiple examples. Carter reveres blues, but creates (as he thinks) a complete fake. Recalling his trip to the American south in the 1950s, JumpJim confesses his utter ignorance as to the lives lived by the descendants of his heroes: "I had never been inside houses like that... I had not thought such places existed, not in America. Honestly, I hadn't known." He ends up wishing he had made that trip in order "to register people to vote, to tell them they ought to be free." Chester collects and loves blues music, but won't stand up publicly for equal rights. He is profoundly uninterested in the story of Charlie's life, as told by the bluesman's sister. He just keeps burrowing away for information about his repertoire. And eventually, he steals the record -- the ultimate form of appropriation, as practised by every colonial power everywhere. (Incidentally, this was the record that was never actually made... So was Charlie Shaw's sister a ghost, too? Don't know...) And as Seth explores the "Black Mecca" of Jackson, Mississippi, a woman tells him: "Only two reasons people like you come down here. The blues or taking pictures of ruins. We're fascinating to you, long as we're safely dead." Again, Seth protests that he's not to blame for what happened to her neighbourhood...

Michael Schaub puts this all very succinctly: "The story of American popular music plays out the same way so much of American culture does: black people make innovations, and white people take the credit. Jazz, blues, soul, rock and roll, disco and hip-hop all came from the minds of African-Americans. None of them existed for long before being co-opted by whites who realized they could make big money by watering down the music and selling it to a mass audience. The appropriation of blues -- music born out of the pain and suffering of African-Americans forced to live in a racist society -- is a particularly bitter pill to swallow."

I come away from this book feeling that I have a lot more thinking to do. Which is surely the way the author wanted it to be.