To Fill a Yellow House by Sussie Anie review – salvation in a charity shop | Fiction

Life in the city is shocking, its din so overwhelming that inhabitants learn to dull it into an incessant ambient roar. It is this bewildering clamour of urban living that sets the rhythm for Sussie Anie’s London-based debut novel, To Fill a Yellow House. It is the story of the unlikely friendship between Kwasi and Rupert. In the course of the novel, we see Kwasi grow from shy infant to artistic and socially unsure young man. Rupert is the ageing owner of a charity shop. He and the shop, poorly maintained after the death of his wife, are both in decline, caught between the whims of the unsupportive council and the threat of local youths.

If this sounds like a small or parochial story, it is testament to Anie’s skill (and background as a short story writer) that it rings with such keen and resonant themes. The only thing Kwasi and Rupert have in common is they are both outsiders, which makes their simple, human closeness all the more touching; amid the pressures of inner-city life, they allow each other the space in which they can be themselves.

Kwasi’s voice is majestically narrated, folding in Anie’s authorial drive with his own syncopated artistic sensitivity. For him, the world is still molten and newfound – holding scarves for the first time, he describes the way they “slip between his fingers like water turned to cloth”.

The story’s antagonist is the city, the tension coming from the ties, demands and restrictions imposed on the two friends by their communities. Yet the novel does not pursue the easily editorialised tales of youth violence and gang crime, lingering instead on the quieter moments in its storytelling rather than the direct opposition of traditional drama.

The novel is about the failure to act as much as it is about action. Although sometimes this can feel like the plot doesn’t fully take shape – as if the beats of the story grow dim at times – it means the characters are given a startlingly recognisable humanity. Jericho, Kwasi’s cousin, is by turns friend, persecutor, role model, ringleader; he is what happens to someone who struggles for the esteem of everyone and the antithesis of Kwasi’s own search for authenticity.

Instead of mounting violent threats, Anie creates a harder-won drama from Kwasi’s struggle to be himself; in her skilful narration it is his inarticulacy that best expresses his frustrated urge to belong, his sense that “everything pushes him away. Everything is too much but not enough.” It is only through art (both visual and musical) that Kwasi eventually finds a way to be heard.

To Fill a Yellow House explores the problem of “how to be” if you want to be truly yourself, if you are not prepared to divide yourself among what everyone else wants. As the novel follows Kwasi carving out his own freedom – finding communities delineated less by family and neighbourhood, united instead by permitting and “seeing” each other – it points a way to our untying ourselves from those with whom we share a history, to form more meaningful bonds with those whom we share a future.

Life in the city is shocking, its din so overwhelming that inhabitants learn to dull it into an incessant ambient roar. It is this bewildering clamour of urban living that sets the rhythm for Sussie Anie’s London-based debut novel, To Fill a Yellow House. It is the story of the unlikely friendship between Kwasi and Rupert. In the course of the novel, we see Kwasi grow from shy infant to artistic and socially unsure young man. Rupert is the ageing owner of a charity shop. He and the shop, poorly maintained after the death of his wife, are both in decline, caught between the whims of the unsupportive council and the threat of local youths.

If this sounds like a small or parochial story, it is testament to Anie’s skill (and background as a short story writer) that it rings with such keen and resonant themes. The only thing Kwasi and Rupert have in common is they are both outsiders, which makes their simple, human closeness all the more touching; amid the pressures of inner-city life, they allow each other the space in which they can be themselves.

Kwasi’s voice is majestically narrated, folding in Anie’s authorial drive with his own syncopated artistic sensitivity. For him, the world is still molten and newfound – holding scarves for the first time, he describes the way they “slip between his fingers like water turned to cloth”.

The story’s antagonist is the city, the tension coming from the ties, demands and restrictions imposed on the two friends by their communities. Yet the novel does not pursue the easily editorialised tales of youth violence and gang crime, lingering instead on the quieter moments in its storytelling rather than the direct opposition of traditional drama.

The novel is about the failure to act as much as it is about action. Although sometimes this can feel like the plot doesn’t fully take shape – as if the beats of the story grow dim at times – it means the characters are given a startlingly recognisable humanity. Jericho, Kwasi’s cousin, is by turns friend, persecutor, role model, ringleader; he is what happens to someone who struggles for the esteem of everyone and the antithesis of Kwasi’s own search for authenticity.

Instead of mounting violent threats, Anie creates a harder-won drama from Kwasi’s struggle to be himself; in her skilful narration it is his inarticulacy that best expresses his frustrated urge to belong, his sense that “everything pushes him away. Everything is too much but not enough.” It is only through art (both visual and musical) that Kwasi eventually finds a way to be heard.

To Fill a Yellow House explores the problem of “how to be” if you want to be truly yourself, if you are not prepared to divide yourself among what everyone else wants. As the novel follows Kwasi carving out his own freedom – finding communities delineated less by family and neighbourhood, united instead by permitting and “seeing” each other – it points a way to our untying ourselves from those with whom we share a history, to form more meaningful bonds with those whom we share a future.