RaveThe RumpusIf Frantz Fanon had written War of the Worlds, he might have produced something like The Lesson ... Turnbull gives the reader a visceral sense of what it might feel like to live as a colonized body, for those of us with the privilege not to: a life of queasy, oppressive helplessness; a constant low-grade fear and anger that sits at the back of the head like a tension headache always ready to flare ... There are no simple heroes or villains in the story, for the most part. Turnbull allows the reader to see the full range of their humanity, in all its knotty complexity ... One of Turnbull’s brilliant conceits is to jump back in time periodically to show the reader harrowing visions of the Virgin Islands’ history of violent occupation ... does something more complicated than imagine a brave resistance against an invading force or humans learning to coexist in harmony with a misunderstood alien species. The Lesson is concerned with the experience of dehumanization under the project of colonialism. What if the arrival of alien life wasn’t the future, but just another recapitulation of our bloody past? ... Turnbull shows with heartbreaking clarity that even when fundamentally different individuals are able to find an essential humanity in each other, the nature of colonialism destroys both the colonizer and the colonized.
