Gooseman by M. G. Sanchez

Abstract

Reviewed by: Gooseman by M. G. Sanchez Robert Patrick Newcomb Sanchez, M. G. Gooseman. The Dabuti Collective, 2020. Pp. 449. ISBN 978-1-999-88764-3. Gooseman is the fourth novel by the prolific Gibraltarian author M. G. Sanchez, a fiction writer, memoirist, essayist, and columnist, who has affirmed his place as Gibraltar's most important living English-language writer. Gibraltar, a self-governing British territory bordered by Spain and the Mediterranean, is a multilingual community whose writers have published in English and Spanish. A West Yorkshire resident with a PhD in English literature, Sanchez often utilizes his fiction to address the Gibraltarian experience in Great Britain. Gibraltarians have a long history in the United Kingdom, whether as World War II-era evacuees, students, or economic migrants. In Gooseman and elsewhere, Sanchez depicts the ignorance and xenophobia Gibraltarians face, despite their British citizenship, as "foreigners" from a little-known imperial relic. He cleverly represents this dynamic in the title of his new novel: Gooseman is a corruption of the surname of narrator-protagonist Johann Guzman, who is habitually referred to as "Gooseman," "Geeseman," and so on by his British interlocutors. Readers accompany Johann's sputtering progress from childhood to middle age. Born in Gibraltar in the 1970s to working-class parents, Johann is a sensitive, socially awkward boy, who eventually discovers that he suffers from depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and agoraphobia. He also periodically self-harms. The young Johann fails to distinguish himself academically, despite his intelligence, and is repulsed by his peers' alcohol-fueled, sex-obsessed social life. He drops out at 15, "with nothing to show for ten years of schooling except a mild to moderate persecution complex and a stolen library copy of Tayib Salih's Season of Migration to the North" (24). After a period spent self-isolating and failing to live up to his father's expectation that he pay his way ("If you think I'm going to be keeping you without you bringing a wage home, you're out of your head, pishón …" [boy]) (25), Johann heads "to the UK to seek better prospects," as he writes to his parents (85). Johann hopes that by moving "from periphery to centre" (362), he might "start afresh in some place where nobody [would know] about my mentally unstable past, somewhere where character judgments [would be] dependent on what I said" (84). These hopes are quickly dashed. Setting up in the bleak London suburb of Neasden, Johann first works cleaning toilets at McDonald's, then in a mail room. English nativism marks him as a "foreign bahstard [sic]" (377) from the moment he opens his mouth. His mental struggles, which strained by poverty and alienation flower into misanthropy, prevent him from realizing his ties—hinted at by his pilfering of Salih's novel—with his fellow "colonials," that is, the working-class South Asian and African immigrants he encounters in London and later in Yorkshire. Johann also fails at love. His first relationship, with white, middle-class Jules, collapses under the weight of deception (ashamed of his poverty, he pretends to be a graduate student), his emotional instability, and her parents' snobbery. His second, with Ashrita, a civil servant, implodes in spectacular fashion after a night at a swingers' meetup so disastrous that she—improbably—abandons her job, returns to her Indian immigrant parents in Bradford, and agrees to an arranged marriage. Johann's life moves from malaise to crisis when, after failing to convince Ashrita to return to London, he is accosted by a group of Bradford teenagers. Misidentified based on his accent ("'Geeb-ral-tar … 'that's still Kosorvo, mate, innit?") (301), Johann becomes the victim of a hate crime, and is stabbed and beaten so viciously that he is left disabled. After a prolonged hospital stay leaves him homeless and unemployed, Johann is moved to public housing in nearby [End Page 750] Wakefield, where his accent and disability earn him harassment from a second gang of bigoted teens. Verbal threats escalate to property destruction, and most disturbingly, the shoving of a crucified rat through his letterbox. Johann eventually lures the group's sadistic leader into his apartment, where in a scene both...