Really, what other industry would have offered me the same chance?'Įarlier generations of her family, she tells us, 'had no such opportunities I felt I could hardly waste mine.' This is an antidote to the cheerful speech she must present at the titular assemblies. Ruthless, efficient money-machines with a byproduct of social mobility. When the narrator explains her career choice, she does so with icy matter-of-factness, an explanation that is also an indictment: 'Banks - I understood what they were. Here the reader must supply the precipitating question thus, the reader becomes a kind of participant. The chapter 'What It's Like,' presented in the third person, begins, 'No, but originally. Rather than describe herself, the narrator records what other people say about her.

Brown allows the connection between the third- and first-person sections to stay slightly unclear, perhaps to highlight the way that this woman's story is part of a broader, relentless narrative. When a woman is subjected to uninvited attention at work, Brown writes, 'there was he the subject and her the object.' The 'object' notes her colleague's descriptions of her body: 'her hair (wild), her skin (exotic), her blouse (barely containing those breasts).' The reader can assume this 'object' is, in fact, the novel's subject, the first-person narrator whose voice appears several pages later, addressing a school assembly about her work at the bank. In the fragmented, urgent chapters of 'Assembly,' Natasha Brown's debut, the narrator often chooses to 'detach' in order to survive the pressures in her life: a banking career in London, where she is a minority in various ways a relationship with a man of a different race and class a diagnosis of cancer, which she keeps to herself.

Natasha brown assembly