48. House of Ashes by Monique Roffey

Twenty four years have elapsed since the July 1990 attempted coup by the Jamaat al Muslimeen. Those who recollect the events of those six days in Trinidad and Tobago’s history do so with collective unease, channeling repressed fury and a kind of malaise that’s difficult to translate into common speech. This is what Monique Roffey’s fourth novel, House of Ashes (Simon & Schuster, 2014) seeks to do: to transubstantiate 1990’s Red House horror into fiction that grimly vows never to forget.

Roffey, whose third novel, Archipelago, was the winner of the 2013 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, has in her new book a creative undertaking not dissimilar to a holy ritual, one replete with its own unfair allotment of both bodies and blood.

Narrative takes a three-pronged approach in House of Ashes. In addition to segments told in a mostly plot-propelling omniscient voice, the author employs two speakers to shoulder most of the novel’s heavily symbolic baggage. One of them, Ashes, is a mild-mannered, bespectacled scholar, a gentle academic who follows devoutly in the wake of the coup’s enigmatic Leader. Aspasia Garland, Minister for the Environment, is Roffey’s second principal mouthpiece. Garland is one of the government officials held hostage in the House of Power, by the Leader’s gun-toting lackeys (of whom Ashes is also a firearm-wielding, reluctant member.)

Through Ashes and Aspasia, the author works hard to show how terror may share a mutual cell of confinement, in the hearts of both terrorist and victim. Though he adheres to the faith-prescribed tenets of social justice that his Leader has invoked, in this storming of the island’s House of Power, Ashes struggles with doubt. It is Ashes, who, mid-skirmish during the storming of the House, perceives the absurd levy of so much violence. He describes the bloodied scene unfurling before him with a kind of disjointed helplessness:

“Men firing and men returning fire and a clatter of bullet-hail and it didn’t seem to matter who was shooting at who, just that a storm was going on and the revolution was still taking place.”

Aspasia’s accounts are the only ones conducted in the first-person narrative voice, and her fearful bouts of introspection summon a dreadful immediacy to the novel’s proceedings. Unable to rest easily during the prolonged occupation of the House of Power, Aspasia regards the malevolent forces surrounding her in sinister, allegorical terms. “The darkness activated my deepest fears,” she thinks:

“Would the looters be able to climb through the windows? Would jab jabs now show up in the dead of night? Would the gunmen shed their combat fatigues to reveal themselves as devils underneath?”

Ashes and Aspasia are citizens of Sans Amen, though this fictitious island, relocated to the northern end of the archipelagic chain, is easily and identifiably Trinidad, beneath the patina of a reissued title. Arguably, Roffey is letting herself off the hook here; there are a number of ways in which the novel might have benefitted from bravely claiming this story as Trinidad and Tobago’s, in every appellative act possible.

Still, the examination of Sans Amen’s political climate, and its history of quelled insurgencies, is intricately constructed, then distilled through the dissatisfaction of the island’s people. Sans Amenians are a caustic, confrontational lot, though not immune to their own passive occupations of cowardice, and fleeting moments of grace. The author paints both the principal and unnamed characters who reside here with thoughtfulness, using her considerable boon for human portraiture to render them as real people.

Is this the definitive coup novel that Trinidad and Tobago needs? No, perhaps it is not. House of Ashes is lit from within by an earnest fire, and the quality of Roffey’s vast intentions here is more convincing than the work she’s produced. This is emotionally-charged fictive reportage, a dizzyingly ambitious treatment that inevitably falls short, but has the assiduous and requisite strength to at least fall well.

In sensitive, brave prose (marked by forays into repetitiveness), Roffey shows the reader that human animals all respond in essentially the same ways, when staring down the steel barrel of their own fear. Though House of Ashes cannot be thought of as a 1990 coup primer, what it gets undeniably right is our primordial response to terrorism.

This review first appeared in its entirety in the Trinidad Guardian‘s Sunday Arts Section on August 3rd, 2014, entitled “Converting real horror into fiction.”

47. The Best of All Possible Worlds by Karen Lord

Published by Del Rey in 2013.

Would you care for a bit of inter-species, mixed faction romantic mingling, housed in a travelogue-formatted space odyssey? That’s at least some of what Barbadian writer Karen Lord is getting up to, in her second novel, The Best of All Possible Worlds.

What’s remarkable about Lord’s oeuvre is that it’s near-unmatched: very few Caribbean writers, resident in the Caribbean, commit themselves to speculative fiction. Lord tells stories that are not only fascinating emotionally and anthropologically, but she’s doing it in a singular literary field.

Lord’s first novel, Redemption in Indigo (Small Beer Press, 2010) was longlisted for the 2011 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. In its unpublished manuscript format, the novel won the 2008 Frank Collymore Literary Award. The Best of All Possible Worlds also received the Frank Collymore award, in 2009.

As with so much speculative fiction, the ambitions of Lord’s second novel are vast – and for the most part, they find confident footing. The story is narrated principally by Grace Delarua, a plucky biotechnician and resident of polycultural planet Cygnus Beta. Delarua is assigned to a social research expedition in service of the Sadiri, a proud, intellectually advanced race whose home territory has been obliterated. Represented by their chief councillor, Dllenahkh, the Sadiri seek out potential mates most similar to their own core temperament and physical appearance, on the many separate homesteads scattered throughout Cygnus Beta’s outposts and provinces.

Perhaps Redemption in Indigo bore more easily recognizable hallmarks of folkloric treatment (unsurprisingly, given that it’s a creative retelling of a Senegalese folk tale.) However, the avoidance of monoculturalism is gratifyingly strong in Lord’s second work. Cygnus Beta is described as “a galactic hinterland for pioneers and refugees,” and is populated with a diverse set of races, each with their own identifiable quirks and passions. Dllenahkh’s Sadirian measured equanimity finds a consistently pleasurable foil in Delarua’s Cygnian matter of factness and emotional volubility. The two give every indication, in the novel’s earliest stages, of being well-suited to the kind of romance that not only links two people, but solidifies tenuous bridges of cultural commingling.

This seems to be one of the central premises Lord works out in the novel. The universe’s various citizenries enact premeditated (and often brutal) acts of separatist violence against each other: witness Ain’s cavalier destruction of Sadiri, and the massive devastation this genocide left in its wake. Despite unfathomable loss and crippling exile, Lord prompts her central characters deeper into an understanding, and appreciation of, mutual dependency. Almost all of the novel’s players express strong attachments to concepts of home, kinship and domestic succor. Delarua says it herself, during an unexpected trip to her sister’s homestead:

“Blood is blood, you know? There’s too much shared history and too many cross-connecting bonds to ever totally extract yourself from that half-smothering, half-supporting, muddled net called family.”

It is perhaps slightly ironic, then, that Lord suggests that the connections we make, rather than those into which we are born, hold greatest sway. This isn’t a novel concept, but it’s engagingly transmitted through the writer’s exploration of psychic bonds, particularly the psionic linkages that Delarua and Dllenahkh test with each other. It’s not an especially groundbreaking way to talk about sensual or sexual intimacy in science fiction, but Lord recycles it well. Through these episodes, it feels like we see the potential couple most clearly, wherein they allow themselves to interface with vulnerability and trust. As Dllenahkh puts it, there can be a certain

“transcendence to bonding… feeling the bones, tendons and nerves of another being – not as a puppet master but like a dancer fitted to a partner, able to suggest a movement with a light press of silent, invisible communication.”

The novel’s greatest flaw is also one of its most affecting charms: it is both episodic in nature (as opposed to tackling one core issue head on in the plot), and it wants to say a great many things about a great many things. If the best of all possible worlds, according to the aphorism, is the one we’re living in now, then reading Lord grants us pathways to other places no greater than this Earth, but no less captivating.

This review first appeared in its entirety in the Trinidad Guardian‘s Sunday Arts Section on April 6th, 2014, entitled “Confident new Caribbean sci-fi novel.”

46. Deathless by Catherynne M. Valente

On January 17, 2014 By Novel NicheIn Reviews 20141 Comment

Published in 2011 by Tor Books.

There are various iterations of his accursed name, but in Slavic folklore, Koschei the Deathless augurs ill, particularly for the beautiful, chaste maidens he lures into his lap. As the ancient stories have it, Marya Morevna is his opposite: a steel-tempered warrior woman who brings the immortal, undying Tsar to heel, with chains and with stratagems. Russian children cut their teeth on these parables, and in their imaginations, such figures are hewn from the stardust of reality, fashioned in the space where our inherited stories possess, in their childhood telling, the greatest strength.

Valente has claimed the tales of Koschei and Marya to enact the fable-ornate, revisionist tableaux of Deathless. Young Marya, her head filled with any number of strange, otherworldly things, lives in a house on Gorokhovaya Street, St. Petersburg, where she peers from her window out onto the street below. A husband, who begins his visitation to her as a bird, waits in her future. His arrival will confirm that she’s meant to step over the veil that shrouds the Other World from easy sight. It is a realm in which she, so unlike her sisters three, belongs. She cannot predict that her husband will be Koschei himself, cloaked in the raiment of a young man’s beauty. Though Marya has not bargained for Koschei’s hungry entreaty — that she follow him into the wide maw of uncertainty, far away from her home — she goes, making the bargain for ill, or good.

Deathless spans the Russian Soviet Union history of the 1920s through to the 1940s. The reader sees St. Petersburg become Petrograd, morphing into the Leningrad that endures the unspeakable grief, and human cost, claimed by the over two-year long Blockade. Marya is present, her consciousness superimposed over the multiply-tiered storylines of this Russia, and another: the undying lands of Buyan, Koschei’s kingdom where everything lives, even walls of responsive skin and fountains ceaselessly spurting arcs of blood. In this realm, the one to which Marya has been stolen away by her immortal lord, the human maiden blossoms into a hard-won womanhood, thrice-tested by the wicked tasks that Baba Yaga, Koschei’s demon sister, the Tsaritsa of Night, commands.

Those unfamiliar with Valente’s writing style will fall headfirst into the thicket of her prose, as adorned and intricate as ever it’s appeared — though perhaps considerably less breathless, less prone to swoops and sky-curlicues than it appears in the dizzyingly lush Palimpsest. The order of the narrative, through the intoxication of the language used to tell it, is stamped with the austerity of Soviet Russia. It’s a bureaucratic severity that seeps even into Koschei’s domain, as Baba Yaga herself reminds Marya, there’s always been a war, in and out of one girl’s reckoning with the war that shapes her, personally and politically.

Though it cleverly considers the landscapes surrounding an origin story (and the ways in which such terrain might be respectfully, usefully subverted), Deathless runs on fable. The structures of fairytale, principally the (re)occurrence of triumvirates, knit one Russia to the other, knit Marya’s one warrioress life with her domestic decisions in another realm. There is a necessary repetition to this that’s worth the occasional strain it puts, on the rate at which the braided stories canter along to their final destination.

Books like these are bold by default, because of the territory they excavate in order to achieve their own world: they cannot escape claims of cultural appropriation, nor should they. Deathless is a pulchritudinous, seductive fable that supplants emotional hierarchies of how Koschei, Marya, Baba Yaga and the Slavic folkloric contingent are perceived. It’s not written by someone to whom this folklore is native, and this will always be problematic for some of the indigenous recipients of the work, and the ways in which they come to bear on it.

I can’t claim to have my own compass points on cultural appropriation finitely fixed. It’s a dangerous thicket in which emotional and spiritual navigations can shift on the reassignation of a scrap of sacred ground. If you are of Russian lineage, if your ancestors lived, or else died, in Communist Leningrad, you may thrill to Valente’s fictive perceptions, or you may despise them. This, I think, remains your right.

Perhaps this makes my own task easier, less fraught with personal demarcations of inheritance, and resultant ownership. In every regard, Deathless is fiercely beautiful. It is assiduously researched, devotedly formatted, with attention lavished upon the stories, rituals and conquests of old.

What I love best — and there is no dearth of it throughout the worlds Valente helms in this moribund mythology — is the constant countermanding of what’s deemed “normal”. Weird love howls for triumphs, too, and in this territory, the surreal is as credible and palatable as the bread & buttered obvious. If you’re a feral adherent to that which is fanged, dark and plasma-patinated, then you’ll adore what passes between Koschei and Marya. Witness the scene in which he declares her unquestionably his, in the lull of a bitter quarrel, conducted in his smoky-pillared Chernosvyat:

“I will tell you why. Because you are a demon, like me. And you do not care very much if other girls have suffered, because you want only what you want. You will kill dogs, and hound old women in the forest, and betray any soul if it means having what you desire, and that makes you wicked, and that makes you a sinner, and that makes you my wife.”

If you’re wondering whether Marya and Koschei have lived out this scene through countless lives, don’t wonder: Valente makes it plain, using Baba Yaga, the novel’s most rollickingly well-managed auxiliary character, as mouthpiece. Auntie Yaga, not-uncruelly, tells Marya in plain terms:

“That’s how you get deathless, volchitsa. Walk the same tale over and over, until you wear a groove in the world, until even if you vanished, the tale would keep turning, keep playing, like a phonograph, and you’d have to get up again, even with a bullet through your eye, to play your part and say your lines.”

Death’s immutability is the novel’s garnet-studded spine, and the writer bestows gnawing, hungry pleasures for the reader who invests herself in unfurling its viscerally satisfying (albeit repetitive) revelations. If you come to the table famished, Deathless will ply you with loaves and wine, asking that you remember this story when you’re through, when you go fur-collared into glacial streets, to kiss your own Death on its grinning, strong mouth.

For a taste-test of Valente’s style: consider her short story “How to Become a Mars Overlord”, one of my Story Sunday posts. One of the principal characters in Valente’s Palimpsest is the answer to a Bookish Question I asked myself: When last did you catch an incontrovertible glance of yourself in fiction, and did you like the way you looked?

45. Never Mind by Edward St. Aubyn (Patrick Melrose # 1)

On November 13, 2013 By Novel NicheIn Reviews 20132 Comments

Published in 1992. This edition: Picador, 2012.

I feel compelled to share with you that my hands are shaking, a little, as I write this down. Reading books like these pry at the elusive answer to the unspoken question of how deeply an experience, literary or otherwise, can mark us, until we begin to chafe gracelessly against the semaphore of its instruction.

Never Mind is the first of British author Edward St. Aubyn’s novels centred on his alter ego protagonist, Patrick Melrose. I came to these books because I was curious about Patrick, about what fictional forces have led to the concretization of his status as one of contemporary English literature’s most formidably-hewn characters, and his author as one of the best living English writers producing work in that language.

I stayed out of horror and awe, both infused with the kind of reverence you don’t even realize you’re giving up willingly while you read. Whether you levy your slackjawed, glassy-eyed admiration freely or with begrudging restraint, it takes no more than a very few pages to realize that prose, in St. Aubyn’s hands, is effortlessly sovereign. He writes with the sort of sleight of hand beauty that might make poets weep, and he has the good grace to wipe his plate clean of indulgent treatments in diction, in the assignation of flasks to purses, of wineglasses to fiercely shaking digits, of bespoke canes to corridor umbrella stands, immutable and indifferent, receptacles cast in porcelain, green glass and untraceable decay.

Though the origins of decrepitude evade certain timelines, the origin points of disease in the novel’s chief players are subject to a much more rigorous scrutiny. St. Aubyn uses fiction like a paring knife, cunningly training the blade on a single day in the lives of five year old Patrick and his parents, David and Eleanor. The Melroses are expecting a small contingent — two other couples — of dinner guests, a pleasant, intellectually undemanding evening at Eleanor’s family house in the South of France.

Cognizant of the frequently baffling starts and stops of adult humours, the self-sufficient Patrick easily ventures into his private world of childhood play, roaming the grounds of a vast garden that extend into the Melrose holdings. In the imaginatively fertile clutches of this verdant terrain, Patrick is the undisputed king. There is an unashamed curiosity, fringing on tenderness, that the young boy conducts with members of the animal family — behaviours notably missing from his interactions with his parents, or the vaguely warm yet mostly distant maid, Yvette.

“…Patrick had only seen the tree frog twice, but he had stood still for ages staring at its sharp skeleton and bulging eyes, like the beads on his mother’s yellow necklace, and at the suckers on its front feet that held it motionless against the trunk and, above all, at the swelling sides which enlivened a body as delicate as jewelry, but greedier for breath. The second time he saw the frog, Patrick stretched out his hand and carefully touched its head with the tip of his index finger, and it did not move and he felt that it trusted him.”

On this day, Patrick doesn’t espy his favourite lucky tree frog. A different sort of visitation awaits him, one that will alter the pattern of his internal weather, not simply for the remainder of the evening’s social pleasantries, but for a time we cannot, with the limitations of our gaze, yet glimpse.

It would be difficult enough to bear if Patrick’s parents were uniformly, homogeneously wicked, but the inverse is true. Eleanor mires herself near-constantly in drink, to escape the cruelty meted out by David, who administers amoral punishments in line with what he considers his judicious purview. During the course of the miserable spectacle of a dinner party, Eleanor’s miseries are relentlessly pursued across the page. The stifling tedium of her emotional subservience to David is measured out as if in stiff fingers of drink, each furtive gulp of liquor entering her gullet an ineffective balm against days and nights laced with peaceable terror.

Reading David is a master class in pain – in the gnarled roots of its provenance, and in the steady, wincing gait of its unsteady yet triumphant time on earth. We learn more, reading David, than is easy or comfortable to hold, and the more we know about him, the less we wish we knew. In the crucible of his motivations, he reads like an aged Briton of a Patrick Bateman, with his bloodlust diverted into a series of grotesque amusements best served over a course of game and unpalatable, expensive wine. During dinner, having perceived himself vaguely slighted by the antics of his subordinate colleague’s comely-but-gormless girlfriend, David plots.

“Never mind, thought David, I can get her later. In the pursuit of knowledge, there was no point in killing the rabbit before one found out whether its eyes were allergic to shampoo, or its skin inflamed by mascara. It was ridiculous to ‘break a butterfly upon a wheel.’ The proper instrument for a butterfly was a pin.”

Immediately following a calculated act of brutality upon which the novel’s scope and shape hinges, I shared this feverish message with a St. Aubyn devotee: “Reading the first of the Patrick Melrose novels is destroying me in the most delicate of increments. I feel like I’m being precisely gutted, every nick and scrape of my emotional defenses perfectly tallied in this… god, this assiduous, bare-but-gleaming prose. It’s beautiful and terrible, and in the full vein and spirit of so many things I want to do with my own writing that I could weep. It’s a treasure. It’s like reading horror stories in the bright sunshine and feeling ghosts slide up and down your spine like inky regrets. I can’t wait to see how Patrick survives, what he survives. What he becomes. I dread it and I long for more.”

It’s true. It’s all still true. What St. Aubyn proves, in Never Mind, is that there be monsters everywhere, verily, in the safest of places, in the most simperingly polite of cloistered alcove repartee. The writer, you feel, is pinning down an entire poisoned institution to the mat, forcing it to rap its perfumed knuckles to bitumen, snarling at it to give.

44. The Shining by Stephen King

On October 4, 2013 By Novel NicheIn Reviews 20139 Comments

First published in 1977. This edition: 2012, Anchor Books)

Cradled in the majestic, foreboding arms of the Colorado Rockies, the Overlook Hotel seems like nothing so much as a salvation/sanctuary, a real boon for the Torrance trio. Jack Torrance, patriarch, middling writer of possible promise (he once had work published in Esquire, which is saying something) and forcefully-retired preparatory school English teacher, knows that managing the Overlook during its sealed-up winter months is an ace of a job. For reasons that make him sick to his stomach to contemplate, performing commendably here, for six sequestered months, is his last chance in a variety of ways. He’s determined not to muck it up, and with the emotional support of his cheerful wife Wendy and dutiful son Danny, Jack thinks his first tenure at the grand hotel could be just the chance he needs to solidify his autonomy and finish the first draft of his three-act play.

Soon before departing for Floridian warmth, empathetic Overlook cook Dick Hallorann assures Danny, “I don’t think there’s anything here that can hurt you.” Halloran also gives a name to the prescience Danny’s always had, calling it “the shining”. Though Dick shines on a lesser level, Danny’s psychic powers are starkly, eerily majestic, revealing both Jack’s ever-pressing compulsion to drink and Wendy’s crushing anxieties. Danny’s shining is the brightest spark the Overlook has encountered in an age, and the hotel wants him. The spectre-lined chambers know just which desperate, drink-deprived man they can use, to help draw little Danny deeper into their carpeted, chandeliered clutches.

No, this isn’t like the Hotel California, since, in addition to not being able to never leave, you really can’t check out any time you like, either. King situates the glacial furnace of the novel’s primary activity in a place where retreat is nigh-impossible, where the hope of external rescue hangs as precariously as a loose tooth from a bloody thread of gum. Further to this, the storyboard conflicts – Man vs Nature, Man vs Self – are so orderly, so cleanly hewn in their make that they might have popped straight from the pages of a “How to Storytell” primer. Therein lies the ghoulish, fantastic rub, though – this is aching, jealousy-makingly-good storytelling. King’s third novel sees him harness deceptively simple constructs and then stun us between the eyes with the consistent power of worldmaking that fires on all cylinders.

What works well for The Shining is a discernible dearth of heavy turns, though the narrative does occasionally pat itself on the back with unnecessary, sometimes corny insertions. (If I were as tremendous a third book as this one, I’d probably be stroking my own spine with inky compliments, too.) We feel, when we read Jack, that we *are* Jack, from the moment we’re fidgeting in Ullman’s office, hating the officious little prick’s guts, promising vindictive retributions that our new boss might not quite deserve, but by God, it’s the principle of the thing, it’s to do with being humiliated and just how unjustly one can turn the knife back on one’s oppressor matters, it does. When we’re reading Wendy, we’re Wendy, a woman who fiercely adores her son, a woman who’s timed the steady degradation of her marriage against the repetitive clink of scotch and gin bottles, a lady who’s startled by the surges of her own uncommon intelligence. She stifles her own better judgments with hausfrau-esque personal admonitions that resonate with a sickly thud of commingled girlish naiveté and calculated despair, measured out in mental hair twirls through restless, well-manicured fingers.

Perhaps most astonishing and gratifying is the fact that when we read Danny, we are Danny. We’re five, and not too far gone from nights of bedwetting. We regress to thumbsucking states when confronted by the ire-fuelled interactions of the Mummy we cherish and the Daddy we idolize. We want things to be right, knowing from the very beginning that the Overlook is wrong, and we learn far sooner than we should about all the slithering, Room 217-dwelling manifestations of just how wrong wrong can be. King’s embodiment of Danny’s precarious, nuanced mental journeys is stunningly navigated. We’re there with him, fumbling in the labyrinths of his exceptional mind, our hands held up to fend off bogeymen of corporal and ethereal formations. We’re there with him even when we most want not to be.

Certainly, this book is scary. It’s more than a scream-by-numbers investigation, though. At its best, The Shining pierces through to the telltale heart of psychological decay, of the most earnest of human intentions lain low by a roque mallet. It’s a portrait of personal devastation as convoluted as anything Dorian Gray could conjure, and then some. Jack’s progressive decline is the novel’s snarling beast, and it’s even more terror-inducing than encounters with topiary creatures in feet of fresh snowfall, because Jack is you, and me. Jack is anyone who’s fought tooth and nail against the siren call of the thing they most love and fear. In his hubris, his clever arrogance, his petulant protestations against situations his own shortcomings have engendered, you know that he’s you on the days you want to erase from the ledger. Jack is proof that we can’t outrun ourselves, and oh, how brutally and systematically this reminder thuds from the pages.

If you’re new to Stephen King, as I was (and still am, since one novel doesn’t an adept make), maybe you might not want to read this one in the dark. Maybe it’ll come for you in the dark regardless, like it did for me, demanding to be read in silence, with a light borne aloft, while the rest of the house slept. Read about how this inhuman place makes human monsters, of how imaginary friends can reveal the truth lingering in a chiaroscuro world running parallel to this one. You might dismiss the horror as not supernatural enough, maybe. Or, like me, you might find your body blistering with wintry fear when you learn that King’s paranormal horror beats (bleats?) with the dogged persistence of a very human heart.

Don’t be surprised if surviving The Shining catapults you into the dimly-lit corridors of King’s considerable oeuvre. At the very least, it’ll make you want to take your medicine.

42. Light Falling on Bamboo by Lawrence Scott

On November 12, 2012February 7, 2013 By Novel NicheIn Reviews 2012, Trinidad Guardian Sunday Arts Section1 Comment

Published by in 2012 by Tindal Street Press.

“Don’t forget where you’ve come from. Don’t forget the ideas of freedom that have carried us this far,” Michel Jean Cazabon’s mother urges her favourite son from her deathbed. Michel, who has returned to his birthplace, Trinidad, after eight years of artistic apprenticeship and training in Europe, will find this final wish to be complex and fragmented, like so much else in his life. He is drawn repeatedly to the stunning natural beauty of his homeland, and captivated by the noble elegance of those who have toiled in its fields. Despite the pleasures of being an artist in his natural domain, he is soon reminded that island life goes hand in hand with its own specific set of perils. Temptations, including the form of his childhood playmate Josie, beckon in Cazabon’s moments of weakness, even as he fondly awaits the arrival of his French wife and children on Trinidadian shores. As a painter and a son of the plantation class, he finds himself divided in more ways than he wishes to be, quickly learning that no creative muse comes without a past story.

Scott’s latest novel is nothing less than remarkable, blending in ambitious detail the real life of one of Trinidad’s founding artistic figures, with a fictional account of what his most personal moments might have resembled. An intimate biography of the actual Michel Jean Cazabon is not a matter of public record, as the author himself remarks in his historical notes. Light Falling on Bamboo would probably read as seedy conjecture in the hands of a writer less sensitive to character development. The reverse is true here: one is gifted a portrait of Cazabon as he might plausibly have been. The reader leans towards believing, rather than discrediting, the artistic licenses that Scott himself has taken – what emerges is the study of a complex, haunted figure.

Divisions run through the novel, which begins in 1840s Trinidad and spans more than five decades. These ruptures are not simply evident in Cazabon’s conflicts, but echo throughout the structure of Trinidadian society. While crossing the greens on his way to the Governor’s residence, Cazabon muses that “he could have been somewhere in Hertfordshire”, so strong are the parallels of the local atmosphere with that of a British pastoral scene. Money is described as the province of power; those who possess it are the white landowners and dignitaries for whom Cazabon is commissioned to paint epic vistas. These members of the elite ruling class continue to consider themselves superior to the former slaves who built the plantation empires. As Cazabon himself admits with deep guilt, the slave trade is at the heart of his family’s financial success too – a success he tries to distance himself from with dedication to his art.

Light Falling on Bamboo presents Cazabon’s Trinidad with vivid imagery; each description is ornate, infused with the colours the artist favoured in his famous pieces. Michel Jean’s earliest daydreams in the novel revolve around painting, evoked by events as routine as a carriage ride through Port of Spain, where “he noticed the light on water and on the surrounding hills changing all the time from lemon to subdued white, plain greys and blues, the piercing fire of the sun lighting up the greens and ochres. He longed to paint.”

It is painting that keeps Cazabon’s self-described demons at bay; it is painting that cements his purpose as a human being, caught as he is between rapidly-changing worlds. As he reflects to Governor ‘Ping’ Harris in an intense conversation, “The people have made this landscape… I mostly paint out the hardship and keep the dignity. Not that I am blind to what has happened here.” No aspect of Scott’s prose feels blinkered: in the writer’s imagined portrayal of a luminary artist, the reader is given one of the finest examples of art reflecting what is best about nature, and vice versa. This is a multi-layered, sympathetic characterization of Cazabon – as an artist, husband, son, and as a figure who fully embodies both tragedy and triumph at different phases of his life. It is impossible to term Light Falling on Bamboo a biography, but one imagines that Cazabon himself would have been pleased with the result.

This review first appeared in its entirety in the Trinidad Guardian‘s Sunday Arts Section on November 11th, 2012, entitled A remarkable imagined portrait of Cazabon.

41. The Blue Place by Nicola Griffith

On November 9, 2012 By Novel NicheIn Reviews 2012Leave a comment

Published in 1999 by William Morrow.

I made a pretty terrible joke with myself when I began drafting notes for this review. I said “Hmm. Aud Torvingen is like an Atalanta from Atlanta!” Were you to read The Blue Place, though, you might agree with me that the comparison between Aud and Atalanta is more than a little on the nose. They’re both light on their feet; they both refuse to comply with notions of what a ‘proper woman’ should do, think or resemble. That said, I’d rather chase Aud than a golden apple because, well… Aud Torvingen is hot. Of Nordic ancestry, the six-footed former elite police officer no longer needs commission work to support herself financially, but accepts certain jobs for the challenge and curiosity they inspire. It would be untrue to say that she doesn’t think too much of a late-night run-in on an Inman Park sidewalk with a woman whose hair smells of fresh rainshowers. She does, even though she knows the woman she encountered can’t have set the building behind her to bursts of flames. The curious night that gives rise to these disjointedly-connected events persists: the woman turns another corner into Aud’s life, asking for the kind of assistance that Torvingen has (perhaps unfortunately) become all too skilled at giving.

If you declare that you love violence for the purity of it, odds are that you will find yourself alone at the buffet table, but the singular protagonist of Griffith’s novel would understand what you mean. There is an electric pulse to the concerns and rhythms of the human body in the writer’s prose: all these ways that we can bend, shatter, solder ourselves back together with far fewer implements than one might think. In the pauses of a conversation with Julia Lyons-Bennet, Aud considers what the woman at her side thinks of excitement, and, by extension, of danger.

“Danger… means suspending consideration and just being, acting and reacting, moving through a world where everything but you cools and slows down so you can glide between the blows and bullets and take out someone’s heart. Danger is desperately seductive.”

What’s laudable about Griffith’s sculpting of Torvingen is that her past extends far behind her, like a trail whose former rest-stops are only visible when she shares them. Her character is written with the uncomfortable heft of too-muchness — too much messiness, too many close calls, too few safe places. The sanctuaries we think of as inviolable are often a hair’s breadth away from being gutted, Aud reminds us. She reinforces this hard lesson as much by what she muses to herself, as by the string of events that set the narrative to a blistering string of causalities.

The Blue Place subverts the colour-by-numbers diagram of what thriller and suspense fiction should emulate, thankfully. In a genre that lumbers, recycles the same weary, gunsmoke-dappled tropes with every chapter, and consistently insults the reader’s skills of deduction and/or common sense, stories like these stand out. They dare take the format to new ground, or at the least, they prompt a paradigm shift that’s usually sorely lacking.

For instance, subterfuge and smuggling are allowed to occasionally take a backseat to the clarion call of Nature, with vivid and enduring results. As proficient as Aud is with slaying in less than fourty seconds, her attention to the cadences of the world around her should come as no surprise when they also extend to a hawk’s eye view from her deck at sunset. While sipping a Corona one evening, she sees:

“A huge barred owl ghosted silently across the garden to land in the pecan tree overlooking the deck. It turned its head this way and that, intent. Somewhere on the lawn a shrew crept through the grass in a desperate search for juicy insects to stoke its ever-needy metabolism. The owl focused for an instant, dropped into a shallow glide. It dipped once and I heard the tiniest squeak, then the soft wingspan and full talons were lifting over the hedge, blending with the darkness to the east.”

If so many paths seem to guide one back to laws of survival and primacy, then The Blue Place is just the sort of fiction for bearing those thoughts out — it suits violence, one could say, as violence suits the seasons.

Yet for all the ways in which savagery has never seemed better, what endures in the memory are Aud’s minutes of tenderness. “Beneath us”, she observes in the final phase of a plane ride in perfect company, “at the head of the swan-shaped neck of water that is Oslofjorden, Oslo glittered in the spring sunlight like a broken-open geode.” Her happy contemplations are worth their weight in the salt of all her old scars; they serve to humanize her unflinchingness, proof that even the most battle-grizzled steel can be tempered. If Aud could not feel pain, then her sorrows would be moot, and not sting, nor coruscate your heart with raw grief as they do.

Expect to be split open like a parted lower lip by The Blue Place. It will make you want to do things:

write a semi-pornographic letter to Aud
travel to Norway
kiss the right girl at the wrong time
take a self-defense class
kiss the wrong girl at the right time
read the other two books in the Aud Torvingen series
live more outwardly and outrageously, until it starts to hurt.

“I was unstoppable, lost in the joy of muscle and bone and breath. Axe kick to the central line of the huddled mass on the floor; disappointment at the sad splintering of ribs and not the hard crack of spine. Mewl and haul of body trying to sit; step and slam, hammer fist smearing the bone of his cheek. Latex slipping on sweat. Body under my hands folding to the floor, not moving. Nothing moving but me, feeling vast and brilliant with strength, immeasurable and immortal.”

40. Island Pursuits by Heather Rodney-Diaz

On November 7, 2012 By Novel NicheIn Requested Reviews, Reviews 2012, Trinidad Guardian Sunday Arts SectionLeave a comment

Published in 2012 by Crimson Romance.

Chance encounters have an often-mystifying way of turning one’s life around. This is the case for Second Lieutenant Adrian Mendez and Cory Phillips, who meet under unfortunate circumstances at a police station, in the early hours of New Year’s Day. Mendez, a former U.S. Marine, has returned to his homeland of Trinidad, in the interests of serving and protecting his countrymen. Instantly mesmerized by what he describes as Cory’s “sun-kissed island goddess” beauty, Adrian soon comes to realize that the alluring, intelligent Ms. Phillips is unlike any woman he’s ever known. As he steadily falls for her, despite the cautions of his closely-guarded heart, Cory also struggles with her feelings for this enigmatic, dashing military man. As a woman with more than ample reason to despise the armed forces and what they represent, the island goddess’ emotions for this man in uniform are complex from the very start. Will this stop them from expressing their truest selves beneath the relentless blaze of the Trinidadian sun?

As a debut offering, Island Pursuits plays it close to the traditional structure and character development of any successful romance novel. There are no bold narrative leaps of experimentation made here; nor will the reader find any genre-defying calculations intended to push the romantic envelope. This is one of the ways in which the story is safe: it tells the tale of relatable people, alternately pursuing or fleeing from desire that threatens to overwhelm them with its intensity. The chronicle of Cory and Adrian’s fiery courtship cannot be said to break moulds or pioneer inventive new structures for romance writing. Thankfully, the novel is far from being a colour-by-numbers affair. Although the character types are ones that fall into neat archetypes – the courageous soldier torn between duty and ardour; the feisty career woman who’s been once burnt, twice shy – Rodney-Diaz serves them up with humour, framing them in believable situations as opposed to fantastical ones.

What is most laudable about the novel is that it is set on Caribbean soil: not the Caribbean of an idealized weekend getaway, not a foreigner’s beach idyll, but the living and breathing entity that is an everyday Trinidad and Tobago. The fact that the story is grounded in an environment so largely unexplored by mainstream writers of romance fiction is one of its highest points of merit. The reader has the luxury of a true immersion of place, within these pages. She can relate immediately, for instance, to the sights and sounds evoked by a run around the Queen’s Park Savannah.

“They started walking at first, making small talk with each other along the way as Gothic churches, historic buildings, the U.S. Embassy, the Zoo, and the President’s House all came into their view. They spoke about their day and week so far, about the extremely hot weather and Carnival coming up.”

The author captures without unnecessary embellishment details that might otherwise be lost in a different climate, or on chillier shores. Much of Trinidad and Tobago’s natural beauty is on display in the novel, interspersed with highlights of the nation’s dynamic culture. Witness, for instance, these familiar descriptions of Carnival’s colourful spectacle: “Already runaway beads and other remnants of discarded costumes lay strewn about the streets. Varying hues of brightly coloured materials in golds and oranges, blues and greens dazzled in the midday sun.”

One hardly expects issues of a serious nature to be given much scope in the romance genre, but beneath the adult-scenario sizzle, many books of this persuasion tackle concerns that are more troubling than a cheating boyfriend’s roving eye. Island Pursuits continues admirably in this tradition, focusing on injustices within the judicial and protective services systems. Rodney-Diaz writes bravely and convincingly of the dangers that form an uneasy part of opposing the law, even when one is on the side of the innocent. There are deep-seated troubles at the heart of this complicated land we inhabit, and oftentimes the rewards for persistence may seem uncertain. Her characters have their own burdens to bear, and do not seek love out as a Band-Aid for all their worries. Love, however, continues to be a reliable anchor in the world crafted by the author.

This review first appeared in its entirety in the Trinidad Guardian‘s Sunday Arts Section on October 14th, 2012, entitled Love, Trinidadian-style.

A free electronic copy of this novel was provided by Heather Rodney-Diaz for review. The opinions expressed in this review are entirely my own, and are not influenced by her generous gift of gratuitous literature.

39. Daughters of Empire by Lakshmi Persaud

On November 6, 2012 By Novel NicheIn Reviews 2012, Trinidad Guardian Sunday Arts Section1 Comment

Published in 2012 by Peepal Tree Press.

Amira Vidhur, an educated, upper-class Indo-Trinidadian, migrates with her husband and three daughters to Mill Hill, London, in the 1970s. Life in this charming suburb is far from unassuming, and Amira must adapt quickly to the vast differences in culture and expectation. Striving to be a dutiful wife, wise mother, friendly neighbor, accomplished gardener and, in the midst of all this, a self-sufficient woman, Amira’s journey is often met by challenges. She seeks the counsel of her bossy elder sister Ishani, a Trinidad-based businesswoman who has remained home to run the family store. Despite Ishani’s often comically-phrased advice, Amira learns that she must chart her own path, in uncertain territory, with lessons she’s learned while on Trinidadian soil.

Readers often expect that stories strongly populated by female characters will be rooted, for better or worse, in domestic issues and an excess of emotion. Though the concerns of home and family play a vital part in Lakshmi Persaud’s newest novel, Daughters of Empire, they cannot be said to rule it, either. Amira is the predominant narrator, yet space is made for the perspectives of other women to shine through: not just Ishani’s voice is heard, but also the voices of Amira’s three daughters, Anjali, Satisha and Vidya. Dedicating itself to the span of generations, Persaud’s tale traces the journeys of these women, and others, as they do battle with society’s demands. Injustices are experienced on a minor and massive scale; these heroines are betrayed, scarred and manipulated, but it is their own sense of community and personal strength that encourages them to persist. The blueprint of Amira’s resilience becomes a mantle taken up by each of her daughters in distinct ways. It is especially intriguing to see how the three Vidhur children hold fast to their parents’ ideals, and how they create their own mottos for survival, too.

Written in a sweetly engaging style, Daughters of Empire shies away from the gritty, harsh narrative structure that defines so much of contemporary fiction. Persaud could be partially likened to a Caribbean Jane Austen, underscoring the deepest of issues with a light, graceful hand. If the novel sometimes reads like a giddy comedy of errors, it is worth noting that it confronts questions of race, class, gender, xenophobia and spirituality, from a series of outlooks. The reader will find her assumptions challenged on even the simplest of matters, finding out in the process that sometimes the least refined arguments are the ones most worth having.

Past and present, England and Trinidad, rural country roads and commercial city centres: this is a novel of polarities, of opposite ends finding unexpected meeting places. Persaud’s storytelling is more sophisticated than mere comparison, though; it also considers this: how do we live ‘abroad’, when these foreign landscapes are swiftly becoming our homes? When her happiness is threatened, Amira wonders, “She was living at the close of the twentieth century and still following her mother’s way. But how could you stop the past walking beside you?”

There is, admittedly, a way in which the Vidhur clan loves, admires and respects its members that seems a little too perfectly… satisfying. At certain sections of the novel’s progress, one is forced to consider whether or not this dynamic, self-sufficient band of brilliant and multi-talented individuals can’t weather every obstacle that life slings in their direction. Amends are made frequently in Persaud’s narrative, with seemingly effortless elan, scripted with the most cloying of diplomacies. If this is not how people reconcile in reality, the reader may well conclude, then, by Shiva’s trident, they damned well should.

Natural beauty is everywhere in Daughters of Empire, often unearthed in the most unlikely of places. The persistence of Nature and the constant rhythms of the seasons act in contrast to the unstable currents of human interaction, a reminder that the world continues to revolve while we ponder its mysteries. In the fragrant, delicious meals that Amira prepares, there is a richness of flavour and texture that woos even her most reluctant of neighbours to her London dinner table. Similarly, Amira’s old teachers who run a cookery school in rural Trinidad channel this knowledge, passing it on to their students: that an appreciation for the art of cooking can influence one’s entire life positively.

“They learned about the fibres, textures and flavours of vegetables, meats, fish and spices… the structure of the fibres, the strength of the raw materials’ natural flavours influenced the choice of spices as well as the methods of cooking… they began to transfer this training to their lives and their dealings with those they encountered. Methods of cooking became the methods of communicating with others, how to speak to bring understanding […] They had been laying the foundations for them to reinvent themselves as well as recipes.”

The earth is filled with this untapped splendour, Persaud’s novel seems to suggest, and it remains the reward of those who seek beauty with unfailing honesty and appreciation, asking nothing in return. In this way, Amira, who once described herself as “still in the infant class on how to live a good life”, and the other remarkable women she loves, are able to navigate their own courses confidently, reminding themselves that there is goodness at the heart of most, if not all things.

A marginally shorter version of this review first appeared in the Trinidad Guardian‘s Sunday Arts Section on October 7th, 2012, entitled ‘Caribbean Jane Austen’ novel tackles hard questions.

38. Midnight in Your Arms by Morgan Kelly

On November 1, 2012 By Novel NicheIn Reviews 20124 Comments

Published in 2012 by Avon Impulse.

“Her dreams would take her there, and she would run through its sunlit, eerie halls as free as a little deer in the wood. It was the first time she understood that sunlight did not dispel terror, any more than terror was wholly unenjoyable. Rather, she found she liked being terrified. It was a feeling so pure, so deep, that everything else quite paled in comparison. Stonecross was both her worst nightmare and her deepest wish fulfilled. It was with her in every season, at any time of day or night. She need only close her eyes, and step into her dreams, like Alice through the looking glass.”

Laura Dearborn is no stranger to ghosts. They have whispered their secrets, grievances and regrets into her ears for much of her life. It is only in the aftermath of World War I that necessity impels her to use these skills for sustenance. The burden of collecting shillings for a psychic medium’s soul-wearying work swiftly takes its toll, so when Laura receives word of a most startling inheritance, she wastes little time. Bound and determined to embrace Stonecross Hall as her own — as she has long felt in her bones, reason be damned, that it must be hers — she finds herself thrown into the non-corporeal arms of Alaric Storm III, a Crimean war veteran who reigned and brooded behind Stonecross’ fine mullioned windows … some sixty years’ hence.

There is a well-stocked arsenal of reasons why Midnight in Your Arms could spoil one for regular romance reading, not least of which is its ornate attention to detail. Many writers in this genre seem to consider that a surfeit of heaving bosoms and undone cummerbunds will compensate for meagre plotting and substandard research — not so with Morgan Kelly’s debut novel. Multiple nods to architectural awareness are made in every description of Stonecross Hall, which, by the end of this supernaturally delightful read, will feel legitimately like a character in its own right. The accoutrements of Laura’s trade; the sharp contrast of fiercely beautiful moorland terrain with soot-choked London’s ennui: these are rendered so convincingly that we taste the sea-salt spray; we see the spirit board’s planchette move with or without the guidance of our shaking fingers.

War stalks the pages of the novel, and the memories of those who have known its bitter draught. Laura and Alaric are haunted by far more than pleasing, maddening glances of each other. They have both seen too much, lived through more than they can forget. As Laura muses, during her first night within Stonecross’ alternately comforting and goosebump-inducing walls,

“She wanted a man who wanted her. So few of the men who had returned seemed to want anything, and she certainly could not see herself with a man who had not fought. It seemed to her that there would be something essential missing, a sort of joint, generational understanding. No one who hadn’t been on the front line could fully understand her. She needed a man who knew what it was like to live with ghosts.”

Our hero and heroine have been tempered by more than cotillions and cocktail parties; theirs are irreversibly wounded lives in which the knowing of each other is an unlooked for bridge of solace — a beacon across dark water that assures with each glinting semaphore, you are not alone.

That the two lovers should cross paths almost instantaneously seems to be a hallmark of popular contemporary bodicerippers. Midnight in Your Arms shies away from this. Instead of sending Laura and Alaric careening into each other’s clutches on the first page, the writer takes time to establish each of them in their separate, individual worlds. This might not curry favour with readers used to more immediate gratification. In truth, it strikes one as a calculated, bold move — a statement that assures even the most seasoned of romance readers that not everything allegedly outside the realm of ‘serious fiction’ is a foregone conclusion. Kelly’s careful world-establishment, of Laura in the 1920s and Alaric in the 1860s, is a nod to considerate stage setting, infrequently seen in titles of this ilk.

For the ways in which this tale charts new territory for romance writing, it plumbs depths that resound at the heart of any intense love story — that notion of two souls finding their fate in the other. We rarely read romance to be reasoned with, and Kelly’s contemplation of the lengths to which men and women can go to find unison with that truest, unflinching other part of themselves makes for an immensely gratifying, toe-curling read. This story offers us one of the most spectacular leaps of reason, the idea of time that bends to the will of era-crossed inamoratos. It makes it less suited to those who prefer their romance cut and dry, dressed up in business suits and stuffed with dirty martinis. An ideal adorer of Laura and Alaric’s adventure is more likely to be found mapping the constellations and dreaming of Dr. Who, fancying herself at home in the novels of Diana Gabaldon and Ursula K. LeGuin — or one who challenges himself with questions of how Ennis and Jack might have fared as gunslinging vaqueros with robotic arms in 2027.

Laura herself triumphantly declares to Alaric, when their twinned future seems most tenebrous, “Time isn’t what we think it is. It’s something so much more. It’s infinite. This moment is endless. We will be here like this forever, even after we are both dead and gone.”

Morgan Kelly, with her inaugural Charleston in that vast, glittering ballroom of romantic fiction, made me think of quantum physics side by side with ardent kisses. This, and other her glass-ceiling-shattering feats of talented composition in any genre, makes Midnight in Your Arms an oft-astonishing pleasure. Immediately upon finishing it, I clasped my Kindle tight to my chest, and thought, “I would so love to ask Laura Dearborn on a date… that is, if Alaric Storm III could be prevailed upon to spare her for one dance.” He probably wouldn’t, but, as the best romance reminds us over and over again, stargazing is not merely admissible, but perfectly necessary.

A free electronic copy of this novel was provided by Morgan Kelly, through Avon/ Harper Voyager/ HarperCollinsPublishers for review. The opinions expressed in this review are entirely my own, and are not influenced by her generous gift of gratuitous literature.