FICTION: Black Rock By Amanda SmythSerpent's Tail, 250pp, £10.99
‘TRINIDAD IS A wonderful place, Celia. Everyone who lives here can’t wait to leave. But once they go, they spend their whole lives trying to get back.”
So says Joseph Carr Brown, the white Trinidadian owner of a 300-acre estate. But for Celia D’Abadie, the luckless narrator, orphaned, black and yearning to find her English father she believes is living in Southampton, island life is a prison she has determined to escape.
Indeed, her observations of Tobago, where she has spent the first 16 years of her life, or Trinidad, her place of refuge after being raped by her aunt’s husband, are sketchy to say the least.
The oppressive heat is remarked on, and the dilapidated shacks which house most of the population, but there is little warmth in the landscape. Its inhabitants are viewed with suspicion and the burgeoning flora and fauna often appear as harbingers of bad luck or even death.
Amanda Smyth’s first novel is about Celia’s coming of age. The narrative ends when the poor young woman is only 19 years old, but the traumatic events which take her from confused child to embittered adult hint at her redemption, too.
Fate and superstition punctuate the work. Long before she runs away from her childhood home, Celia remains shaken by the certainties of an old soothsayer that “men will want you like they want a glass of rum. Drink you up and pee you out.”
Like every character here, the reader is constrained by an unshakable belief in such predictions, including a fate in which Celia will never marry, will destroy the one man who loves her, and die in a foreign land.
Inevitably, Celia’s sexual experiences come to dominate the novel. Saved from yellow fever by William, a young gardener (destined to love her and be destroyed) and given a job in the household of Dr Rodriguez (rum drinker and serial seducer), she gradually forgets almost everyone who cares for her, allowing the steamy relationship with her employer to grow into obsessive love.
Determined to deny her fate, she also ignores many of the sudden chunks of advice which punctuate the story, including another from, once again, Joseph Carr Brown: “You follow your life, Celia. You don’t lead your life. It’s a mistake people make. We’re not that powerful or important.”
Yet, for all her icy purpose, Celia’s viewpoint remains oddly passive. The publisher’s blurb claims that Amanda Smyth writes like a descendent of Jean Rhys, and certainly the Irish-Trinidadian author does conjure a pervasive threat out of every corner of her damp and fecund West Indies terrain. But whereas Rhys’s women are more often endangered by their own tragic and indolent sweetness, “Celia does what Celia want. You don’t care what happen to get what you want.”
Her plodding descriptions of both the shocking and mundane are more reminiscent of the narrator in Lloyd Jones's Mister Pip, another novel set in a lush island world, with memories of pain and trauma told from a cool and guarded distance.
The contrariness of Celia’s character may be a question of period. Options for women in the 20th century widened with every decade, and as her story progresses it is hard to decipher which one Celia inhabits.
When the date, 1958, is finally supplied, it begs all kinds of questions: what, in the postwar period, was the likelihood of a poor island child being advised by her teacher to consider a university education? And what of the grinding poverty of the time? Surely a smallholder’s year-round production of food was more time-consuming and vital for every member of a household than is suggested by the occasional reference to an aunt’s bright flowers and breadfruit?
Nor, apart from a recurring pattern of sexual exploitation, is there much sign of the institutional racism which would surely have pervaded every aspect of island life.
Celia’s two confrontations with white children are extraordinarily polite, and social tensions between the black and Indian populations of the islands never get a look in. As for Joseph Carr Brown, his firm but fair treatment of estate workers smacks of the rewriting of history –Trinidadian and Irish – long after the landowners have packed up and gone.
Yet this colourful first novel intermittently provides a captivating read. Smyth has a sharp ear for the wit and wisdom of Trinidad. Her take on the women there – black and white – is particularly interesting. Faced with so many weak, bad or sexually incontinent men, it is striking how they retreat into madness or tight-lipped respectability: another aspect of the period, perhaps.
The enigmatic claim that “men might be bad, but women can be worse than bad” is never developed. Perhaps Smyth is reserving that theme for her second book. What Celia Did Next may be well worth finding out.
Aisling Foster is a novelist