Love after Love by Ingrid Persaud

Reviewer: Catriona Troth

What We Thought of It

Set in more-or-less present-day Trinidad, with its complex mixture of races and religions - and in particular among the largely Christianised descendants of Indian bonded labourers brought to the island when it was a British colony - Love After Love follows the lives of Miss Betty, her young son Solo, and her gay lodger, Mr Chetan.

Reading it feels like being privileged to dip at intervals into personal diaries of the three protagonists. Their Trini voices ring out strong and true and full of humour.

“If you bounce up your ex after all this time I find God should arrange it to be in a crowded supermarket on a Saturday morning. He and the wife should be vex with one another and the child throwing a tantrum on the floor.”

The narrative is layered and richly textured. Every time you think you know which way the story is going, it gives itself a little twist and flies off in a new direction – but one that, once you’ve found your feet again, feels completely right and true. 

Persaud captures the paradoxes of Trinidad, the beauty side by side with violence.

“We followed the coast road, taking in the beauty of mile after mile of beach lined with coconut trees. If this country didn’t have five hundred plus murders last year alone we would be in paradise.”

She examines the special nature of the relationship between a single mother and her only son – and what happens when that breaks down. And she picks apart toxic attitudes that encourage, or at least turn a blind eye to, homophobia, domestic violence and alcoholism. 

This is a novel that will make you laugh and cry and catch your breath in your throat. So assured are the voices that it is hard to believe that this is Persaud’s debut novel. Mind you, the author has already won the Commonwealth Short Story Prize in 2017 and the BBC National Short Story Award in 2018, so perhaps it should be no surprise that Love After Love is on the shortlist for the 2021 Costa First Novel Award.

An explosively strong debut novel and a welcome addition to the pantheon of fabulous Trinidadian writers like Michelle Innis (She Never Called Me Mother) and Claire Adam (The Golden Child)

Shortlisted for the Author's Club Best First Novel Award 2021

You’ll Enjoy This If You Loved: The Golden Child by Claire Adam, The Cupboard Full of Coats by Yvvette Edwards

Avoid If You Dislike: Novels writing in dialect

Perfect Accompaniment: Curried cascadoux (Trinidadian fish)

Genre: Contemporary, Caribbean literature, LGBT

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A Tall History of Sugar by Curdella Forbes

Reviewer: Catriona Troth 

What We Thought of It

A Tall History of Sugar, set in Jamaica, tells the story of Moshe, a foundling child discovered floating in basket of reeds among the sea grapes, and Arrii, the girl just one year older who becomes his friend, protector and interpreter. When they are little, the two are so close they can read each other’ thoughts. But life has a habit of getting in the way.

The novel opens in 1958 and ends in the present day, explicitly in the era of Trump and Brexit. It is a close up view of rural, post-independence Jamaica and its struggles to shake off the suffocating ties of the ‘Mother Country’.

“England was all around us, all the time. Right next door. Not just any door, but a glass door you could push and go straight through to the other side.”

Moshe is a misfit. Not just a foundling but racially impossible to classify. His skin his pale as clotted cream and desperately fragile, his features African, and his hair and eyes a strange two tone. He is also a talented artist, destined for international recognition.

Moshe’s sexuality, as well as his race, is ambiguous. His relationship with the avowedly gay character, Alva, reflects Jamaica’s own struggle coming to terms with gay relationships – another legacy of colonialism.

The politics is of the time is there. And the music. But also a sense of magic. It’s in the two children’s ability to read each other’s minds. In the mysterious way they track down the old woman who can tell Moshe something about his birth, and in the duppies that haunt a clearing near Moshe’s home, “spending their nights quarrelling and cooking insatiable meals in three-footed Dutch pots”. Yet Forbes herself rejects the label of Magic Realism and calls the book instead a Fairytale.

This use of a fairytale form allows Forbes to reflect the deeper history of Jamaica – such as the lasting scar of slavery, symbolised in Arrii’s family curse– a birthmark that torments them to agony at the start of every sugar harvest – and Moshe’s inability to tolerate even a trace of sugar.

The story is ostensibly told by Arrii, yet the voice of the novel shifts back and forth, easy as breathing, between first and third person, and between standard English and Jamaican patois. It’s unsettling at first, but fascinating, shifting our perspective in and out. At one point, between sections, there is even a wry step outside the frame of the novel, as the author notes that, “There are now too many spelling and grammatical errors in A Tall History of Sugar to make automatic corrections ... Oh, Lord, what is the correct and singular language to carry this freight, this translations of griefs?”

Forbes does indeed seem to be creating the language in which to tell the stories of her country. A bold and fascinating novel that weaves a spell around the reader.

You Will Enjoy This If You Loved: Empire of the Wild by Cherie Dimaline, Augustown by Kei Miller

Avoid If You Dislike: A somewhat ambivalent relationship with male homosexuality

Perfect Accompaniment: Bean stew with callaloo and Bob Marley’s Redemption Song

Genre: Literary Fiction, Adult Fairy Tale

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