Daughter of a bitterly disappointed woman and half-sister of a dangerously self-destructive beauty, Jean Landing lives in a chaotic domestic world where security died with the early death of her father. Although much of the drama of CezairThompson's ambitious if dogged first novel, short-listed for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, comes from the vivid descriptions of 1980s Jamaica in a vicious political turmoil, it is largely a family story. The difficulty with the narrative, however, is that despite the attention placed on creating an intense sense of lives determined by circumstance, the reader quickly becomes far more interested in the reported upheaval tearing the country apart than in the fate of any one individual.
There are many characters, perhaps too many. Aside from Jean's grandmother - the saintly Mary Darling, daughter of a fascinating character, Jean Falkirk, a Scot brought by marriage to Jamaica a century earlier - and Jean's colourful Aunt Daphne, few of the characters emerge as more than two-dimensional. Characterisation extends to little more than a collection of types. Jean is the central figure almost by default. Flight from Jamaica is what makes her interesting. Compared with her hardened mother, Monica, and the wayward Lana, Jean is ordinary without being particularly real. The most fascinating aspect of her story is not her interludes of second sight, but the slow awareness that eventually leads her to some understanding of the hopeless love that exists between her and her friend Paul, once the handsome youth next door.
The narrative moves back and forth in time and also avails, not very convincingly, of journal-like entries narrated by characters from a past that is extremely complicated as well as neatly caught up between two families. An awkward quality of here-I-am-speaking-to-camera weakens these sequences. Cezair-Thompson appears stylistically most at ease when writing in a straightforward tone of reportage. There is a self-consciousness about much of the prose. "The scent of unearthed history breaks the air at every landmark, and every familiar thing is a landmark for her today, not in the way of an edifice proudly drawing attention to itself but with the air of a forgotten ruin." Elsewhere, Jean experiences an epiphany of sorts. "Everything that had been worrying her rolled suddenly into the one thought: Jamaica was too young to die."
Yet while there are profound moments, with insights into lives lived and ended - Cezair-Thompson certainly earns the sympathy of the reader through the sheer honesty of this laboured book - the narrative is heavily dependent on events to drive it along. All too often there's a whiff of the romantic, racy novel. Jean, who invariably acts passive observer, in time meets an interesting older man. "The fragile but cumbersome thing they had been balancing between them - propriety - fell, and they were glad. His lips moved over her face and neck as if he intended to feed on her . . . She wanted to strip him and begin the worship of everything manly about him."
At the heart of the novel is the theme of place, what it means and how it changes. Jamaica is presented as both paradise and hell. People arrive there from elsewhere and become part of it while also remaining at a distance. A strong sense of cultural and racial variations runs through the book and becomes a narrative device. Sex is another and is consistently seen more as a mistake than a pleasure. All of the central characters have suffered through it, particularly the women. Monica, Jean's mother, remains embittered by a schoolgirl pregnancy by a boy forbidden to marry her. This rage infects her relationship with both of her daughters, particularly the lovely, crazy Lana who in turn replicates mother's mistakes.
The various characters, some colourful, if forgettable possibly because they are alike in their oddness, ebb and flow through the action. Cezair-Thompson kills off many of them along the way. There is a lot of chatter, much of it stilted and most of its ranging around sex. Only the sequences written in patois ring true. Few questions are asked. All the individual stories ultimately form a backdrop for the affectionate tension existing between Paul and Jean, friends since she was a small child. In common with many of the straying men in the book, he admits to not wanting to commit to any one woman. It is expected that the men sleep around, while the women lament. At times, the narrative is predictable enough to guess what is going to happen next, even what is going to be said next.
The True History of Paradise is attempting to handle powerful themes of race, gender, family and place with the earthy ease and inspired grace of a Toni Morrison and consistently fails by the flatness of the prose. It is a novel without texture. It also has to contend with the weighty shadow of Caribbean writing at its finest that dazzles through its poetry, exuberance and daring images. There is little of that expected imaginative effervescence here.
Cezair-Thompson does not match the emotional force, confidence and wonder of writers such as the magnificent Jamaica Kincaid and David Dabydeen - both of whom have been short-listed for the IMPAC award - for The Autobiography of My Mother and The Counting House respectively. To compare her with Patrick Chamoiseau as she has been is simply unfair to both.
For all its ambition, The True History of Paradise is peculiarly lifeless, more workman-like melodrama than parable. It never manages to move beyond a rigidly structured narrative consisting of a potentially exciting collection of fragments of individual stories caught in history. It is a first novel, but reading it after so many fine Caribbean novels, some of them also debuts, is rather like reading Arundhati Roy's disappointing and massively hyped debut The God of Small Things after a series of majestic Indian writers. Still, Roy went on to win the 1997 Booker Prize. So who knows.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
