A promise that falls short

Show Me a Mountain , the most recent of the interconnected novels constituting Kerry Young’s ‘Jamaican trilogy’, comes with high expectations: Pao , her debut effort, was shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award and the Commonwealth Writers Prize; Gloria , which followed, was well received by critics.

In her third novel, the author remains faithful to the milieu she knows intimately: Kingston, Jamaica, where she was born and spent the first decade of her life. Home to a multicultural cocktail of communities, this is a city where “di rich live soft and comfortable” in opulent localities, “di poor scratch di rock-hard earth” in impoverished townships and “the colour of your skin still counts for everything”. As Young leads us into the alleys of Chinatown, describes the high tea ritual in a wealthy home or exposes us to mob violence in a disreputable slum, her flair for creating a sense of place is evident. Extensive research has also gone into her depiction of Jamaica’s charged socio-political climate between the early 1930s and the late ’60s, suggesting an attempt to lend a wider dimension to what is, in essence, a family saga.

Like the backdrop against which the narrative unfolds, life at the Wongs’ is fraught with tensions and ambiguities. The narrator Fay, like the author herself, is of Chinese-African parentage. Her genial father, who has clawed his way to affluence, prefers to spend his leisure hours in opium-scented gambling dens, away from the frictions of his home on tony Lady Musgrave Road where his African-origin wife plays grande dame of the manor, rants about sin and damnation and unleashes her rage — the residue of past traumas — on Fay, the light-skinned daughter she resents. Apart from the regular and somewhat distasteful episodes of child abuse that ensue, the narrative also weaves in hints of incest, sodomy and murder. Here, we tell ourselves, is an explosive combination of elements, waiting for the right catalyst to ignite it.

But as we read on, it slowly fizzles out. The brutalised child who had aroused our pity grows up to become someone we can neither root for nor admire. The adolescent Fay, befriended by the bold, saucy Beverley, another mixed-heritage offspring of a rich family, turns rebellious. Encouraged, we look forward to a newly confident Fay charting her own destiny. But all she does is “flit away” her days “sleeping and eating and dancing”, squandering her indulgent father’s money and surrendering to not very well-understood urges.

She goes slumming with strangers from the other side of the tracks — notably, Isaac, a black butcher’s assistant and latent communist — ostensibly to spite her class-conscious mother. There’s an affair with a ne’er-do-well Englishman and even a forbidden love story involving a young Catholic priest. While Kingston is torn by strikes and riots, Fay roams around in her linen dresses and maroon Mercedes-Benz, consorting with people she would normally shun, getting them into trouble, using them to fulfil her own ends and — what really exasperates — offering self-righteous excuses for her actions. Rarely, in fact, are we spared her explanations, aimed at absolving herself of the consequences of one flawed decision or another. Rarely is she persuasive.

Imperfectly conceived, Fay seems as ambivalent as she is unconvincing. Consider her varied reasons for sleeping with Isaac: to be rid of the guilt she feels for the privileges she was born to and he was not; to learn about that side of Jamaica she was never exposed to and he knows so much about. Absurdities of this kind are dished out in periodic interior monologues, introduced, one suspects, to redeem Fay in our eyes, though her subsequent deeds belie her sincerity. Towards the end of the book, in a sudden outpouring of concern, Fay is spiriting her kids away to England, severing their ties with the father they adore.

If Fay manages a heartfelt connection with anyone at all, it is Sissy, her maid, who lends the novel a certain Gone with the Wind flavour. Theirs is a relationship that comes across as genuine, though Sissy lacks the exuberant, larger-than-life persona of the unforgettable Mammy. Nevertheless, her down-to-earth wisdom is welcome and her Jamaican patois, juxtaposed with the quaint Chinese English spoken by Fay’s father and husband, endearing, revealing Young’s keen ear for the idiosyncrasies of hybrid speech. But given the breadth of her canvas, the plethora of extraneous characters, the many strands in the narrative that tug it in different directions, Sissy’s presence remains peripheral.

As sagas of this kind go, Margaret Mitchell’s evergreen ’30s classic also featured a family caught in the colour-and-class conflicts of its era. With one crucial difference: it had Scarlett O’Hara holding the reins of the narrative firmly in her hands. Fay is certainly no Scarlett, lacking her energy and resolve, her fierce loyalty to family and the courage of her convictions. Scarlett evolves, never losing the reader on her journey. Stunted in her growth, Fay abandons us midway.

Mita Ghose is a Kolkata-based freelance writer and editor

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