George Lamming (1927–2022)

A terribly boring novel. Made up of monotonous and meaningless conversations between: a) children, or b) elderly grandparents. In an attempt to convey the authenticity of the narrative, the author introduces a highly deformed, Creole English, which for a reader like me (English is my third spoken language), puts an additional obstacle to liking the work. After filtering out the pointless conversations between the main characters, the reader can still get an idea of what life was like in colonial Barbados, which is why I give a whole star to the novel.… (meer)

Lamming's first, and best-known, novel is the essentially autobiographical story of a boy, G., growing up in a small village on Barbados before and during the Second World War. But it's also an account of the history of the Caribbean, of the peculiar social structures and confused loyalties and identities left behind by slavery and colonialism. Lamming uses an experimental narrative style that allows him to treat the village almost more as a collective organism than as a collection of individual characters. The villagers struggle to make sense of their place in the wider world through the limited information they have access to and the distortions in the Anglocentric, imperialist curriculum of the village school, where most of the teachers have had no education that goes beyond what they are supposed to be teaching.

The village has grown up as a quasi-feudal dependency of the landlord and employer, Mr Creighton, in the aftermath of the end of slavery. And although there are still one or two old people who grew up as children of slaves, the village as a whole has no capacity for grasping what that meant. And they are even less aware of the way their lives are locked into the feudal relationship with Creighton: the anti-colonial agitation in the island that persuades him to sell up to members of the rising black middle class also allows him to decide that he has been absolved of his responsibility for his former tenants, and they are suddenly left facing homelessness and the destruction of their community.

This is a political novel, but it's also a very poetic one: there are long, beautiful passages of observation of the island world in which nothing important seems to happen (the headmaster looking out over the silent school, three crabs walking up a beach, a boy being bathed by his mother in the back garden), but at the same time we learn an astonishing amount about what it must feel like to live in such a setting. The narrative viewpoint switches around disconcertingly between the "I"-narrator, G., and various other characters, and we are launched into unfinished storylines that may or may not be picked up later. It's a book you need time and leisure for, but a very rewarding one to invest them in.… (meer)