Book of the week
Sugar Money by Jane Harris (Faber & Faber) $33
Three lines into Jane Harris’s third novel ,I realised I had read her before. That’s how idiosyncratic her style is. That first novel was
a glorious and often very funny Victorian pastiche about the ills of an age and place, complete with a plucky heroine, a bleak house, and a strange employer with the obligatory deep dark secret. back of the layers of a history to expose the ugliness that lies within and the use of humour, though the subject matter and time periods are different. Another point of diversion is that has a male narrator, whereas
one is female, though both are young – mid-teens.
Harris has based on an incident that happened in Grenada in 1765 involving a group of French-owned slaves who had been taken as spoils of conquest by the British during the invasion of Grenada three years earlier. Two mulatto slaves owned by the French monks, who have retreated to Martinique, are charged with the task of ‘‘rescuing’’ the taken slaves, by their masters and bringing them ‘‘home’’. For the narrator Lucien who is about 14, it’s a grand adventure, for his older brother Emile it’s an expedition fraught with danger.
What makes such a good novel, aside from Harris’ absolute commitment to telling the story in Lucien’s voice and through his unworldly man-child eyes, is the way in which it examines slavery in this part of the world during this time period. The French monks rather congratulate themselves on being good masters, and compared to the English they probably are.
Emile and Lucien are both sons of the hated Father Damien Pillon, their mother being a slave he bedded regularly. The kindly monks have also casually sold Emile to another order of friars for being surly and Lucien talks of having his back turned to jelly under the lash in the past, though he’s still little more than a child.
This kind of pastoral guidance is however relatively mild compared to the atrocities committed by the English. And yet Lucien recounts these horrors along with a list of French crimes against slaves with a calm acceptance and more than a touch of black humour. It’s the reader’s job to be appalled by the dark heart of men, not his.
The novel hums with the look, feel, sounds and history of the Caribbean, recounted, along with the details of the ‘‘reckless venture’’ in Lucien’s distinctive patois and with his often naive take on events. All of which Harris effortlessly sustains over 300+ pages.