Different voices lead to distinctive second novel
Just as Trinidad’s natural beauty and warm climate can blind tourists to its social deprivation, Ingrid Persaud’s vivacious prose style could almost make readers of her second novel overlook the violence at the heart of the story. I say almost because Persaud, like her fellow Trinidadian the late V. S. Naipaul, deftly exploits the potential in writing lightly of heavy subject matter.
Love After Love begins with a death, as long-suffering Betty snaps and kills her husband, Sunil, after years of abuse. “That man only gave love you could feel,” recalls the widow, and it’s obvious that she and her teenage son, Solo, are better off without Sunil. After the death is deemed an accident, Betty takes in a lodger, Chetan, and the trio, who each take turns at narrating, live happily together. “I don’t want to put goat mouth on it,” says Chetan, expressing his fear of tempting fate, “but days like this it’s as good as having my own family.” Their idyll is shattered, however, one night when Solo overhears Betty drunkenly confiding to Chetan about what happened to Sunil.
The boy is furious and leaves for New York, where he stays with his paternal uncle Hari. Back home, Betty is heartbroken while Chetan is coming to terms with his homosexuality — a complicated and dangerous thing in a place where homophobia is rife. “He spared my life but until you get planasse with the side of a cutlass you don’t know real licks,” says Chetan of the time his father attacked him for being “a buller man” then banished him to live on “the other side of the island”.
Later, Chetan meets a former lover and is shocked to hear that the man’s family accepted his sexuality. “His family loved him no matter what,” says Chetan, which leaves him feeling unloved. Perhaps the novel’s title refers to the search for new love after old love dies. Solo is in denial about Sunil’s abusiveness, but Betty is reluctant to tell him the truth: “The shame would have been like getting the kicks and punches all over again.” Solo carries his own sense of shame and cuts himself to displace his pain. At the lighter but no less truthful end of the spectrum, Persaud shows that one of the ludicrous paradoxes of not talking to your parents is that you keep hearing yourself talking like them: “Lord, I’m starting to sound like Mammy,” says Solo.
The three narrators’ voices are distinctive and well-sustained. “When we were fed up playing we sit down, eat we belly full and relax we-self,” says Betty of a trip to a casino with her girlfriends. Persaud’s ear for dialect is unerring, she evokes a vivid sense of place and is particularly good at writing about cooking, listing the vegetables that go with curried cascadoux before enthusing: “I love that moment when the water hits the pot. It does be like a curry bomb exploding.” You can smell the spices and would be raring to get into the kitchen if only you could stop turning the pages of this enthralling book.
London Daily Telegraph