Lennon, Brian. "'Human frailty and God's grace'." Review of Salt by Earl Lovelace. The Boston Book Review 4.4 (May 1997): 46-47.

Reproduced here in edited form, for personal or classroom use but not for republication. Citations should follow the original printed version.

The novels of the Trinidadian writer Earl Lovelace have appeared at intervals ranging up to ten years; as often enough with writers who work so slowly, each new work appears to re-think or recast its antecedent(s) in some way. Lovelace's debut, While Gods Are Falling, published in 1965, is in some ways a typical first novel: a study of upwardly mobile alienated idealism, a portrait of the artist as a young urban malcontent, omnivorously literate ("He was there reading elementary psychology or the Greek philosophers or a novel by Zola or some poems out of the book of American verse") and driven by a sublimated but volatile self-interest that is as apparently irresistible to women, as the novelist constructs them, as it is bewildering to himself. By contrast, The Schoolmaster (1968), a quasi-allegorical "village tragedy," bears a pastoral and dioramic cast, relinquishing psychologistic impressionism for antipsychologically spare narrative notation. In The Dragon Can't Dance (1979) Lovelace retu[text missing]

Hailed by The New York Times Book Review as "a poetic wonder," The Wine of Astonishment (1982) was billed as Lovelace's contribution to the canons of postcolonial literature. Like the first two novels, it is the story of an apostate---in this case, a delegate from a Spiritual Baptist or "Shouter" congregation---who, pledging to utilize his government post to end the persecution of his own people, repudiates them instead, moving into the colonial mansion known locally as "the big house." As Marjorie Thorpe notes in her introduction to the Heinemann edition of the book, the breakthrough of The Wine of Astonishment was its switch from third-person to first-person narration, and so to a narrative history from below ostensibly encouraging "the reader to believe that he is in fact listening to the artless, unstructured narrative of a simple peasant woman."

Salt follows The Wine of Astonishment by fourteen years. In many ways, it is an expansion and refinement of the characterologies, political topographies, and historiographic mises-en-scène of the earlier novels---and a synthesis of their stylistic experiments, as well. Alford George is a bookish, introverted Trinidadian child of African descent, whose first experience of peer acceptance (and subsequently, dominance) comes when he is recruited as a cricket umpire. With growing civic and intellectual authority comes the desire for worldliness, a longing to escape the "penitential island" of Trinidad and experience the culture of Europe, which he absorbs en masse in frenetic Bildung ("He bought a book called Improve Your Word Power... He read the sonnets of Shakespeare. He read the novels of Marie Corelli, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Of Human Bondage, the essays of William Hazlitt. He bought an umbrella"). In a reluctantly accepted post as schoolteach[text missing]

The novel's central episode is an audience granted by Alford, as National Party official, to Bango Durity, a common laborer and craftsman. Bango requests the ceremonial grant of a parcel of land in reparation for the suffering of his African slave ancestors under colonial governments. Alford, who deplores the cultural and political stasis he sees as the result of "living in the past," prepares himself for "the falsetto of false modesty, of self-pity and martyrdom that I had come to recognize as the voice of my father's generation struggling with its victimhood and its pride." But what he gets instead is an eloquently argued ethical vision:

"Understand from the start," he said. "I ain't come here to make the Whiteman the devil. I not here to make him into another creature inhabiting another world outside the human order. I grant him no license to pursue wickedness and brutality. I come to call him to account, as a brother, to ask him to take responsibility for his humanness, just as I have to take responsibility for mine. And if you think it is easy for either one of us, then you making an error. This business of being human is tougher than being the devil, or being God for that matter. And it doesn't matter whether in the role of brutalized or brutalizer...."

There was never any magic about what they had to do. People know it already. In every part of the world. From time begin, people have always done each other wrong, not because one fella is so much more wicked than the next but because to be stupid is the principal part of what it is to be human. And unless we want to doom ourselves to remain forever locked into the terrors of the error of our stupidity, we try to repair the wrong by making reparation: so many cows, so much land, so you could face again yourself and restore for yourself and the one you injure the sense of what it is to be human.

Persuaded, Alford proposes a public reparations policy for African Trinidadians. His denunciation, as a national traitor fomenting racial hatred, and the consequences for his political career furnish Salt with its dénouement.

Salt rehearses the high points of Lovelace's earlier work, including the drive to fidelity in recording both creole speech and psycho-characterological counterpoint: "...getting to his feet with the sense of weariness, of affliction, that he managed now whenever he thought he had to blame her for something"; "...her irony by then a habit of speech, ineffectual for any other purpose than to underline her helplessness." That portion of Alford's story addressing the crisis of his "change of heart" is arguably a richer ethical exploration of character than anything in the earlier novels. New here, perhaps, is something of a finer instinct for those deflations of comedy permitting one true seriousness. In the character of Alford George, Lovelace revisits the raging youth of Walter Castle, the hero of While Gods Are Falling, and artfully describes its solipsism by re-staging the epiphanies of responsibility that terminate it.

Not every aspect of Salt is perfectly realized. An introductory narrator, who appears to be a nephew of Bango and a student of Alford, is left radically underdeveloped, suggesting something of a withdrawn or abandoned attempt at unifying perspective. And the novel's central narratological conceit---the myth of Bango's distant ancestor, who "put two corn cobs under his armpits and flew away to Africa," leaving behind his children, who "had eaten salt and made themselves too heavy to fly"---is perhaps purposefully rendered a cipher. But if even (or especially) here, in mythic obscurity, Salt constructs an index to a complex of histories for recognition after the age of (European) imperialism, that in itself recapitulates the source of what are arguably "our" most vital literatures, today.

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