Mel Cooke, Freelance Writer
IN MOON River, the sixth of 15 stories in Isaac Chin's collection Tilly The White-Liver Woman, he writes about being told tall and short tales by an elderly black man: 'It didn't matter to me whether the stories he told were true or not. I believed them ... '
And this sums up a lot of the instinctive response to the tall and not so tall tales, all set in the Caribbean, mostly in Trinidad and, to a lesser extent, Guyana, which Chin puts down in very clear language.
He writes in the first person a lot, being a molested nine-year-old boy in Was It Murder ('Then followed excruciating pain as he plunged into me. I went limp and would have fallen into the water, but he kept supporting me while doing his thing.') and a 75-year-old finding unquestioning and unexpected passion with a 'young' woman of around 50 (' ... My first plunge had shown I could still swim, so I was tempted to try again.') in Baby Girl.
REAL AND CONSTRUCTED
He puts himself in the position of being told stories in the title and first story (told to him by a Jamaican), as well as Jonas' Version of Genesis and The Gates, again blurring the line between real and constructed experience.
It does not help that on the back of the book (which has a really terrible cover that does not do its interesting contents justice) it says "The names of places and persons are actual, used only to enhance credibility; whereas the incidents are only partly historical."
It does not help that the ages used in the book could be consistent with the author's at different stages.
Still, on whichever side of fact and fiction (or both) the 87-year-old Isaac Chin falls, he has some good tales to tell and does so in a conversational style, which would not be out of place on a verandah after Sunday dinner, when the television would become sacrilege. There is a good, old-fashioned murder mystery in The Head In A Goblet, a romantic duppy story (sex and all) in The Poltergeist and the bad possibilities of sudden wealth get good treatment in Suddenly, a Millionaire.
MANY RELATIONSHIPS
And throughout it all, there are relationships and relationships and relationships.
The writing is at its consistent best in the title story, where Chin writes about a potential robber being shot: 'Fortunately, the bullet had lodged in the intruder's hindquarters, causing him little injury other than another hole there.' (OK, so it is a bit gross, but it is a rib-tickler.) But he does get off graphic lines in other stories, such as in Three Days In The Life of John-John, where he describes the bedroom exploits of a man who had denied himself for very long with, '... Aided by years of storing zinc and other reproductive minerals, he added to the village population ... ' And he sums up the relationship between a man and his dog in Suddenly, a Millionaire with 'they ate the same dishes, off the same dishes.'
Tilly, The White-Liver Woman, published by Loft Press, is a good read, but I still would like to know where fact ends and fiction begins - if it does.
