Mary Hanna
Title: Suspended Sentences: Fictions of Atonement
Author: Mark McWatt.
Publisher: Leeds, England: Peepal Tree Press Ltd., 2005. 250 pages.
Reviewer: Mary Hanna
Mark McWatt's Suspended Sentences has deservedly won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for 2006. This collection of 11 short stories, presented in a highly imaginative framework that is itself a story, is fresh and vibrant.
The stories are ostensibly told by a group of Guyanese sixth formers who were required, as punishment for vandalism, to write short stories about their country at the time of independence.
The McWatt persona follows up this charge years later and compiles the book with tales written by the motley group of friends who by now have spread around the world.
McWatt's own story closes out the collection with a detailed account of what led to the suspended sentences. The collection closes with high spirits and an update on the fates of the various 'friends'.
Some of the purported authors are female, some are young, some are deceased at the time of compilation. This imaginative frame for the short stories offered in the collection adds a dimension of drama and depth to these wonderfully wrought tales of Guyana.
Not since Pauline Melville's prize winning collection, The Migration of Ghosts (1998), has such a spellbinding group of stories been offered from this area of the Caribbean; I recommend it highly to anyone seeking a thoroughly 'good read'.
Whether 'written by' their youthful or adult selves, the stories reveal their tellers and the Guyana most of them have left. They also offer a scholarly and artistic take on Guyanese fiction-making.
My favourite is the tale of the ageing spinster who meets a naked Bakoo (a homunculus) in a jar and finds her life turned upside down.
'Alma Fordyce and the Bakoo' is an upbeat and hilarious contribution to Caribbean literature. The spinster Fordyce is literally driven out of her home, her mind, and the text on a lady's bicycle with a constantly ringing bell. Her adventures with the Bakoo are left to the imagination of the reader.
Similarly, 'Uncle Umberto's Slippers' is an upbeat offering that raises chuckles as the author's uncle follows a blue butterfly into the land of magic. His big feet keep walking after death and the family is left to puzzle out what really happened to him.
This story is charming, in the way that Caribbean family stories can be when the underlying drama is tongue-in-cheek and the language of the text is relaxed and reflective of the creole.
There are other upbeat stories in this text. 'A Lovesong for Miss Lillian' is a precious take on the moment in a Georgetown courtesan's life when she gets a reprieve from penury and old age with a startling new lover. The great gusto of the storytelling adds flavour to this tale of womanly charm and generational lifestyle. Miss Lillian embodies a gentile past that the ostensible author evokes with panache and humour.
In this tour de force of invention, stories that deal with homoerotic encounters and the making of art are offered with a calm, sure voice that belies the tempestuous nature of the investigation.
In 'Sky', old schoolmates meet and explore the interior of Guyana only to discover it is really their own hearts of darkness that is being interrogated.
This painful encounter is told with masterful control of the subject matter and the form of the short story, and is a fresh look at male friendships that span the years from school to adulthood. It makes for teeth-clenching suspense and gratitude to the author for his civility in bringing about a wise conclusion.
'The Bats of Love' is another such deeply civilised handling of a difficult subject. In this instance, the purported author tells the tale of a love triangle gone awry in the college days of two friends, but the real story is the playing out of doom for a brilliant scholar with a mental illness.
The illness is chronicled with great realism, and McWatt's control of his material and mature comprehension of his characters allows for an understanding of what to most people would be a puzzling situation. McWatt's protagonist tells of the death of his friend owing to a kind of betrayal by the 'I' narrator in the text. It is a thorough and compassionate rendition of mental illness that many will be grateful to read to achieve understanding of the loss of life by their own hand of some people so afflicted.
In 'Afternoon Without Tears', the 'author' Victor Nunes, who supposedly has disappeared in the interior of the country, writes a story in the style of Wilson Harris as a tribute to the great Guyanese writer.
Conflating past and present, this story reflects Harris' language and concerns as the author finds himself absorbed in a personal experience of self-revelation on the black river:
I had become the object of my own perception in that confused moment when I began to suspect the river (of what?), when I seemed to hear voices and it was as though someone danced on the river behind the curtain of rain, just beyond the bow of my corrial. It was, I knew, a species of entertainment, a show that was performed for my benefit and yet mocked me at the same time, that mocked my prudish response and the blood and shame it summoned in a timeless moment of anxiety that I prayed would pass.
This story is unsettled in its fabric; visionary, it blurs the real and the unreal as the 'I' narrator moves toward self-understanding. It is a fine, sustained effort at producing a Harrisian text, stamped with impressionistic detail of the Guyanese hinterland.
'The Tyranny of Influence' explores (with a nod to critic Harold Bloom) the making of tradition literally from the inside out. The author steps through a painting into the world of Renaissance art.
He examines the making of Madonna and child icons and the painting of great martyrs, including the Christ figure. In another dimension of art, there is included in the text a colour plate of the pictures under discussion that is very helpful to the reader. This story is a tour de force of art criticism and an insight into the artist's mind and skill in producing these icons.
In 'Still Life: Bougainvillea and Body Parts', McWatt writes an epistolary text that intertwines the story of two generations of lovers and tells of the painting of a powerful picture by the young daughter of the narrator. This is a lovely, leisurely story of the then and now. There is much to celebrate in the author's great delight in life and love and his appreciation for the art of painting.
Two science fiction tales are offered, and while not as successful perhaps as some of the other stories it is a pleasure to see a Caribbean writer experimenting with this form.
In 'The Visitor', a schoolboy is hijacked to future time in Guyana's history: the year 2070. He is there to perform a duty for the people of that age, but he resists their pressure to perform at the death ceremony of their Pope.
This story is an interrogation of religious and social mores and makes interesting reading for Caribbeanists. 'Two Boys Named Basil' is not, strictly speaking, science fiction, but I group it with 'The Visitor' to keep the integrity of the collection firm. This story is supposedly told by one of the women and tells the tale of two schoolboys who were friends and rivals until one of them disappears. It is a strong narrative that keeps one spellbound until the surprising conclusion.
Mark McWatt's tale of the supposed sentencing of the group of students for vandalism concludes the collection and cleverly grounds the stories in a realistic framework. McWatt is to be congratulated on his selection of such a wide variety of ethnicities and his careful presentation of them.
McWatt was born in Guyana in 1947. He has published widely as a scholar of Caribbean literature and jointly edited the Oxford Book of Caribbean Verse (2004). He is also a published poet: Interiors (1989) and The Language of Eldorado (1994.
