Book Review…An artful presentation of our darkest hours

May 03, 2015 Book Review…, Features / Columnists

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Book: The Whale House and other Stories
Author: Sharon Millar
Reviewer: Dr Glenville Ashby

Sharon Millar barrels through life’s darkest tunnel where any glimmer of redemption is illusory.
In ‘the Whale House and other stories’, primal, unfettered and destructive seeds

germinate and sprout through our pores, leaving us psychologically disfigured and morally bankrupt. Thorns and thistles are our perennial companion and Providence bears down on us with punitive abandon.
Here, the past is a bitter pill never to be ingested.
It is circa 1980s and Trinidad is withered, rotting with drug trafficking and kidnapping.
Millar well captures the brutality and the callousness that turn innocents into criminals and victims. Law enforcement is turned on its head and one can hardly distinguish between murderers and society’s protectors. In her opening salvo, ‘The Dragon Tail,’ the trail of pain is palpable. A mother grieves for her murdered son caught in the underworld, lured by the glitter of quick fortune. She wails at the pathologist’s office, “How you lose someone? A boy is not a handbag or a scrap of paper that fly off a table and disappear in the breeze; a boy is not something you could lose so.”
What really has become of her son is disturbing, uncovering an unholy alliance between the law and a rogue element in the office of forensic pathology.
Justice eludes the poor and a status quo riddled with deceit and treachery ýremains entrenched. Whether doled out by nature or at the hands of killers, death lives in this skewed world, even visiting the forlorn ‘actors’ in the lumbering ‘Gayelle.’
Interestingly, Millar dabbles with race and class. She reproduces a letter written by Soraya, an East Indian protagonist in ‘Trotsky House.’ It reads: “Americans are not interested in a laundry list of ancestors. To them it is the same; you are not white, then you are black.
Millar understands the warped psyche of Trinidadians, long beaten with the colonial whip. The stereotype of the criminal is so removed from the facts; and predators use this (perception) to their advantage. The following tells the regrettable truth.
Millar writes in ‘The Hat,’ “But people still have it in their head that bandit can only come in one colour, and they have to be poor and downtrodden.”
This is an autopsy of Trinidad’s society, performed with clinical precision. ý
In ‘Centipede,’ we are faced with a marriage of convenience, infidelity, obsession, and the slippery, cryptic and superstitious world of gambling. In the haunting ‘Whale House,’ the death of a couple’s baby leaves psychic wounds and a gaping hole in the sanctity of trust and truth. ‘Trotsky’s Mouth’ follows with domestic violence turned deadly and families ripped apart. And for the unfortunate who have experienced the scorched earth battle against cancer, ‘Making Guava Jelly’ is a doleful recall of its assault on the body and the mind.
Throughout, ýMillar frantically searches for the soul of a nation and its people but both are already capped in darkness. Frankly, no one is immune, neither is anyone free from culpability. There is an unforgiving, tragic thread running through her offerings. Surely, anguish, longing, duplicity and murder abound, yet, Millar is able to clothe our darkest hours with artful colour. We are never overwhelmed or derailed by excess. Rather we are mesmerized by Miller’s dance with words, her vivid, imaginative brilliance… her creative penmanship. Madness is somehow sanitized by this rare gift.
It is in ‘Dragonfly’s Tale,’ that we see the first of her many strokes of genius as she describes a police officer.
“Wiping his hands on the seat of his pants, he comes towards her. He’s a good-looking boy. Tall and dark with a square head and a nose carved like an answer to his heavy brow.”
And in ‘The Hat,’ she remains true to her craft, her gripping narration never abates.
“In the time since he’s last seen her,” she writes of the story’s protagonist, “she’s aged that bit more. Not anything you could put your finger on, just a subtle desiccation of the body – the marrow calling the flesh home.”
Millar, the consummate purveyor of creative-writing, peppers her oeuvre with such definitive artistry that we ignore the blight that has overwhelmed our native land. Yes, the Whale House and other Stories stands tall, a cut above many. Regrettably, it is a woeful reminder of a paradise that once was.

Feedback: [email protected] or follow him on Twitter@glenvilleashby
The Whale House and other Stories by Sharon Millar 2015
Publisher: Peepal Tree Press Ltd, UK
ISBN: 13; 9781845232498
Available: amazon.com
Rating: recommended

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