Published: 2020, Faber and Faber
Genre: Fiction
Themes: love, domestic violence, Trinidad, relationships
My rating (out of 5): ❤❤❤❤
If you distilled this story down to it's purest element, you would find a mother's love glistening strong and bright. A love that refuses to give up, even when life seemed intent on testing it to destruction.
Set in Trinidad, this is the emotionally charged story of Betty, who finds herself trapped in an abusive marriage to Sunil, and although she can deal with his drunken violence against herself, a line is crossed when he starts to mistreat her little son Solo. Sunil was a good man when they married, with his dashing good looks and charming ways, but once he took to drinking regularly with his brother, it didn't take much for his temper to flare and she knew it wouldn't be long before her skin was bruised and sometimes bones broken. He was always sorry of course, and he knew a shady doctor who would patch Betty back up with no questions asked, but now she has to protect her boy.
Written in the Trinidadian dialect, this book has a lively pace, and the story is engaging, although it covers a number of very harrowing issues. In addition to the domestic violence there are some quite graphic descriptions of self harm and incidents of homophobic attacks bought about by cultural intolerance. There is also a great deal of mental anguish and grief, so I wouldn't say this was an easy read.
It won't be too much of a spoiler to tell you that Betty and Solo find themselves living their lives without Sunil, and although they are getting along nicely, money is tight and she looks for a lodger to help with the bills. This is how Mr Chetan comes into their lives. A single man who teaches at the local school where Betty works in the office, and his own circumstances have left him with nowhere to live. Mr Chetan is calm, neat and methodical and best of all, he is a very good cook, so he even agrees to take a share in preparing the evening meals. Betty is happy with her new arrangement and, as everyone gets along so well, she wonders if they might ever become a proper family. The only trouble is that Mr Chetan doesn't seem interested in her in that kind of way.
Ingrid Persaud looks at different forms of love and how relationships build to form family units, with and without blood ties. On the flip side, she writes about partnerships that flounder through incompatibility or an imbalance of control between the two people involved. Sometimes people stay together despite their differences, just because the partners know each other so well. Everyone must find a set-up that works for themselves and society cannot dictate the shape of a family.
This is a good read but be mindful of the difficult subject matter.
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