When it fails, she prepares a poison from a native plant for an act of collective suicide. With her dying, she sees her descendants conjured up before her like a pageant.The only ones to escape are Marie Ursule's three-year-old daughter, Bola, and her lover, Kamena, who search out ground where the Ursuline nuns' convent once stood. Bola lives on wild plants, sucking on stones and waiting for tidbits from her father on a crab- infested island. She has children by the men who travel through her Eden, and then farms them out or keeps them.
Her fostered children might lose sight of her, but their own offspring are inexorably linked.Cordelia, respectably married, suddenly discovers lust at the age of 53 after looking carefully at her body in a tall mirror. She gazes out the window and sees first the freezer repair man walk past and, then, a seamstress. When Cordelia's seams burst with longing, she rides the repair man on the kichen floor and plies the seamstress with rum. She even seduces a young boy addressing a revivalist meeting.The boy, nicknamed Priest, is another of Bola's descendents who, fanning out from her silence, gain education and enter the gritty realism of modern immigrant life. Bola has "spread her children around so that they would never be gathered in the same place to come to the same harm". Children descended from Sayman, the child who fearfully traced Bola's footsteps in the sand, leave for North America in the 1970s.
The most vulnerable are always brought back into the fold of this hard-loving, chaotic family.Descending through the generations, Dionne Brand returns these children to their almost mythic beginnings. She is best known in Canada as a poet, and her prose pays sharp attention to detail, with sensual, often playful, descriptions. She injects a rhythm into her language and creates characters who burst with colour. This is a delicately structured, beautifully written novel, infused with rare emotional clarity.. The Isles: a history by Norman Davies Macmillan, pounds 30, 1,222ppAt over 1,000 pages of text and with several tantalising supplements - illustrations, maps, tables and "capsules" - The Isles called for a very long train journey indeed Dresden to Dortmund did it.
At Dresden, I had been talking about contemporary Britain to Saxon civil servants, following the British Ambassador, Sir Paul Lever, who warmly quoted Norman Davies's approval of the European ideal in his Europe: a history. The ambassador was fortunate not to have got to page 1032 this work, where Davies writes "I happen to belong to that group opinion which holds the break-up of the United Kingdom to be imminent".A handy quote for the SNP's Alex Salmond - or is it? Reading Davies made me a lot less sure, for The Isles is a puzzle of a book - more to be explained, perhaps, by the politics of publishing than by its actual programme. Davies is a distinguished historian of East and Central Europe. His History of Poland was highly praised and Europe welcomed, though not without attracting critics.
The idea of locating the experience of the British Isles in European history must have seemed logical, given the huge sale of Sir Roy Strong's shamelessly Anglocentric The Story of Britain. Publishers are, these days, selling personality, not fastidiousness. Hence, I suppose, the decision to circulate a proof copy that seems closer to a first draft than to anything more elaborated.The proof's lacunae, question marks and remotely-recollected quotations read at times like a collaboration between Private Eye's Lord Gnome ("as Disraeli said... [some suitable quotation, please]") and Bertie Wooster ("Tum-ti, tum-ti, tum-ti tum/ I SLEW HIM!").