Book Review: The White Woman on the Green Bicycle

I have been meaning to write about this book (The White Woman on the Green Bicycle by Monique Roffey) for some time. I’ve already mentioned that I picked it because it was set in Trinidad, after having read a few books on the trot set in Africa. I actually bought it last September and really wanted to enjoy it, but I only half enjoyed it. I have been beset by doubts that are not in the first instance to do with the book itself. First, this book is on the short list for the Orange Prize, and one of my nagging doubts is that I should have bought and read by now Attica Locke’s Black Water Rising, which is also up for the prize – but I haven’t done either so far. Black Water Rising though set in the US covers the same time as the TWWOTGB.

The 2010 Orange Prize winner is announced next week and the bookies odds have just come out and Monique Roffey’s book is at the bottom of the list at 8/1, while Attica’s book is third on the list at 7/1. There is stiff competition on this year’s Orange Prize list with both Hilary Mantel and Barbara Kingsolver’s books heading the list.

The second thing is of course, it seems that nothing has been published about the Caribbean for a while, and then Ian Thomson’s more controversial book (The Dead Yard) on Jamaica, even though its been out a while, pops up and wins the Ondaatje Prize, and of course I feel I should have read that by now too.

So now that I have got that out of the way, what is TWWOTGB about? The facts are - a newly wed French woman moves to Trinidad, with her English civil servant type husband. He falls in love with the place and is completely ‘at home’ from day one. She after decades of marriage never really settles, and spends much of her married life thinking that anytime soon he will take her back to the drizzle of Harrow on the Hill, to a perfect English suburban life.

If you don’t anything about Trinidad, and you bought this book I wonder what you’d make of it. You would I suppose imagine that it was absolute fiction. That, for example, the interviews with the ‘father of the nation’ singer The Mighty Sparrow and the cricket hero Brian Lara are with fictional characters. You’d not imagine that the Trinidad football team, known as the Soca Warriors, did really take part in the 2006 World Cup, because that would truly be fiction wouldn’t it?  Knowing all this, and amusing as it was, it did not make the first part of the book hang together for me. Another thing that has a part in the book, but is also true, is the crime blimp that hangs in the sky watching what goes on. I live in a part of London that puts up bollards to ‘design out crime’ so I am in awe that Trinidad has millions of dollars to spend on a high-tech blimp. In one of the funniest moments Brian Lara states that he believes that there are Mossad agents in the hills of Trinidad waiting for the sign of an attack on the oil installations from Cuba. Maybe that bit is also true and he does believe that – who knows?

The second part of TWWOTGB begins in the 1950s going onto cover the period of the 60s and 70s, therefore just before and just after the first post-colonial independent government of Trinidad. This felt more genuine as a story; you got a real sense of life for the wealthy and for those who were just making ends meet. The characters and the storyline here felt more believable. Not only does this section trace the young love and early shared dreams of a marriage, it goes on to show how a couple who are still very much in love, can grow apart too. This mirrors the relationship with the nation of Trinidad, as the people of the island are madly in love with the fantastic and vibrant historian and politician, Eric Williams (he’s real) who was the first elected leader of the nation, the book goes on to describe how quickly this hopeful brave new world disappears into paranoia and disappointment. The main character of the book is the island it self. Roffey describes it beautifully and it comes across as a gorgeous place from the green hills, the sunny beaches, glorious seas, hotels with verandas, big colonial houses, country house clubs, even the tiny chattel houses of the post slavery villages are described with the care of someone who is determined to get it right. [Note to self - should do a check on whether every book with black people in it has a big church scene – touché cliché.]

The things that irritated me most about this book were the limited use of colour descriptions of people in the book; so many people were described as black. In an island where you’d easily guess that the skin hues would be rich and varied – everybody who was not white was often just black. I was also annoyed by the phonetic spellings in the sentences and expressions of the ‘black’ people. They were the only people who had discernable ‘accents’ in this book. Roffey needs to take a look at Andrea Levy to see how it should be done. There are references in this book to the issues that are the focus of The Long Song.  I did however learn the word for ‘sucking your teeth,’ which it seems in Trinidad, is ‘steupsed.’ 

I am pleased that I have read TWWOTGB and will look out for other things by Monique Roffey, but this was a bit too slow for me. 

Illustration (from the back of the image)

Limbo

Watercolour on silkscreen print by Nan Richards and Mel Bauman

Signed and numbered by the artist 112 of which this is no 52

The Art Society of Trinidad and Tobago

Nan Richards

Nan Richards had some preliminary training at Manchester School of Art. England.

English by birth she lived in Trinidad for many years, working first as a book illustrator and as an illustrator for the Trinidad Guardian. She was also well known for her back-drops and scenery for local theatre productions.

In the early 1950s she experimented with painting in oils. Her landscapes remain among the most profound expressions from that period, not being considered typical of the purely decorative pieces. She extended her media into watercolour and silk-screen. Richards moved to the US where she died.