Andrea Gunraj’s debut novel is a tale of innocence and experience. It is a narrative driven by a strong fairy tale element, where children are stolen by evil ex-lovers and old women’s presentiments of danger come true. It begins and ends on a fictional Caribbean island, Marasaw, where the protagonist, Neela, puts up with a judgmental community and an overbearing grandmother who’s taken care of her all her life.
When Neela, despite her grandmother’s words of warning, runs away with her boyfriend, Jaroon, she enters a world of corruption and deceit: the island of Nasee-ki, where the government is struggling to build a fancy Caribbean resort for the world’s rich. The island appears haunted, half-constructed buildings mysteriously torn down by “wood ants [and] overnight winds.” Neela is further than ever from her critical community, but this freedom has come at a cost: Nasee-ki is a scary place.
Her grandmother’s fears are soon confirmed when Jaroon establishes himself as the dictator of the bush; bloodshed, bribery, and the murder of children follow. Once again, Neela is forced to run away, but this time, there is a catch: she is pregnant with her baby, Seetha. The fairy tale quality of the novel is here underlined by a sense of fate. Echoing in Neela’s past is the story of her mother, who ran away after having two illegitimate children, one of whom was Neela.
Gunraj’s writing is stronger when she uses dramatic, almost Gothic depictions of setting and character. Neela’s relationship with Baby, an “inbred” girl who was “born in sin,” is a high point of the book. It seems that Baby is a freak—as is her child—and that society would prefer them invisible. But Neela and Baby’s friendship develops nonetheless, a connection based on a shared love for their children and the feeling that they must protect them from a cruel and insensitive world.
In a similar vein, Jaroon’s steady descent toward sociopathy reads like opera, his evil feeding drama and suspense. He and his soldiers burn down Nasee-ki’s matchstick school, the building alight with “dazzling flames and a swirling tunnel of fumes,” as Gunraj expands into tirades of fiery description that never seem contrived.
However, in the realm of typical human relations Gunraj falters. Sibling rivalry and Neela’s brother’s love affair both feel forced and awkward. The subtlety of emotions is often lost in a wash of sentimentality. The reader wishes Gunraj would just tone it down. The delicacy and grace that Gunraj lacks in the quotidian, however, come through when she breaks free of the banality of people’s daily lives. A scene where Baby and Neela are discussing books—“Dis one says dat God sees things happening on earth… dat’s good, right?”—demonstrates Gunraj’s true facility as a storyteller: her ability to humanize the freak as well as the villain.
Tobias Atkin has published poetry in The Claremont Review.
