Indigo Or Mapping The Waters [Paperback]

I wanted to like this book because, really, I want to applaud anyone with the ambition to use a Shakespeare play as the starting point for a novel. And this novel starts off well. I found the first half of it to be interesting and engaging, but unfortunately it seemed to lose its way somewhere and I ended up thinking that this is really a 250-page book that's been stretched to nearly 400. The other thing that began to bug me was that it does not really have anything very original to say. If you are familiar with books by Jean Rhys, VS Naipaul and other Caribbean writers, then you won't find anything new here.

A very interesting if somewhat frustrating novel about colonialization, using Shakespeare's 'The Tempest', various fairy stories and real-life political incidents as inspiration. Warner's fourth novel is set in a series of imaginary Caribbean islands, partly in the past (in the 16th century, I think) and partly in the 20th century. The Everard family, descended from Elizabethan explorer Kit Everard, once owned two islands in the Caribbean (invented by Warner, but loosely based on a couple of the smaller islands in the West Indies). Over the years the Everards maintain close links with the islands, and eventually Xanthe,one of the last surviving Everards, goes back there to live. The story of the modern-day Everards: Sir Anthony the patriarch, his young wife Gillian, Kit, his melancholy son from his first marriage, Kit's depressive and anorexic wife Astrid, their eager-to-please daughter Miranda and Xanthe, Sir Anthony's 'golden-girl' daughter' forms the outer sections of the book - a lengthy section in the middle is devoted to Kit Everard's arriving on one of the paradisical Caribbean islands and his subduing of its inhabitants. This is where the 'Tempest' references come in: Sycorax, Caliban (called Dule by his own people) and Ariel are all inhabitants of the island, and bear some relation, though not much, to their Shakespearean namesakes. And in the present-day sections the use of the name 'Miranda' maintains the 'Tempest' links.

This is a book with some wonderful bits to it. I particularly enjoyed some of the modern sections: the depiction of London from the end of World War II through to the 1960s and on to the 1980s, Miranda's relationships with Xanthe and with the Everards' Afro-Caribbean maidservant Serafine and Kit's memories of his childhood on the islands. But this is also a novel that's trying to do too much, and be rather too intellectual about it. In the end I felt the references to 'The Tempest' were too loose to quite work (in the original, for example, Ariel and Caliban are not meant to be friends or kin, and trying to portray them both as victims of the brutal colonizers didn't convince). 'The Tempest' is not simply about colonialization, and focussing solely on this aspect of the play meant that the play's more interesting, human relationships (the figure of Prospero, for example, and the whole Miranda/Ferdinand story) weren't touched on. Adding the fairytale elements to the story (Xanthe being a modern version of the fairytale princess visited with blessings and curses by fairy godmothers, for example) complicated things further - Warner ended up trying to work in so many references to myths and folktales, and to make her characters behave in accord with the folktale plots that she'd laid out for them that some of them, particularly Xanthe and the gentle, rather weak hotelier who she marries, never quite felt like real people. The final section too, with the coup that takes place on the island, began to sound less like a novel than news reporting; Warner trying to show us that she was well-versed in the politics of international development. The problem was that, as the human dimension of the story began to be less important to her, the island inhabitants and their champions began to seem more and more like stereotypes and less like human beings. I ended up feeling that the tone adopted for some of the island sections was slightly patronizing.

This is a pity, as there is some marvellously beautiful writing in this book, and when Warner does concentrate on the characters' inner lives and emotions, as well as using them to work out ideas on colonialization the book is superb: I enjoyed the depictions of Sir Anthony's tormented relationship with his daughter, Astrid's depression and Miranda's struggling to find a way to fit in and be loved particularly powerful. Some of the descriptive passages in the 16th-century sections of the book were also lovely, even though the characters never quite came to life in the same way as the modern ones. And I loved the final section of Miranda's story, when she finally found a man who would accept her.

All in all a book with much of interest, but one which tries to be too clever and to get in too many academic references. If Warner had relaxed a bit, and thought more about the characters and less about Important Themes To Explore it might have been an even better read.