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New Caribbean Novel Explodes the Myth of Island Paradise
Britain’s largest supermarket chain, Tesco’s, is advertising Like Heaven on the web although it isn’t yet off Random House’s press. This debut novel by old Hilarian Niala Maharaj is expected to seduce readers with a mix of sex and politics, humour and hi-jinks. ‘I can just see shoppers coming out of the grocery with a cauliflower, a dozen beers, my book, and a pre-cooked tikka-massala,’ the writer laughs. Like Heaven actually debunks popular concepts about the Caribbean, focusing on corruption and race politics, but adopts the Trinidadian habit of turning tragedy into comedy. Its title is taken from the speech poet Derek Walcott made when he accepted the Nobel Prize for literature. ‘And here they are, all in a single Caribbean city, Port of Spain, the sum of history, Trollope's "non-people". A downtown babel of shop signs and streets, mongrelized, polyglot, a ferment without a history, like heaven.’ Walcott’s poems attacked the Caribbean’s image in early English travelogues. ‘There are no people here,’ Trollope had said. Yet, when writing about Trinidad, which is blessed not only with natural beauty but immense natural resources, Walcott stated in an early poem, ‘Hell is a city much like Port of Spain’. Niala’s novel explores the reality that gives rise to these pronouncements. It follows the adventures of Ved Saran, a reluctant businessman who gets sucked into a whirlpool of politics and corruption. Ved may be clear-sighted in his practical vision of the future, but he is unable to apply the lessons he has learned to his private life. And intense family pressures bind him tight when he needs to be free. ‘Like Heaven shows how natural, ebullient innocence has a struggle to survive under the extreme pressures of commercial development,’ says Paul Sidey of Random House, who is bringing out the book in June. Every move Ved makes catapults cash into the family coffers. But he really wants respect and love. Instead, he keeps getting what he calls ‘close encounters of the third kind’ i.e. sex. His search involves him with a cast of typical Trinidad eccentrics: a carnival leader whose motto is ‘say no to curtains’, a steel-band player working on the first Caribbean symphony, corrupt politicians galore. And that’s not even counting his family. ‘Ved’s mother is a classic,’ says Jeremy Taylor, publisher of the Caribbean Review of Books. ‘Like Heaven is epic in scope but intimate in detail,’ says Paul Sidey. ‘And Niala Maharaj has a vibrantly original new voice.’ It was Sidey who urged Niala to produce a novel some years ago when he visited her in Amsterdam after reading stories she had written on a sabbatical spent at Boston University. ‘Her stories were a wonderful mixture of high hilarity, perceptive psychology, and a sort of crazed social consciousness,’ says Leslie Epstein, Director of the Graduate School of Creative Writing there. ‘No-one wrote like her then and I very much doubt that anyone is writing like her now.’ For more
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