[dropcap]P[/dropcap]risnms is not your cozy, rainy-day reading. Even the title promises refraction; things at once splintering and claustrophobic. So, if you’re looking for warm, loveable heroes, venture no further. Garth St. Omer’s characters, are likely to be torn, tortured and mistrustful.
Prisnms is a wiry tale. It wends through issues of isolation and entanglement, enclosure and escape. Its leading characters are riddled with psychoses from which they seem unable to extricate themselves. Despite advantages of education, income and social status, they all battle with real and imagined exiles and crises of exclusion. As such, a brooding inevitability pervades the telling of this highly visual, almost cinematic narrative. It is written in the voice of its lead character Eugene Coard, whose opening scenes offer an addictive dose of sudden death, violence, and sexual conflict, set against an unhurried dissection of the island society to which he has temporarily returned.
Hypocrisy, bigotry and prejudice abound. But so do moments of sheer beauty, admiration, and even love, of which Coard proves reluctantly capable. It is his submerged sense of unworthiness, however, that drives the narrative to its inevitable end, where both happiness and resolution remain available but unsure. Increasingly malcontent and manipulative, Coard seems uncomfortable with both extremes of professional success and personal failure. He vacillates hungrily between power and impotence, needing to scour fragmentary relationships to confirm his own denigrating diagnosis.
Even when Coard has physically escaped his Caribbean backwater, and has all that he needs to stay free, he remains that product of dysfunctional society and demised family, bearing the scars of social diminution occasioned by his father’s death. His psychosis nevertheless runs deeper than a fragmented identity. Even at the pinnacle of professional success, he indulges in discomposure and deconstruction, coaxing and eroding the reader’s hope for lasting cohesion. Beneath his disquiet, is the memory of a sullied sexual encounter with his best buddy’s sister; an act for which feels not so much regret, as the need to do penance. This compulsion reinforces the novel’s tenor of simmering adversity, of unfinished business and perpetually fraying ends.
In Prisnms, island meets individual, as St. Omer treats us to intimate versions of emotional fracture. His narrative suggests strongly that there remains at best a lingering malaise which only one character, Fredrick Olsen—ironically the one who has had the least fortunate of beginnings—seems to have cursorily escaped. Still, how
far from your past can you run . . .? Childhood acquaintances, not seen in years, remember you: not by your government name, but as Red Bam who ran errands, son of Babsy, “short, Indian, a prostitute” who put on shoes when ships were in and “ . . . catered only to the white sailors.”
St. Omer transposes into individual lives, the sort of flagellation that island societies—lacking assurances of their own histories—routinely inflict upon themselves. He offers the keen example of Coard’s widowed and impoverished mother who, despite her fallen circumstances, watched Babsy from behind closed jalousies and judged. There are few benign recollections in this work; mostly haunting memories awaiting resolution. In the telling of such torment, St. Omer focusses an incisive light; not so much to produce unfettered clarity, but to reveal hidden fractures; to split the single beam into its divergent spectrum. Nowhere is this more acutely felt than in the attention devoted to Coard’s relationship with his patient Fiona Lynch, who reclaims her soul through the ritual of a double murder. Like the principle character and his patients, the very narrative is distrustful. In the end, one feels that Coard has merely stumbled through his post-colonial world, from one deception into the next, playing the lead in the classic tragedy of his own flawed character. In that respect, the work is reminiscent of an Achebe character: Okonkwo in Things fall Apart or Obi, in No Longer at Ease.
Prisnms raises inevitable questions, not just about Caribbean society, but about the human condition at large. Fiona’s desperation, juxtaposed with the tragic caricature of Walker, for example, offers a cocktail of inbred psychoses, which largely ignored, remain latent until they are amplified to disastrous proportions by the angst and anguish of transplantation, and by the triggers of racism, loneliness, and inadequacy. Few will curl up into such a tale to enjoy its delicious unravelling. More likely, readers will be drawn—unwillingly—into a world of deepening discomfort; a spiral which mirrors the complex contradictions of St. Omer’s settings and characters. Readers who have lived through the deceptive duality of Caribbean societies, not unlike St. Omer’s Saint Lucia, and who have experienced, even briefly, the acute anonymity of metropolitan cities, will understand why this might be. They may even admit an enduring empathy. But the residual effect of this work is more like an unvoiced scream somewhere inside the skull; an unasked question about the kind of violence to self which simultaneously entices and condemns. This effect St. Omer brilliantly achieves.
Adrian Augier is an award-winning poet, artist and producer and an ANSA Foundation Caribbean Laureate of Arts and Letters. He is also a development economist, an independent senator, and St. Lucia’s 2010 Entrepreneur of the Year. In October 2012 he received an honorary doctorate from the University of the West Indies for his contribution to regional development and culture. For more information on this writer and his work: adrianaugier.blogspot.com.
