Good Ol Boys from Saints
Mark McWatt's Suspended Sentences (2005) comes with much biographical baggage attached. It is a collection of short stories, but before you delve into the first the author sets you up with a Preface and a three-part Introduction. The book was conceived as a set of stories purportedly written by a group of real-life sixth form students eleven stories, eleven writers as penalty for acts of vandalism they once committed. There are portraits of the writers (as students in the 60s) and an update of their lives (as adults in the 90s).
The stories are set in Guyana, "a country which most of [the students] abandoned", and the group committed the act of vandalism "at a sports club of the Imperial Bank on Friday 9th July, just over a month after Independence".
For readers who still live in Guyana, or who might be planning to abandon the country, the concept might prove more intriguing than the stories. Students at our prestige schools could consider this project (minus the vandalism) as part of their farewell rituals: strong sixth form male (or female) bonding, departure for institutions abroad, journal-keeping or blogs that record their progress around the world; and eventually stories sent back home "celebrating" their sixth form idealism, their failed or fulfilled adult lives.
The story tellers of this book are all old boys (and a few girls) of the old St Stanislaus College and the idea might have worked as a template to explore that venerable institution once run by Jesuit priests, the attitudes and assumptions built into the "education" they provided for the sons of the faithful and well-to-do. But McWatt slips away from this challenge to the imagination; his half-and-half stories offer few insights into why "abandonment" of Guyana became so abruptly the only choice for that student generation.
If you're a Saints old boy (before the school admitted girls) the real-life and fictional names and references might stir some nostalgia. The pertinent question here is: do the stories, as works of fiction, stand on their own? Would a reader born in Lagos or Mumbai and living now in Leeds, England, or Kingston, Jamaica pick up this book and be informed? amused? disturbed?
All told, there are rewarding moments, in part because many of the stories deal with ghosts, disappearances and bacoos. (Which would seem predictable for young Guyanese students in the 60s abandoning the old country in a hurry, but in any event) McWatt writes with a priestly devotion that keeps you sufficiently engaged.
His prose has the strolling decorum of old school Roy Heath; and a few of the stories remind you of Edgar Mittelholzer's My Bones and My Flute: the controlled pacing, the delineation of quaint characters, familiar but strange settings; though there's a hint of high-toned propriety which might be McWatt's own signature or perch.
"Alma Fordyce and The Bakoo" is set in a Georgetown Bar & Restaurant and is a droll tale about a naked bacoo in a glass jar whose penis suddenly comes alive to the astonishment of a spinster, Alma Fordyce. In "Uncle Umberto's Slippers", the footwear made out of old Firestone tyres disappears after the old man's death. When they turn up again it seemed as if "in two and half years someone or something had put ten thousand miles" on their soles.
"Two Boys Named Basil" is about mixed-race lads whose lives "seem to have been curiously and profoundly interrelated". On a school trip climbing the Baracara Falls one Basil disappears leaving the other Basil torn with guilt; forty years later his face reappears Zelig-like in the background of a Guyanese tourist brochure picture.
If some of these mysterious goings-on remind you of Wilson Harris, the connection is not incidental. McWatt's Guyana is by and large Harris' metaphysical terrain; his settings are the Pomeroon, the Mazaruni, Kaiteur; characters experience "involuntary shudders" and "realize in a flash what they had known intuitively all along". And "Afternoon without Tears" a strong "tribute" to Guyana's mythmaking genius is so delightfully accessible, you could be forgiven for suspecting the writer is a Wilson Harris doppelganger.
This collection of stories might unwittingly give our literary tourists the impression there's a constant flood of shape-shifting phenomena, as unfathomable as Harris' prose, rushing back down our rivers from the Interior and breaking through seawalls of reason in Georgetown and on the coast. It's reassuring to know that bacoo stories from Guyana are as common as UFO stories from North America or gravedigger stories from Nigeria.
A startling inclusion at the end of one story, "The Tyranny of Influence", are photos of four oil paintings by an Italian painter, Antonello Da Messina. The story is about a Guyanese painter. He stands before a blank canvas; he turns and sees a 15th century painting in the background of which is a muddy stream of bleached skulls; he leans closer and is drawn inside the painting; he starts walking through the stream and finds himself mysteriously in Guyana's Interior, wading through a shallow river and stepping over skulls strewn among the boulders.
For the Guyanese reader this is a clever start to an intriguing idea; the story carries you along on some Sci Fi intraterrestrial journey; but the streaming prose rarely rises above "cleverness", and the glossy prints of the Antonello da Messina paintings stick out like postcards of jarring irrelevance sent back home by a self-confessed "lost" soul.
Several stories deal with sexual awakening. (One 'sex scene' is set in the Pakaraimas; at the end of it the two former classmates, now grown men, discuss what did or didn't happen.) The stories set in Georgetown take their time arousing and sustaining interest. McWatt's prose draws on an ornate, well-stocked vocabulary, and you're reminded he's currently a professor in the English Department at UWI: "Liliana had been for years his only source of carnal pleasure He had arranged her monthly stipend fourteen years ago In recent years their assignations had diminished to a sad routine Liliana glanced down at the limp flag of his withered penis, slumped disconsolately against the inner thigh of his left leg." ("A Lovesong for Miss Lillian"). Saints Old boys from the 50s and 60s might find all this highly gripping stuff.
But what, you wonder, might sixth form students at St Stanislaus College 2005, holding fast to dreams on shaky stilts, take away after reading McWatt's Suspended Sentences? They might be struck by the lyrical intensity of these sentences near the end of the book: "Over the years the country lurches from one calendrical totem of independent nationhood to another celebrations of emancipation, Mashramani, the hallowed raising of the flag in memory of that first independence midnight as we continue to bite each other like bugs in a stinking bed where for years, no warmblooded body of hope has come to lie " ("The Celebration"). Plenty disheartening news and calendrical "omen" there to take any young reader's breath away. Not much by way of lessons from the past for a new post-Independence order. More like the old school 'plague on both your [political] houses'; then flight and abandonment.
Given our churning ethnic anxieties and our ever-shifting economic sands Suspended Sentences is not by any means the book about Guyana you simply must read. Nevertheless, there's a darkly handsome cover, with a collage of Guyanese images; and the blemish-free typeset of Peepal Tree Press makes for a pleasant way to pass a Sunday afternoon, say, on a Berbice verandah or at an Essequibo hideaway. Any place where sound systems cannot reach you.
Impatient readers, still stuck with or pledged to Guyana, are best advised to bypass the Saints ol' boys scaffolding. In short, if you prefer your reading pleasure straight, cut to the bacoo!
Book Reviewed:
Suspended Sentences: Mark Mc Watt: Peepal Tree Press,
England (2005)
