Tide Running (Bluestreak)
Kempadoo's second novel (after Buxton Spice) is a sensuous, richly vernacular account of a young Tobagonian's intimate, ultimately disastrous intersection with a vacationing married couple. Cliff is a shy, aimless 20-year-old in the sleepy town of Plymouth on the Caribbean island of Tobago, whose fatherless family scrapes by on what his mother hustles from the "goods boat." As Cliff observes his friends falling into drugs and crime, he gravitates toward the charming openness of an interracial family with a vacation house nearby: Bella, a Trinidadian photographer; her husband, Peter, an English corporate lawyer who is white; and their small child, Oliver. Gradually Cliff becomes a friendly presence in Peter and Bella's airy, stunning home, and then much more as their three-way relationship deepens. But when Cliff begins to steal from the couple, the view of the limitless ocean-a constant presence in the novel-shrinks to the restricted prospect of a jail cell. Most of the novel is narrated in Cliff's heavy Tobagonian argot, challenging then mesmerizing, with stream-of-consciousness interjections by Bella. Kempadoo, sagely, does not condemn the rich outsiders for taking advantage of Cliff's disenfranchisement, but offers each character space for his or her own self-justification: Bella entertains "some na‹ve romance for [Cliff's] rootsy background"; Peter, older than his wife, tests his manliness against Cliff's in a mock-serious way; while Cliff remains an enigma, falling into criminality through a kind of "watch me nuh" boastfulness. Kempadoo's knowledge of the class-conscious ways and speech of the island people is deep and sensitive; her resistance to sentimentality imbues her narrative with moments of startling and incisive clarity.Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.