At the end of Barbara Lalla's novel, Arch of Fire, the reader is left with only one question. It is, however, a rather large one: "What's the point?"
Sub-titled "A Jamaican Family Saga" Arch of Fire tells the stories of the Goldman, the Donalds, the Castries and the Stollmeier families, as well as other peripheral characters. The main story dates from the Morant Bay Rebellion in 1865, with brief forays to previous centuries to describe distantly-connected ancestors. The trouble is, neither the characters nor their stories really engage the reader.
Lalla's novel falls into the genre of historical romance, but it does so with a tentativeness that reduces its effectiveness. Although reviewers should always be careful about saying what a book should be, it is fair to state that good novels, broadly speaking, are entertaining and/or erudite. In the former category, a novel should have a gripping plot, engaging characters and accessible prose. In the latter category, the novel should have complex ideas, interesting characters, and elegant prose. Good books always cross both categories, while bad books never do. Lalla's book is not bad, but it's not particularly good, either.
If Lalla intended her book to be an historical romance (which puts it more in the entertainment category) Arch of Fire falls short because it lacks gripping plots and sub-plots. At no point did I find myself asking "What happens next?", which is the litmus test of good story-telling. (Stephen King, perhaps the best story-teller of all living novelists, calls it the gotta, as in "I gotta find out how this chapter ends.") Being an academic, Lalla, a Senior Lecturer at the University of the West Indies, probably would not have stooped to consulting Barbara Cartland or Colleen McCulloch, let alone John Grisham, in order to learn how to keep a reader gottaed. Given that the book is filled with intense events - enslavement, rapes, conquest, love affairs, murders, earthquakes, and even a gunfight - it may seem odd to say that the novel lacks story. But melodrama is only a substitute for creativity.
In lieu of story, a novel should have characters who arouse the reader's empathy and excitement. Lalla again fails in this respect: even when her protagonists get murdered or raped or married or pregnant, I really didn't care. My indifference arose partly because Lalla fails to draw each character distinctly. She merely gives a factual description - "Pearl was a stunner...a gorgeous girl, pulsing with life and laughter" or "His tall, lean body hovered taut with intensity, yet out of the urgent, dark brown face gazed dreamer's eyes" - then proceeds to describe emotions they experience and events that happen to them. This is one mark of the novice writer and, in a 520-page novel with over 20 significant characters, keeping track of who's who becomes a distraction.
If, however, Lalla intended her book to be in the erudite category, she succeeds a little better. There is much history here although, since Lalla gives dates like pulled teeth, I found it a bit irritating to constantly have to figure out what period I was reading about. At one point I thought I was in the 1940s for several pages before realizing the war she gave as a reference was World War One. There is also a lot of description, especially of the flora. Unfortunately, this turns out to be a weakness. Lalla flings adjectives at the reader like wedding rice - another characteristic of the novice writer. The background detail in a novel is supposed to remain just that: background. Here it intrudes far too much.
But even in the erudite arena Lalla falls short. After delineating almost five centuries of Jamaican history, no conclusions are drawn by the author (which is OK) and no lessons are learnt by the protagonists (which is not OK.) Near the end of the book, one character, Sarah, says, "Once I thought with horror what poor people went through...What a history of brutality. But it's not so simple...People refuse to work. They should be made to...Reintroduce the whip, I say."
This, of course, is just a character speaking. Yet the author does not have another character refute the opinion expressed - instead, the other characters opine that the "quiet, God-fearing people" of Jamaica -i.e. lower-class Jamaicans - got "so bad" because the socialist government of the1970s drove away the upper and middle-classes from Jamaica. So that when Lalla ends by focusing on a little boy, Gerry, who is the descendant of all the families, her description of him as "a new, untried shore waiting somewhere in the deeps of time" does not seem very promising given the definitive statements of a few pages back. Indeed, if this is the final message of the book, then Lalla has spent over 500 pages to say very little.
Copyright ©1998, Kevin Baldeosingh