It is difficult to decide what audience journalist and cultural historian Kim Johnson is targeting for his book, The Fragrance of Gold. It can't be serious history students: the brief extracts which make up the 104 chapters of his 171-page book do not provide sufficient information on any particular topic. It can't be professional academics: Johnson's sources are mostly second-hand, taken from books and articles written by persons who studied original documents, thus making the information in Fragrance mostly third-hand. And, although in his foreword, Johnson states that the book was meant to be a "popular work", the structure and style mitigates against it reaching that ill-defined target.
An academic work, almost by definition, can never reach a popular audience. What it can reach is the intelligent layperson - a growing but still not especially large minority - in an educated society. In this century, Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy, Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time, and Steven Pinker's How the Mind Works all achieved bestseller status. But that is because these books all deal with fundamental questions of existence. History has a much narrower scope.
Besides this, writing a popular work of any sort requires certain fundamentals to be in place. For example, there must be narrative structure. But Johnson eschews this in favour of staccato extracts which jump from event to person to country and different combinations thereof. Supposedly held together by the sub-title "Trinidad in the Age of Discovery", the book geographically covers Spain, Trinidad, Antigua, England, Margarita, Netherlands, Guayana and others; leaps in topics from anthropology to linguistics to botany; and in parts just lists place and animal names. All of which could work within a structured narrative but, as Johnson explains, he was "recoiling from the boredom of much academic historiography."
A second key requirement for popular writing is a flowing and lucid style. Johnson's style is certainly informal but, like his chapters, jerky in the extreme. He also has the irritating habit of inserting rhetorical questions and then proceeding to answer them, like a host who monopolizes the conversation at a dinner party. His style, he says, was "obviously influenced by...Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Octavio Paz and Alejo Carpentier." I am not familiar with these writers, so I cannot say if the too-liberal use of contractions ("the son with whom he'd come", "What's this world coming to?" "Whatever's happened to him?"), breathless adjectives ("a trenchant Toledo blade, two arms in length, tempering the hardness of glass with the flexibility of rubber..."), beginning sentences in the passive voice ("So do the tremulous austere months pass...Food they get from the caciques..."), and whole paragraphs without a full stop are all attributes of good Latin American writing. But I suspect Johnson would have done better to immerse himself in CLR James, George Orwell, Dr. Eric Williams and Gwynne Dyer in order to learn how to write history in an accessible manner.
The third requirement of popular writing is the vivid delineation of persons and/or quirky anecdotes. Here Johnson succeeds a little better, but only in the portion of the book that deals with Sir Walter Ralegh. This is largely because Ralegh gets over 40 pages devoted to him, as compared to the 17 pages for the conquistador Antonio de Berrio, and the seven for Columbus. Through Ralegh, the reader gets a sense of the personality of both the explorer and the people around him. There is narrative flow, mostly because of the number of extracts, and interesting details. It is a pity that the rest of the book could not have been more like this.
In the final analysis, Johnson's book offers little that is new about the history of our region and nothing especially gripping in literary terms. However, the book can be a useful guide to anyone who might be interested in learning more about the topics he touches on, especially its wide-ranging bibliography. And it is worth noting that historian Bridget Brereton, author of several books and a competent writer herself, says in the introduction that "in its imaginative sweep, its vivid style and its power of historical empathy...The Fragrance of Gold deserves to be compared with Naipaul's The Loss of El Dorado."
Copyright ©1998, Kevin Baldeosingh