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Django

Road Scholar

Swimming in the Volcano

Review by John Radanovich

The Caribbean, as Gabriel Garcia Marquez has said, is a place whose unified culture extends from New Orleans south all the way to the Venezuelan coastline. He is always impressed when he gets on a plane in Barranquilla, Colombia, and a black woman in a blue dress stamps his passport, and then when he disembarks in Jamaica and another black woman in a blue dress stamps it again, in English.

Sadly, few North Americans who have ventured to those rich new worlds have come back with the material for quality fiction - with the exception of Bob Shacochis. This young author's first book of stories, "Easy in the Islands," set in various fictional places throughout the West Indies, deservedly won him an American Book Award in 1985. His next book of stories, "The Next New World," expanded the examination of "Caribbean" themes as far north as Galveston and Virginia, and this work also gained the author a Prix de Rome.

 "Swimming in the Volcano," Bob Shacochis' newest work, is a hefty novel set on the fictional Lesser Antilles island of Saint Catherine, a lush, deceptively dangerous place where "any crisis was disguised in the normal flow of things."

 American agricultural economist-expatriate Mitchell Wilson, 26, has been summoned to the island to serve as an advisor for a land reform program that will eventually fail, amidst his own difficulties with a former lover who shows up unexpectedly and untimely. As an appropriate metaphor for the coming political difficulties of the island, the unpredictable volcano atop Mount Soufriere has recently begun to threaten Saint Catherine's "stability."

 Like his literary predecessor, Joseph Conrad, Shacochis believes that white men with their aggressive schemes not only don't truly belong in the Third World, but that "white men in the tropics naturally go to pieces."

 Although Mitchell Wilson (who first appeared in Shacochis' earlier story, "Hidalgos") is a disillusioned, post-Nixon American, he still hopes that fairness and at least a nominal form of democracy will come to Saint Catherine through his help. This is where Shacochis believes Wilson is strong: that he is still a kind of unwitting post-Colonial presence.

 In reality, what Wilson suggests is to replace many of the imported, difficult crops that the islanders hold so dear with better paying crops more suited to the climate and markets. He comes to realize that no one is listening to his good advice and that the land reform done, ultimately in his name, is being abused. And as always in the developing world, the poor are paying for everything.

To confound Wilson's professional/moral difficulties, an old flame, Johanna, appears out of the past - trailing trouble with the law and bringing even more confusion to Wilson's life. Wilson's former lover has left him bitter and angry. "Five years ago," the author writes, "losing her was like a practice session with death." Several chapters show him keeping just out of her reach, which greatly frustrates Johanna. But Wilson is taking no chances.

Wilson himself is feeling what the Third World has felt ever since Europeans discovered its possibilities. Wilson "read an extreme significance in each move she made. It was not unlike being colonized by an equal or even a greater power, this business of coming back."

When Wilson finally gives in against his better judgment, he comes to regret it. While his personal life disintegrates, the island's political volcano erupts.

Among the other, well-drawn characters: the rival faction leaders, Joshua Kingsley and Edison Banks, between whom Mitchell Wilson must gingerly walk a tightrope; Josephine, a black island woman who eventually offers Wilson lasting peace and happiness on the island; and Tillman, the unfortunate owner of the motel/restaurant, Rosehill Plantation.

Tillman first appeared in the excellent title story of "Easy in the Islands," when his mother died suddenly during a visit to the island. He was forced to keep her body in his walk-in freezer while being victimized by the island's petty police force and arcane laws. In "Swimming in the Volcano," Tillman, too, has a woman visitor for whom he isn't ready emotionally.

The novel's prose - at times its own liability - is dense and overcrowded, mimicking the island and its complicated difficulties. Often the prosaic style and the narrative technique of using a "town crier" newspaper to advance the story are distracting. Shacochis is really best at his witty observation of uneasy relations - both sexual and racial - rather than political intrigue. Because his ear for Caribbean patois and humor is so exceptional, the reader often wishes for more of it in this book.

Even so, this highly ambitious novel continues the long tradition of a white man living in a black (or brown) country, questioning his own culture and battling his own weaknesses. The author's oeuvre thus far has certainly advanced "anti-adventures" pioneered by Conrad, Graham Greene, and recently by Robert Stone. "Under the Volcano" shows great promise of future work from one of our best young writers.

John Radanovich is an instructor of English at the University of New Orleans.

©Times-Picayune