Augustown

Superb book that really reflects the complexities of post-colonial life on Jamaica and really good narration of the audiobook. This one will stay with me for a while.

This is a really good book that manages to be both interesting and a really good read all at once.
The book starts with a chapter describing the locality, where Augustown is, what it looks like, what its people are. And the chapter finished with a short paragraph that is pregnant with possibility - and danger.
For here is the truth: each day contains much more than its own hours, or minutes, or seconds. In fact, it would be no exaggeration to say that every day contains all of history.
And with that we feel as if we are sitting a powder keg, just waiting for the apparently insignificant spark to set off an unstoppable chain of events.

And yet there are several points at which the story could have turned; the fuse could have been stamped out; but they are evident only in retrospect.

The story revolves around Ma Taffy, primarily, her niece, Gina, and Gina's son Kaia. The story is in 2 main time frames, the events of 11th April 1982 and the events of the past. We hear the story of Bedward , a charismatic preacher of Ma Taffy's youth who flew. Also in the crowd that day was a neighbour who plays a further role in the events of the later story as well.
I liked the way that there is a lot of information and research here, but it's presented lightly. There are a large cast of characters, some of them appear fleetingly, others appear and then reappear in the later time frame . It shows that the events of today are built upon the events of the past and today's trigger only takes place, in some senses, because of the past that is sitting there with threatening potentiality.

There was a lot of dialect in the speech, but the story used this more sparingly, such that it didn't feel that it took a long time to get int the story - I've struggled with dialect in the past, but these seemed manageable.

Atmospheric.
I particularly wanted to enjoy this book as the author was at our literary festival and he was just lovely. He was the only man on a panel for International Ladies Day and had such empathy. I really felt this empathy in the way he wrote his main character of Augustown, the elderly, blind, Ma Taffy.

I was listening to the audio version of this book, read by Dona Croll, which was great for getting the correct Jamaican accent, but a bit irritatingly slow.

However, for me, the part that lowered my star rating was the story about the flying preacherman, which didn't grab my attention at all. What I didn't realise when listening was that this story represented the beginnings of the Jamaican religion of Bedwardism, which, to quote Wikipedia, 'was one of the most popular Afro-Jamaican politico-religious movements from the 1890s to the 1920s".

The rest of the novel was excellent and the characters were interesting. Ma Taffy's great-nephew, Kaia, has his dreadlocks cut off by a teacher and there is a nice circle of connections between the characters of Ma Taffy's family as the story progresses.

A heavy atmosphere of impending trouble and doom runs throughout the novel and is excellently portrayed by the author. In the opening scene we meet a young gangster who thinks Ma Taffy doesn't know he hides his guns under her house, and later the Rastafarians mass to protest the cutting of Kaia's dreadlocks. Class segregation and social hierarchy felt like a living entity that could spark a riot at any time.