“You’d never think Jamaica was once British,” writes a reclusive painter, in the early chapters of Gillian Royes’s third Shadrack Meyers novel. Her email back home continues, “It has a character all its own. It’s loud, crude, beautiful, and utterly unpredictable.” In the artist’s bewildered musings lie the distilled ambitions of Royes’s entire Shad series: to portray Jamaica and its people as real, non-commercial entities, and to render the island in all its outrageous splendour. This she achieves through her central character of multiplying narrative delights, Shad himself. An unsuspecting Jamaican proletariat Sherlock, Shad’s personal woes are by turns gently humorous (witness his prolonged dread over tying the knot with Beth, already his beloved wife in all but legal decree) and reflective of society’s larger malaises. Through this plucky, resourceful everyman of a hero, the novel glows optimistically, while refusing to peer at Jamaica from the glossy pages of a travelogue.

© MEP Publishers | Caribbean Bookshelf (May/June 2015) | Caribbean Beat Magazine https://www.caribbean-beat.com/issue-133/caribbean-bookshelf-mayjune-2015#ixzz5ar46KqaT
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