Monique Roffey

There is much to admire in [Passiontide], [[Monique Roffey]]’s latest, soon-to-be published novel. Set in Port Isabella on the Caribbean island of St. Colibri (a fictionalized Trinidad) during Lent and Passiontide a few years ago, this novel focusses on the events set off on the last night of Carnival by the horrific murder of Sora Tanaka. Sora is a young Japanese, well known to the Port Isabella community from her yearly visits at Carnival time to play steel pan music with the best of the local pan players. Although Sora’s murder is at the heart of the novel, [Passiontide] is not a murder mystery. It is about the attempt of the women of the island to bring about change, through peaceful protests, to St. Colibri’s extraordinarily high rate of femicide, wife-beating, and other woman abuse. The women’s ultimate antagonists are those in power who are either religious misogynists or indifferent male government officials. What they experience is the power they can have when large numbers representing all classes, economic levels, and social status unite in their common quest for change from patriarchal power and values.

My memory of this novel will be of voices, layers of voices, mostly women’s voices, but men’s voices as well, voices expressing deep sorrow, rage, anxiety, terror, love, joy, shock, despair, hope, fear. We hear through the victim, the murderer, the detective in charge, the mayor, the prime minister, the pathologist. And then there is the voice of pan music, born on the island, carrying both its greatest sorrow and most powerful joy. The story is mostly carried by the voices of four women who could be said to be the main characters: Tara, already an activist and head of the small group of feminists on the island; Sharleen, a reporter covering women’s issues for the local newspaper; Gigi, a prostitute and leader of a group advocating for the protection of prostitutes; and Daisy, wife of the Prime Minister, whose sister had also been the victim of an unsolved murder. Tara and Gigi begin the protest by planning a peaceful occupation of the public space outside the Prime Minister’s office building. From this decision, the plot builds as the women grow in number and in goals. All is held together loosely within the structural framework of the liturgical season—Ash Wednesday to Easter Sunday.

And then of course, there is Roffey’s own voice, her way with words: her skillful use of imagery, symbolism, and diction. The characters usually speak a highly colloquial dialect, using even obscurely slangy words, making the novel a very intimate experience, even though for many readers, it will also feel foreign. And Roffey’s themes couldn’t be more timely. I really loved [Passiontide] and look forward to September, when I’ll be able to buy a hardbound copy just in time for a reread.

Read if you like an exotic island setting, with a very hardheaded look at the facts of women’s lives in far too many places in today’s world, and a story of a group of women uniting for change.

My thanks to Penguin-Random House and NetGalley for this arc.… (more)

I've just returned from over 50 years in Trinidad, in the company of George and Sabine Harwood. Like Sabine, I've been overwhelmed by the constant and debilitating sticky heat there. Like Sabine I've wondered at the extreme lushness of the vegetation, the loud and strident colours and sounds of the wildlife. Like Sabine I've been discomfited by the tense and angry political situation, which leaves many of the white population, often the women, colonial hangers-on, feeling disadvantaged (despite their very obvious economic advantages) and distressed.

In truth, I've never visited Trinidad. But so lush and evocative are Monique Roffey's descriptions of the landscape, the townscapes, the climate, the boredom, the anger: all part of the complex period through which she passes during her time there, that it's almost as if I have.

Sabine's homesickness for a country she would perhaps no longer recognise, her strange need to communicate with politician Eric Williams as his career rises then falls are all richly described. This is a book which will stay in the memory.… (more)