Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer's Reviews > This One Sky Day

Now longlisted for the 2022 Women's Prize. Shortlisted for the 2021 Goldsmiths Prize which decided to pick half its shortlist (including this one) from the next door University’s alumni as part of an extreme London bias.

An exuberant, enjoyable novel which starts as magic realism, aims for social commentary, heads for fantasy territory while flirting with absurdity but which at the end is a rather simple story of postponed and long thwarted love.

Overall a new genre - fictional activist magical exuberance (FAME).

This novel, the author’s third, and some fifteen years in the writing is set on a single day on the fictional archipelago of Popisho (from the Jamaican slang for foolishness – Poppy show), an Island where butterflies (which can be grabbed from the air and eaten) are like alcohol but moths and like Class A drugs, where everyone is born with “little something-something … a little something extra. The local name was cors. Magic, but more than magic. A gift, nah. Yes. From the gods: a thing so inexpressibly your own" and a gift curated by a group of wise-women – The Council of the Obeah Fatidique – the gift once discovered (and verified by the Obeah women) often defines people’s vocation.

The first character we meet (our first member of the thwarted love-pair) is Xavier – his cors is the ability to flavour food perfectly by hand (a skill which I will return to when discussing the author’s execution of the magic realism genre).

Xavier, due to his skills, was picked many years back as the island’s latest Macaenus (a kind of much celebrated, almost venerated official island cook who cooks a perfectly individually-calibrated meal for each inhabitant exactly once during his twenty year reign). Xavier was widowed exactly one year ago – his estranged wife seemingly having drowned herself and her ghost still seemingly wandering the island. Earlier in life he had many lovers including his predecessor as macaenus – the flamboyant and seductive Des’ree, as well as Anise (the girl he realises he should have married). He is also a reformed moth addict – now tempted to indulge again.

The Iocal Governor – Bertrand Intisar – is shortly up for re-election, and while the islands are increasingly prosperous, there is increasing disquiet (fuelled by a mysterious graffiti artist who paints in orange) at the corruption he seems to have bought to the Island fuelled by his time abroad: in particular the magical toys the Islanders loved for many years are now manufactured to his tastes in a huge factory and reserved for export only (their magic kept secret from the outside world, but the exact distribution of the proceeds kept secret from the inhabitants).

Intisar’s so far cors-less daughter – Sonteine is due to be married the next day – and, to gain some favorable PR he is putting pressure on Xavier both to let Sonteine as her husband jump his queue (by cooking for their wedding feast) but also to take part in one of the fabled walkabouts – when the Macaenus walks around the island gathering ingredients and menu ideas.

The other two main characters who with Xavier and Sonteine are travelling across the Island this day (the author talks of four such) are Anise and Romanza.

Anise is our other thwarted lover – despite her healing touch cors she has herself suffered a series of miscarrriages and her unwillingness to try again she hears this day has driven her husband to take another lover now pregnant. She sets off to find out more but ends up in a brothel for the point at which the novel turns rather absurd (more later) while she turns her thoughts back to Xavier .

Romanza is Sonteine’s brother/Intisar’s black sheep son – with a male lover, a lie-detecting cors and living among the indigent (a group of descendants of the Island’s Carib-equivalents) who live an alternative and simpler life (for example with an obsession with mild doses of poison) on some outlying Islands. Xavier and he cross paths and initially Xavier is inspired by him (not realising who he is) to source his food from among the indigents.

This is only a fraction of the novels ideas which also include shape shifting houses, an imminent “sweet-hurricane”, passing sea creatures which act as stepping stones, a fruit infestation, a campaigning radio presenter, an eccentric beauty contest and the novel’s high (or depending on your view) low point: the “pum-pum” incident with the Island’s women all finding that a crucial body part has fallen out.

This starts with the potential to examine female sexuality, sex-work, male/female differences but it is as though the author does not really know what to do with the idea, other than simply returning to it (I was reminded of a standing joke in a sit-com), as Michael Donkor in the Guardian says “the absurd conceit is at first striking and provocative; it loses its comic charge because it is returned to over and again without engaging development or expansion” – and eventually the author just abandons the idea and moves on to her next invention.

And I think this is ultimately the issue with the book in a literary sense.

The book is intended to be in the magic-realism genre. Now of course the literary-fiction master of that genre also set his novels in a Caribbean coastal setting – Gabriel Garcia Marquez. But what makes his work particularly striking is that the magic elements are incongruous to the reader – not because of their magic but because of the otherwise mundane (in the sense of earthly) setting of the rest of the novel.

Here the author I think has failed to pull off (or perhaps to appreciate) the tension that is necessary between magic and realism.

To use a book-appropriate analogy – she I think lacks the magic-realism corrs. Unlike Xavier her own cooking touch is too heavy on adding the magic seasoning so obscuring the underlying flavours of the sociopolitical realism dish.

And as a fantasy novel I do not think it quite works either – one of the reasons that the fantasy genre is so obsessed with series of novels, beyond just genre-expectations, is that they rely on careful world building and then exploration of that world. And again I did not feel that the author here spent enough time ever exploring the world she had built rather than just adding yet another element to the world.

But I would emphasise again that this was nevertheless a very distinctive and fantastically-imagined novel, one that is as vibrant as its beautifully coloured page edgings and which at the end is an exploration of addiction and celebration of the greatest addiction of all - love.