Before I introduce you to our narrator, a few weeks shy of her 100th birthday, you’d better take a moment to prepare yourself. Tuck that shirt in. Stand up straight. Fix your hair. And for goodness sake, don’t patronise her. Our heroine – mother, grandmother; friend, lover, widow; a successful ganja farmer; a survivor, who sleeps with a cutlass under her pillow – is a force to be reckoned with. “Me is not you fuckin Granny,” she snaps, early in the book. “Me haunt you for fuckin ever if you mek me die inna hospital,” she threatens, later on. Pauline Evadne Sinclair is her full name – Miss Pauline, to you and me.
We are in Jamaica. Not the touristy coastal towns, but inland: a quiet village in St Mary parish, Mason Hall. Miss Pauline’s life is rooted in this soil: she was born here; she and her partner, Clive, built a house and raised their family. She lives alone now, but she still tends her kitchen garden and climbs the steep slope down to the river to fetch water. But recently, her worries have been on the increase. Her stomach gripes. A walking stick might soon be needed. And even worse, the stone walls of her house have begun to shake. She tells no one in the village about this last development, lest she be labelled a “mad ooman”. In any case, she’s already convinced that she knows the cause: “the stones know what she did all those years ago … The past [is] seeking its reckoning.”
Determined to unburden herself of her dark secrets before she dies, she summons a granddaughter, Justine, now living in New York. “Me not long for this eart’, chile,” Miss Pauline proclaims over Skype, using the wifi in the village library. When Justine doesn’t seem moved, she adds: “Me need to talk to you about ma house. About ma land.” The mention of land, Miss Pauline knows, “is like honey to a bee. A drug, stronger than weed.” Justine gets the next flight to Jamaica, and Miss Pauline’s plan is set in motion – but along the way, surprising new information about the family’s ancestry comes to light, which even the wise Miss Pauline couldn’t have anticipated.
There’s plenty of excitement here, including hurricanes, earthquakes, landslides, and, importantly, a backra house, where slave-owning white people once lived. Maybe the plot is a little tightly woven in places, and maybe a few too many characters spring out of the woodwork, but it’s easy to dismiss such petty concerns in a novel as delightful and big-hearted as this. It kept me turning pages deep into the night, and left me full of admiration at the end. McCaulay, a born-and-bred Jamaican, wrestles with the big stuff – difficult questions about inheritance, guilt and blame – and she does it bravely, and with honesty. Miss Pauline must “trace the braided tributaries of her life”; “unravel the double helix of act and consequence, blame and responsibility”.
I worried at first that the title would invite a comparison to you-know-who. Granted, McCaulay has five novels already under her belt, but surely even the boldest wouldn’t dare go head-to-head with the mighty A House for Mr Biswas? But I think we can relax: it’s playful, a bit of backchat, and it works nicely on a thematic level, too. (“You is who?” Miss Pauline might ask, if confronted with Mr Nobel-Prize-Man himself. “You feel you own all the words?”) Anyway, there’s no need for comparison when McCaulay has a generosity and vision all her own. Finally confronting her own powerlessness during her last days on Earth, Miss Pauline is granted this moment of grace: to see herself as “one tiny drop of water in this torrent of humanity, now here, in this moment … waiting for nightfall”.
• A House for Miss Pauline by Diana McCaulay is published by Dialogue (£22). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
