Book review: Show Me A Mountain by Kerry Young

At the crossroads

Show Me A Mountain is the final book in a trilogy written by Kerry Young over a period of thirteen years, but perfectly readable as a standalone story. Set in the Jamaica of the mid 1930-60s, it is a portrait in words of the life of Fay Wong, a portrait that takes gradual but tangible  shape.

Fay`s seemingly uncaring and cruel mother Cicely, a plantation foreman`s daughter, made good by marrying a Chinese immigrant who amassed a lot of wealth, not all of it above board. Be that as it may, when we meet the young child Fay, it`s inside her large family house in a tony part of Kingston, full of English oak furniture, with a tennis court and swimming pool never once visited by her parents, a bevy of servants at their beck and call, in the vanguard Sissy who stands in as an unsentimental but caring mother to the love-starved child.

The Wongs are the clichéd wealthy but unhappy family. Henry Wong /Hong Zilong,  spends all his time downtown in Kingston at his grocery store or the opium den, showing an off-hand, careless affection for his little girl. Stanley,  Fay`s older brother,  is caught up in his own miseries and escapes to join the British army and flee Jamaica as soon as possible. Fay grows up, befriends the rich and wild Beverly Chung   and goes on many capers with her, gets involved with a few good and not- so- good men,  but is eventually forced to marry a young Chinese gangster, Yang Pao, seemingly a pawn in Cicely`s hand.

To further complicate matters, Fay, who on a deliberate whim has joined the British army, is recruited to spy… on her husband and his cohort, his gangland dealings in Kingston`s Chinatown. Even as the intricacies and complexities of local politics begin to make an impact on the intelligent Fay, the wheel of her fortune runs its own course  and she is helpless to do anything but play along. To give her succour is a young priest Michael   who of course, as is the norm in this book, is fighting his own battles.

The population in Jamaica is largely made up of slaves from Africa, Chinese and Indian indentured workers, poor Scots, Irish, Welsh, wage- labourers from northern Europe, altogether an unsavoury mixed bag.

Even as Jamaica slowly,  painfully wins its freedom from the British, in the midst of savage conflict between those of African heritage and the Chinese immigrant population, the not-white- not- fully- Chinese Fay manages to break free, after a fashion, from Pao,  and the story concludes with her flight from Jamaica along with her two young children.

Whatever awaits her,  in London ironically enough, just has to be better than what she left, or so Fay Wong, rootless in more ways than one, firmly believes. And by then, the reader is equally firmly rooting for her.

It`s gradual, the reader`s involvement in Fay`s story but it is also inevitable. This is a substantial work from an accomplished author and Kerry Young gives us valuable  insights into the prevailing system, the people and their hope for change, the rage, resentment and passive acceptance of their fate, via nuggets that emerge from the mouths of each and every character.

Fay, who in Sissy`s words, smells like `mango and sweet soap and June plum all rolled into one,`  realises the nature of unhappiness, that unhappiness so deep is old, not new, as also the undeniable fact that the fall does not happen in one transgression, it occurs in incremental stages. And Fay has been falling steadily. Ironically, even as she starts to understand if not really like her husband, and accept that he has a deep-rooted relationship with his mistress Gloria Campbell, she decides it is best to leave both Pao and Jamaica.

The storyboard is a large one, peopled by characters from both the privileged as well as the shanty town sections of Kingston. We are told that brutality has been bred into the Jamaican psyche from slavery, beaten into every African , the most disobedient unmanageable ones having been sent to the island. Pao emerges an interesting figure; as Fay`s trajectory moves alongside that of her country`s , we are swept along of our own volition.

Kerry Young has one big story to tell and she has told it very well, using a lot of the appealing,  rhythm-infused local patois.

Show Me A Mountain by Kerry Young/Bloomsbury Circus/Rs 499/Pages 378.

http://www.deccanherald.com/content/584632/at-crossroads.html

This ran in DECCAN HERALD of 4 Dec 2016.