Tide Running
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3.4 • 9 Ratings
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- £3.99
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- £3.99
Publisher Description
Cliff and Ossie have grown up in Plymouth on the island of Tobago, their lives turning on the axis of small-town life. Then a young couple arrive on the island. Bella, a Caribbean woman, and Peter, an Englishman, come to live on the hill overlooking the sea. And it is here, drawn by the cool ‘flim-style’ house, that the harsh, bright, brittle life of urban Plymouth may be kept briefly at bay until relations become more complicated. Bella, Peter and Cliff embark on an intense, sexual relationship that leads to tension and guilt. . .
‘There is a salt freshness to her writing, an immediacy which makes the reader catch breath for pleasure at the recognition of something exactly observed . . . Kempadoo writes hilarious comic scenes, as well as lyrically sensuous ones’ Independent
‘Tide Running is a stunning book, cutting from the colourful and the comic to the dark and the sensuous with sure-footed grace’ Scotsman
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Each week, we select a great book and bring it to you, for free, as our Book of the Week. There's an easy rhythm to protagonist Cliff Dunstan's world, which revolves around watching American TV programmes, cruising the streets on high-bar bicycles with his brother Ossie and occasionally taking to the sea to fish—all under the hot Tobagan sun. That changes when a wealthy, mixed-race couple invite the brothers to their "film-style" house, initiating what becomes a complicated relationship clouded by race and class divides. While mesmerising us with arresting depictions of island life and her characters' rich dialect, author Oonya Kempadoo tackles themes of culture and identity.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Kempadoo's second novel (after Buxton Spice) is a sensuous, richly vernacular account of a young Tobagonian's intimate, ultimately disastrous intersection with a vacationing married couple. Cliff is a shy, aimless 20-year-old in the sleepy town of Plymouth on the Caribbean island of Tobago, whose fatherless family scrapes by on what his mother hustles from the "goods boat." As Cliff observes his friends falling into drugs and crime, he gravitates toward the charming openness of an interracial family with a vacation house nearby: Bella, a Trinidadian photographer; her husband, Peter, an English corporate lawyer who is white; and their small child, Oliver. Gradually Cliff becomes a friendly presence in Peter and Bella's airy, stunning home, and then much more as their three-way relationship deepens. But when Cliff begins to steal from the couple, the view of the limitless ocean a constant presence in the novel shrinks to the restricted prospect of a jail cell. Most of the novel is narrated in Cliff's heavy Tobagonian argot, challenging then mesmerizing, with stream-of-consciousness interjections by Bella. Kempadoo, sagely, does not condemn the rich outsiders for taking advantage of Cliff's disenfranchisement, but offers each character space for his or her own self-justification: Bella entertains "some na ve romance for rootsy background"; Peter, older than his wife, tests his manliness against Cliff's in a mock-serious way; while Cliff remains an enigma, falling into criminality through a kind of "watch me nuh" boastfulness. Kempadoo's knowledge of the class-conscious ways and speech of the island people is deep and sensitive; her resistance to sentimentality imbues her narrative with moments of startling and incisive clarity.
