The West Indian

Valerie Browne Lester is better known for her scholarly biographies - on Phiz (her great-great-grandfather) who illustrated Dickens's books, on Giambattista Bodoni, a fascinating 18th-century printer of Parma, and on Clarence Bicknell, archaeologist and naturalist of Bordighera - but many years ago she began a novel, set in Jamaica where she spent some of her childhood years, loving the rich and luxuriant landscape. Near the end of her life she came back to this story and lived long enough to see it published in April 2019.The premise of the story of 'The West Indian' is a fictional invention of the background to Emily Brontë's 'Wuthering Heights' character, Heathcliff, that classic hero/villain which fascinated every young woman reading the novel for the first time. Valerie Lester has developed a fiction-on-fiction that goes much further than Jean Rhys's novella 'Wide Sargasso Sea' which created a fictional Jamaican background for the 'madwoman in the attic' of 'Jane Eyre. Apart from the central narrative voice, many of the characters are the Mason family, relatives of that 'madwoman in the attic' (remember that quintessential dramatic moment when Richard Mason stops Jane's marriage to Rochester?). The book begins with a conceit: a quotation from 'Wuthering Heights' followed by a preface chapter where a little boy, Peter, hears the cries of childbirth and the reader immediately realises Peter is Heathcliff. Peter is 'The West Indian' yet he is a peripheral, if essential, character, to the plot, not reappearing till halfway through the novel.Next, the central character, Martha Grant, leaves England for an arranged marriage to Henry Mason in Jamaica, and from then on the story is narrated through her diary. Set on a late 18th-century sugar plantation, with all the relationship complications which develop in that tropically exuberant atmosphere, Valerie Lester writes with compulsive aplomb and - an achievement few writing in this genre can manage - with a fairness of perception that avoids overtones of racism and exoticism which have often underpinned or overlaid other novels attempting to describe life on a slave plantation. Compassion and humanity exist alongside, and despite, the cruelties implied or explicit in the narrative and while there is no attempt to understate the violence and appalling conditions, the understanding that develops between the black and white female characters is beautifully conveyed. Valerie Lester's literary skill - so much is implicit, inferred, subtle - and her knowledge of Jamaica, its culture and history, all contribute to create a compelling, fast-moving, complex and satisfying novel. Martha's diary intersperses a range of voices, from vernacular dialect, poems and verse, to literary allusions. The author even splices short interludes in the third person (in a different font - Valerie Lester is fond of fonts) to add to the drama. And this novel IS a sweeping drama, rushing through the varied characters' lives like a hurricane wind. Don't miss it.

A classic in the making… the first novel by Valerie Lester, a highly-respected biographer, is not only a fascinating prequel to Wuthering Heights (Valerie recounts how Heathcliff turned up in Liverpool where Mr Earnshaw adopts him) but also a rip-roaring page-turner.Believing that Charlotte and Emily Brontë discussed their writing as they worked concurrently on Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, Valerie Lester has taken a character from each book and, using them, has written a novel that creates a childhood for Heathcliff in Jamaica. The story is told in the voice of Martha Grant, a young woman who travels to Jamaica to enter into an arranged married with her cousin, Henry Mason. She arrives at Beverly, Henry’s house in Spanish Town, only to find that he has fallen in love with his fifteen-year-old, mulatto, half-sister Pearl. The marriage between Martha and Henry proceeds in any case, but Henry is spurned by Martha on his wedding night. He then turns to Pearl, and their passion results in her becoming pregnant. And that’s just he start.The book is beautifully written; I felt I was actually on the island and in the period. The events of the book are as well handled as the feel for Jamaica and the characters. Well worth the read.