Blessed is the fruit

This lyrical new novel by acclaimed young Trinidadian author Robert Antoni is told in the haunting voices of two West Indian women, both thirty-three years of age: Lilla, the white mistress of a once grand but now rotting Colonial mansion, and Vel, her black servant, who has come to the house seeking refuge from the hardships of her poor village. The two women have lived alone for ten years in quiet formality, neither aware of the ways in which their dissonant pasts intersect. Now Vel finds herself pregnant, a condition she fearfully tries to hide from her mistress. The unborn infant, Bolom - whose name invokes the child of Caribbean lore, struggling for life but destined to die before its birth - resists Vel's efforts to abort by drugs, bush medicine, and spells of Obeah magic. After Vel makes one last desperate and bloody attempt, Lilla carries Vel upstairs to her bedroom, a private sanctuary where Vel has never been allowed. From this safe place the novel begins and ends, as the individual voices of these women emerge to tell the stories of their lives. The women use two languages from two worlds that history has thrown together, yet, like the novel divided by a pane of glass, have been kept precariously apart. At the heart of the novel the unborn child dreams in the interwoven voices of its mothers, who embrace one another at last as the reader shatters the barriers that wound and separate. The resulting narrative is a lovingly braided tale of religion, sexuality, myth - and, always, language. It is a testament to Lilla and Vel's shared humanity, to their hope for the child to come, and, not least, to Robert Antoni's masterful gifts as a novelist.