0 brave new book
Caroline Moore
INDIGO by Marina Warner Chatto, £14.99, pp. 402 The full title of Marina Warner's patchy yet haunting novel is Indigo, or Mapping the Waters. Her themes are pioneering and colonisation; and her soundings are taken in the illusive depths of history and fiction. An image of her technique is found three- quarters of the way through the book, when Kit Everard is returning to his Caribbean birthplace, which was brutally colonised by his buccaneering ancestor and namesake:
Islands broke the surface like the crested heads of spouting sea-monsters, green as wrasse, maroon as kelp, with plumes floating above them of cumulus that mimicked the arrangement of the land masses below, so that the archipelago appeared to Kit three times over, first in fluffy whiteness in the sky above, then in the marine troop of dark islands on the sea, and then again in the reflection of both cloud and island that he could see fathoms down when the boat tilted on a wave and the blinding silver hardness of the sea suddenly developed velvety depths and showed him his own face in the water.
Indigo is also triple-piled: there is the modern-day tale of the Everard family, which spans 40 years and three generations, interwoven with the story of 17th-century rapine; and beyond all these, the insubstantial pageant of The Tempest, upon which the novel is based.
In synopsis, I fear that this will sound like the blueprint for a trendy (rather than genuinely pioneering) work: both the read- ing of The Tempest as an indictment of colonial brutality and the literary fashion for revamping well-known tales are all too familiar. (In this marine setting, I was surprised not to meet that other modish ingredient, the holistic-mystic dolphin.) But Marina Warner's writing repeatedly conquers resistance. It has a lovely sensuous directness that dissolves pretentiousness and makes even her most elaborate or startling metaphors seem limpid and natural. In a work which is, as the blurb puts it, 'about transformation and power', the rough magic of Marina Warner's imagination proves its potency — even over a reviewer determined to avoid invoking well-worn Tempest tags or that other hoary chestnut of Prospero-as-artist.
On Marina Warner's island, Sycorax is a wisewoman, skilled in herbs and the preparation of indigo: a 'blue-eyed hag' only because her skin and sclerotics are subdued to the trade she works in, who 'grows into a hoop' only when maimed by the Europeans. As Warner realises, the depiction of 'primitive' women is inevitably shaped by the paradigms which form our perceptions: it is impossible to
find a way of making an image of such women . . . which would be neither exotic- erotic like Ingres or Matisse odalisques, not indignant realist like Abolitionist propagan- da, neither Noble Savage nor Heroic Victim, but would connect with their history all the same.
Her own vision tends towards the Rousseau-esque, and is only precariously saved from sentimentality by the exuberant specificity of her imagination.
With Sycorax live her foster-children, Ariel and Dule, who will later be known as Caliban. Dule she delivers, by a Shakespearian miracle of resurrection from the sea, out of the drowned body of an African slave. In him begins the theme of exile, which will also haunt the Everards; it alters the way he maps the waters of history. For Sycorax, time is an ebb and flow; for Dule, the tide is irreversible. Ariel is another foundling, a female Arawak; and 'Rich! I'll say he's rich! He owes millions!' in her begins the theme of love as possession (or, at worst, colonisation): she finds even Sycorax's love a constraint upon her privacy.
In 1618, the invaders arrive, opportunis- tic rather than evil, and cruel through the limitations of their vision. The depiction of the first Kit Everard is the least convincing part of the book. He is wonderfully vivid when his strangeness is observed through the eyes of Ariel — looking like a boiled prawn covered with a peculiar reddish fuzz — but his mind remains alien to his creator too. His speech remains tellingly thin and stilted, with disconcerting shifts of century and idiom. When quizzed about the 'fair Amazon' Ariel he responds archly, `Shush, and never where ladies are present.' This is cod Fdwardian rather than Jacobean.
In the modern world, Warner's touch is sure. There is old Sir Anthony Everard, former champion of 'Flinders' — a game which, like cricket, enshrined an outdated chivalric ethos, and which he used to dominate by the magic of a coolly dominant character: a Prospero of the pitch. His son by his first, Creole wife is the modern Kit, in whom gamesmanship has degenerated into gambling. Kit's daughter is Miranda, whose self-confidence has been wrecked by the 'tempest' of her parents' febrile and self-absorbed quarrelling. Sir Anthony's other child, by his late second marriage, is Xanthe, blessed at her christening with golden curls, supreme confidence, and an unloving heart: like a Miranda crossed with an Ariel of golden sands, she suffers her old father's adoration as an imprisonment.
The lives of the two girls, with their fairy- tale dissimilarity, are at the centre of the book; each is allowed a fairy-tale ending, of sorts. Xanthe in death suffers a sea-change; Miranda, racked by racial guilt and the restless desire to be loved, finds possible happiness with her own black Caliban. Part of the charm of this book is that though it sees guilt as the natural response to our colonial history, it does not see it as 'right', but as another manifestation of our
damaged Western consciousness. Miranda's ending tentatively offers the possibility, not of escaping from, but of transmuting history, when to the lovers it becomes part of the new-found sea of the other's personality. The last paragraph fuses the image of Ferdinand and Miranda playing chess with that of mapping the waters:
They had begun play. Their openings were well-tried, unadventurous. But these same familiar moves would take them in deep: face to face and piece by piece they would engage with each other so raptly that for a time they would never even notice anyone else looking in on the work they were absorbed in, cross- ing the lines, crossing the squares, far out on the board in the other's sea.
This is a lovely, surprising work, 'full of freshness and glosses', as Shakespeare has it.
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