Pauline Melville's THE VENTRILOQUIST'S TALE

The piece of chalk Wormoal held slid across the wet surface of the blackboard as he tried to write the words "Eclipse - A Rational Analysis of Myth." Water leaked from the ceiling directly above his head. Chofy watched the words disintigrate. Wormoal shook his head in annoyance. He tried again, and the chalk skidded off the board."

Colonizers and their beneficiaries (which I've decided definitely includes tourists and scholarly types) getting their comeuppance, or better yet, being ignored or swallowed up by the territories they've intended to conquer, are my favorite kind of colonizers if such a thing must exist. I enjoy watching would be conquistadors fail (see Werner Herzog's famous Aguirre the Wrath of God), I think the original Peter Weir version of The Mosquito Coast is even better than Paul Theroux's novel*, and I love, love, love, how Pauline Melville's The Ventriloquist's Tale threatens to combine both of these sub-narratives of the Failed Colonizer right up until another, greater force swoops in and upsets everything.

The Ventriloquist's Tale does have me completely baffled in one respect though: the title. The first chapter of the novel is told in first person by a narrator we don't hear from directly again until the epilogue, and we are told that this narrator is a master of ventriloquism in that he/she can perfectly imitate the call or cry of every animal in the wilderness of Guyana and Brazil, and can make it sound like it's coming from anywhere, but (unless this person turns out to be one character whose birth comes near the novel's end but who would seem to have been killed off? Most likely? And hadn't exhibited this talent in the course of what little of the story concerns them in the text proper?) this seems to have exactly zero bearing on the story being told -- even if this titular ventriloquist/narrator does turn out to be the minor character there is an off chance that they are, what's the point of this establishing chapter? Anyway, moving on.

As I mentioned above, The Ventriloquist's Tale is the story of a handful of people who tried to make their mark on the challenging savannah/rain forest landscapes in the interior of Guyana (but has nothing to do with that other famous failed colonization of Guyana led by the Reverend Jim Jones, thank you very much), a Scottish adventurer who thought he'd come make his fortune in the late 19th/early 20th century, a Catholic Priest who thought he'd convert all the tribes of the Guyanese interior and win their souls for Jeebus, and, in the late 20th century, a researcher who has come to Guyana on the trail of a famous visitor to the region between the World Wars, one Evelyn Waugh, who commemorated his visit in a book, Ninety-Two Days: A Journey in Guyana and Brazil, 1932, which I haven't read, and a much better known short story, "The Man Who Liked Dickens", which I have. Of these, the scholar, Rosa Mendelson, seems more interested in the story than the travel book, and seems to have concluded (though without explicitly saying so) that the character in the story called McMaster was based on a real person, Alexander McKinnon, the aforementioned Scottish adventurer.

Before we meet any of these people, though, we are brought to visit the McKinnon family of the late 20th century, descendants of Alexander, a Scottish transplant to the region who, unsuccessful in business in Georgetown, turned to a rudimentary form of ranching in the countryside and "went native." Following the custom of the Wapsiana tribe in whose midst he settled, he married a pair of sisters and had a whole bunch of children with them around the turn of the 20th century. His children's lives, in particular his son Danny's and daughter Beatrice's Oops! re-enactment of a certain mythic archetype and the consequences that follow, form one of the novel's two main storylines, in which Waugh turns out to have played a laughably insignificant part.

Chief among the late 20th century family members we meet are Chofy, a grandson of Alexander's who is 20 years into a so-so marriage with a Wapsiana woman and has a son with the delightful name of Bla-Bla (!), and his aunt, Wifreda, sister of Beatrice and Danny and the only person left around who recalls anything of Waugh's visit, but doesn't want to talk about it because in her mind all memory of it -- which amounts to a schoolteacher giving the famous author a haircut -- is bound up with the family tragedy caushed by Beatrice and Danny's exploits, and with the doomed efforts of a Catholic Priest, Father Napier, to bring the Good News to the Guyanese, village by village, tribe by tribe. Eventually both Alexander McKinnon and Father Napier leave the region and return to Scotland, with Father Napier having made even less of an impression on the land or its peoples than McKinnon did (for after all, McKinnon, like McMaster in the story, fathered a great many of those people), to say nothing of Waugh, who apparently just got a haircut there. All three are like the chalk marks the anthropologist Wormoal fails to make on the blackboard in the scene I quoted above.

Waugh, though, at least had an effect on the outside world, which is what brings Rosa to Guyana in the late 20th century. Asking around Georgetown, where Chofy has come to work for a while and earn some money for his family back in the village, she learns of the McKinnons, reaches her conclusion about them, and manages to get an introduction to Chofy, who immediately falls in lust with her and becomes her very passionate lover. About which, look: I don't usually enjoy sex scenes, am kind of famously prudish about them, but these are some of the funniest sex scenes I've ever read because Chofy is 1. Very direct about his desires and 2. Very fond of narrating the goings-on. I couldn't not giggle.

Speaking of funny, author Pauline Melville, who was herself born in Guyana to an English mother and a Guyanese father, and her father had some "Amerindian" ancestry, so she could be telling us old family stories for all we'd know -- but she is also an actress. And if you're anything like me, you've seen her in a lot of weird and funny roles. Go look at her IMDB page. That's right; Vyvyan's Mum wrote this book. And wrote it well. I'll be looking for the rest of her stuff, which has won many a literary prize, eventually. If this is any example, it's easy to see why. The Ventriloquist's Tale, funny sex scenes and all, is a profound portait of culture clash, the difficulties of choosing between traditional and modern values, and the monkey wrench that sends all the pieces flying apart that is romantic/sexual love. I did not want it to be over. When's the next eclipse?

*I haven't seen the new TV series, because it's on a streaming service I don't get and my budget for those is 1. Allocated already and 2. Just fine the way it is. So I also won't be seeing Foundation any time soon, unless it gets released on physical media that I can check out from the library. Harumph.