- Hardcover: 480 pages
- Publisher: Thomas Allen Publishers; 3rd edition (Sep 3 2002)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0887621104
- ISBN-13: 978-0887621109
- Product Dimensions: 22.6 x 15.7 x 4.1 cm
- Shipping Weight: 726 g
- Average Customer Review: 1.9 out of 5 stars See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
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Amazon Bestsellers Rank:
#322,594 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #38 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Canadian > African Canadian
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Amazon
Austin Clarke, Toronto resident and Barbados native, maintains that he doesn't write for the limelight, but alas the honours have come in: the Rogers Communications Writers' Trust Fiction Prize for The Origin of Waves, a Governor General's Award nomination for The Question, the W.O. Mitchell Prize for his literary mentorship and his outstanding body of work, and finally Canada's largest and most esteemed annual award for fiction, the Giller Prize, for his novel The Polished Hoe. (Some hushed murmurs have blighted the last of these kudos, calling it a verdict skewed by political correctness rather than literary merit, as if a black man writing about slavery were a recipe for mainstream adulation.)
Clarke's ornately polished Hoe unfolds in less than 24 hours, but it explores the fate of black people, past, present, and future, paced by the Great Time--the place where all those times meet--of African and Caribbean oratory tradition. Clarke plunks his muses down on the isle of Bimshire--Barbados in cloak--in the "Wessindies." It's an unsettling postcolonial landscape, soiled by the "sickening power of poverty"--among other routine brutalities, woman and mere girls can be and are dragged off and forcibly taken atop heaps of agricultural refuse. As Clarke's story begins, Mr. Bellfeels, the tyrannical "red-nigger" plantation overseer of Flagstaff Village, has been chopped down. After Bellfeels's concubine, the dignified Mary-Mathilda, hails up the law, resident barkeep Manny huffs, "Any one o' we have reason to kill that son-of-a-bitch."
Having pined for Mary-Mathilda for close to 40 years, Percy, a church choir-chanting, lily-livered police sergeant who gets around on a three-speed bike, is called up to the Great House where Bellfeels has installed his mistress (and their Oxbridge-educated son who can pass as white) to take her statement on the crime. But Percy doesn't want to hear it, "the powers-that-be don't. The public don't. And the Village don't." Bloody facts aside, island justice sensibilities have decreed that Bellfeels's slaying was a public service. So while Percy intermittently nods off or quashes the "impetus to rape," Mary-Mathilda--a polished ho in her own right, well aware that the other villagers call her a "brown-skin bitch"--unloads a soliloquy on village history, specifically her existential alienation "ordered through the destinies of paternity" and "paid for by her body." The rest of us are left to measure this epic against other grand island overviews like Patrick Chamoiseau's Texaco. There's no doubt, this Hoe swings sure and true. --Sigcino Moyo
From Publishers Weekly
Clarke, considered one of Canada's finest political novelists, but less well known in the U.S. (a memoir, Pig Tails 'n Breadfruit, was published by the New Press in 2000), gets a new launching in this country with this eloquent, richly detailed novel, awarded Canada's Giller Prize. A murder takes place in the 1950s on the fictional Caribbean island of Bimshire (a stand-in for Clarke's native Barbados), where the culture of English gardens and cricket contrasts sharply with the legacy of slavery. The murderer is Mary Gertrude Mathilda, a respected elderly black matriarch. But the identity of the victim is less clear. In the 24 hours covered by Austin's tale, Mary is determined to tell the police about the lifetime of degradations that led up to her homicidal rage, and Sgt. Percy Stuart, a black member of the police force, is determined to stop her. Percy is in love with Mary, but his life has been a continual compromise with the still-lingering plantation system. Nobody represents the system better than Mr. Bellfeels, the white manager of the sugar plantation at the center of the villagers' lives. When she was 13, Mary was, in essence, bartered to Bellfeels by her mother, who was his previous mistress. For 38 years, she bore his groping and his children. Though he has helped their son, Wilberforce, become a doctor, Bellfeels has never shown Mary herself any kindness. At times, Clarke loses confidence in his characters and has them deliver forced sociological truths-for instance, when Mary gives a lecture about Christopher Columbus. Most of the story, however, unfolds through brilliantly written dialogue, a rich, dancing patois that fills out the dimensions of the island's painful history and its complex caste system. Like Texaco, by Martinique writer Patrick Chamoiseau, Clarke's novel, by harnessing the genius of Creole, shows how art can don a liberating face.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.
Inside This Book
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First Sentence
My name is Mary. Read the first page Browse Sample Pages
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
My name is Mary. Read the first page Browse Sample Pages
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
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Customer Reviews
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Most helpful customer reviews
12 of 12 people found the following review helpful
3.0 out of 5 stars
I wanted to love this book but I didn't,
By Booknut "Booknut" (St. Albert, AB) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Polished Hoe (Hardcover)
I wanted so much to love this year's Giller Winner. Austin Clarke was the underdog against such big hitters as Wayne Johnston and Carol Shields but I found The Polished Hoe to be a long rambling tale with an unsatisfying climax.Mary Gertrude Mathilda Bellfeels, a plantation field worker who luckily or unluckily caught the favor of the plantation manager Mr. Bellfeels becomes his mistress and bears him his only son. As a reward she lives and raises her son (he grows up to become the village doctor) in the Great House and no longer has to work other than being little more than a [mistress] to a man you come to truly hate. The novel covers one long night of Mary giving her statement to a Sargent who has loved her from afar since they were both only 10 years old. In the build up to her crime, what she did and why she did it, we get the story of her almost 60 years on the plantation through anecdotes of the horrors of black life in the village of Bimshire in the West Indies where blacks are still treated like slaves even if they work for a wage. The problem for me was that this book rambled over the same territory continually and although some of the history was compelling this novel lacked a continuity or a narrative that kept you wanting to read on. The carrot is that you know she's probably killed someone with that hoe she used to use in the north field but you don't find out who and why until the last 10 pages of the book and by then I just wanted to be done. This is a good book for a sense of place, time and culture but don't look for a great love story or a novel of suspense in The Polished Hoe.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
1.0 out of 5 stars
Painful,
By A Customer
This review is from: The Polished Hoe (Hardcover)
I agree with all of the other reviewers. This book was painfully slow! Generally, I like character driven books, but I did not care about these characters. I kept hoping for a big ending, but nothing ever really seemed to happen. My book club read this book and it received 3/10, our lowest rated book to date (after 2 years)!
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
contrary to popular opinion...,
By
This review is from: The Polished Hoe (Paperback)
Having not read a lot of fiction based in the Caribbean I thought this was a great place to start. The characters were rich and Clarke's description of a place I have never seen was impressively vivid. I am surprised by the other reviews- the histiroical pain in this book was palatable, the narrative was whimiscal and was indeed deserving of the prize.
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