Powerful and wild retelling

Maryse Conde

Faber, #7.99

MARYSE Conde's take on Wuthering Heights exchanges the Gothic moorlands of Yorkshire for the heat and scrub of Guadaloupe, and in this pacy, rugged translation by Richard Philcox, we have something as strange and compelling, in its own way, as its original.

This is no Caribbean pastiche, rather a reworking of a primal myth, the bad blood of Heathcliffe and the Earnshaws given the terrible urgency of the question of race, of the degrees of blackness (Mulatto, Quadroon, Octoroon) that decided a slave's price, and, in the late nineteenth century, when slavery was gone but by no means forgotten, the social standing of individuals in a society still twisted and distorted by its legacy.

Cathy is still Cathy, a Mulatto girl with a white father. But Heathcliff is wonderfully transmogrified into a foundling black boy called Rayze, a Creole word meaning wasteground. The Lintons become the white Creole de Lisseuils. And the rest of the eccentric cast is there, from servants to Yoruba mystics, imprisoned not by the barrenness of the moors, but by the imprisoning sea that carried them from Africa and the continuing economic and sexual degradation that defines and distorts their lives.

It is a powerful and wild retelling, and what Conde has done is to take a novel that is already a unique anomaly of nineteenth-century English and re-realised it in the broader historical and racial paradoxes of post-colonial literature, evoking Marquez's Macondo as much as Bronte's alienated, eccentric version of England, rather as did Jean Rhys in the Broad Sargasso Sea, a creative misreading of Jane Eyre.

The story is told in a relentless blizzard of shifting points of view, by supporting players, mostly, who respond to their own versions of the tale of Rayze, Cathy, and their descendants. Conde wisely takes her starting point as Heathcliff's return for vengeance, his marriage to the sister of the man whose wealth and whiteness stole his Cathy. Only here Rayze's revenge is compounded by his sexual donation of his wife, Irmine, to Cathy's dissolute brother Justin.

Which is emblematic of the difference between this fully realised, gritty world, and the possibilities, even for a literary outsider, of Victorian storytelling. If Wuthering Heights is a tragedy of passion repressed and unrealised, Conde's book is a tragedy of passion fulfilled. And when death comes, it isn't the spirit that is wasting within, but the flesh that is collapsing, just as the society around the protagonists falls apart. Rayze loses Cathy just as the masers lose their power to collective violence. The crops burn as the generation that escaped slavery educates itself in new violences, new hatreds, new self-loathing.

A child is born here, and what is vital is its colour. Not merely to establish paternity, but as a thing in itself, blackness promising pain and trouble, whiteness offering hope. This psychotic inwardness can be redeemed only when the birth of a child cleans the slate and, for most of the novel, the future seems lost in a welter of misdirected hatreds and revenges.

But at the end, when Rayze's son brings his and Cathy's daughter's baby home to Windward Heights, it is with a deep wish for redemption that he raises her, hoping that the curse of slavery and its hellish weight upon their souls, no matter what colour, can be lifted. It is a tribute to the relentless power and anger of the novel that the reader, shaken, is left wishing for for no less. A novel of contemporary power has come out of what might have been literary camp. Because Conde is every bit the square peg as her strange, passionate sister in the vicarage at Howth.