The voice of Caribbean alienation

“And then the sea go laugh. Shake-up ‘eself and romp with the breeze. Show off to the beat-up hills, booming ‘gainst the cliffs and blowing out the biggest waves ‘e can push. Then the sea go turn up ‘e colors, swallow down the green, lighten the light blue, and darken the deep. Liven up ‘eself and laugh. Everything ‘bout the sea big-up in them dry-season days ... the sea does talk more. Make me want it more.”

As this short passage delightfully illustrates, there can be little point in talking about Oonya Kempadoo’s writing until you, reader, have at least savored a taste of it. “Tide Running,” a dreamlike yet taut and anguished tale set on the Caribbean island of Tobago, is Kempadoo’s second novel after “Buxton Spice,” a playfully steamy rendition of a girl’s coming-of-age in Guyana.

Though “Tide Running” is a decided leap forward, a tour-de-force of imagination in its inhabiting of the souls of the islands’ marginalized and dispossessed young men, it shares with its predecessor a fascination with the permutations of a spoken language that feels as sensuous, sure and tactile as hands running through the sun-warmed fur of a purring cat.

The primary voice, the sweet, idiosyncratic lilt quoted above, belongs to Cliff Dunstan, a layabout boy-2-man who lives with his mother, brother, sister and baby niece in a shack among Plymuth Point’s population of “t’chupid and ignarant black people nuh,” as the local “muddas” scold their own. Cliff’s rambling and often humorous interior monologues evoke the mix of grit, beauty and humiliation in quotidian Tobago: There may be no food and no water, but the slick TV shows from “Foreign” (anywhere but Tobago) flow free night and day in the shack.

Apart from his deep bond with the breathing sea, Cliff knows no escape from the claustrophobia of being a do-nothing. None, that is, until his voice begins to be joined in counterpoint by that of beautiful, “post-hippy,” middle-class Bella who, with her charming British husband, Peter, and their precocious little boy, moved to Tobago to escape the hectic pace and crime of Trinidad.

Now this young woman’s life is almost too saturated with pleasure to be real, as Bella herself at one point, with a sort of mental shiver, seems to apprehend: “ ... you can’t hold a living thing back, or mold it.... And our living thing is love. Can’t rule it or tame it, separate it or chain it.” Educated Bella’s language differs from but echoes Cliff’s, much as they are related by nationality and complexion but divided by class, much as the cultures of Tobago and Trinidad, yoked yet unlike, tug toward and away from each other.

They meet on the beach. A casual invitation to her villa follows. Almost immediately, to the scandal of some town gossips and the scornful amusement of others -- for what can stay secret for long on a small island? -- Bella, Peter and Cliff slip into a blissful, bewildered, amorphously erotic menage a trois, with little more misgiving than they feel sliding together into the “small waves curling sheets of bubbles” of the bay. Is it Bella’s submerged yearning for “rootsy” connection that draws them into each other’s embrace, or Cliff’s beauty and his coolly concealed amazement at “dem people’s” offered friendship, or Peter’s rather militant unconventionality?

There is not much plot to “Tide Running,” barely enough turn and twist to the subsequent events of this dry season to give novelistic heft to the image-saturated story. Kempadoo’s method is to entirely efface herself as author, to stay close -- skintight, in fact -- to her characters, to their sense-impressions and thoughts. Keen glimpses into Cliff’s world accumulate, especially the islanders’ passive TV experience with an unreachable world, their caustic comments and grudging admirings. Life is its own best satirist. A village “gangsta” worries “how to stay cool when he bathing by the roadside standpipe. He never see them doing that on TV so he only bathing in the night.”

Meanwhile, beneath the surface of the three lovers’ explorations, something more purposeful, darker and indelible is taking shape. A friend comes for a visit and in her wake, in the villa, a wad of money disappears. The finger of suspicion swings automatically to Cliff. Peter and Bella, the liberal, enlightened victims, stand alone in his defense. Yet, as Cliff once asked himself, “Bella -- Lawd, is who she send to test? ... Who know? In dis life. Who the hell know anything anyway.”

Perhaps, as the three face their own limitations and the rains approach, all Cliff can truly count on is the sea, his one true love: “Glazing same color as the clouds, a squinting grey-blue on the sky-line....Not a current shift on ‘e face. Sea stop today.”