Kevin Jared Hosein’s latest novel, Hungry Ghosts, largely takes place in what seems a perversely unpromising, uneventful setting.
“This particular barrack” – one of many in the area – “sat by its lonesome, raw and jagged as a yanked tooth in the paragrass-spangled stretch of meadow, beyond the canefield, beyond the rice paddies, the village proper and the sugar mill – in a corner where God had to squint to see. Neighbour to nothing.”
It’s a desolate yet intriguing description that embodies the novel’s curious power. Hosein describes the mundane barrack rooms of Hungry Ghosts, somewhere in central Trinidad, as a place of “lesser lives”; and yet, as he rapidly makes clear, no one’s life is “lesser” to himself.
That adds to the intensity, universal appeal and epic scale that have already won international acclaim for this newly published book.
Undoubtedly life is cheap in Hosein’s world, snuffed out in an instant by casual violence or by illness that nowadays (the book is set in the 1940s) would be minor. As a result, his characters live at high pitch, on the edge of survival. Children and pregnant women can be carried away by an insect bite or infections picked up from dirty floodwater; a splinter can lead to gangrene; teenage boys contemplate murder.
They have already given the novel an ominous opening. “Four boys ventured to the river,” it begins, ordinarily enough – but the sentence ends, startlingly: “to perform a blood oath.” When the boys carry out their ritual, a few lines later, “The blood bubbled to the surface like their veins were boiling.” They might well be: in this book all the characters’ burning emotions run close to the surface, barely kept in check – if at all. When shortly afterwards the reader is warned of “the promise of coming darkness,” it simply underlines a fact that is already becoming plain, though the nature and extent of that “darkness” is shocking.
Hosein nimbly juggles an extensive, diverse cast. Sometimes a chapter relates the backstory of a character, revealing why he or she is constantly raging, full of malice, or at best careless of others. Elsewhere the reader more rapidly gets to know all the residents of the barracks and some of the people of the nearby village, such as Rookmin, the barrack’s resident expert on and ardent believer in evil spirits, who nevertheless dares to have hope for her afflicted daughter, and has the grace to show kindness to others around her; the quiet Mr Robinson, whose cameo appearances lay bare his good heart; Lata, a thoughtful, spirited girl, who believes – perhaps with too great an ambition – she can avoid the misery endured by her mother and the other women of the barrack rooms.
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Hosein traces too the changes in personalities wrought by unfolding events. Hansraj Saroop initially has more self-restraint than his adolescent son, but their roles are almost reversed towards the end, though Krishna longs for his father to father him once more. But Hans has been t
