Berkley Wendell Semple
DIANA McCaulay’s impressive new novel, A House for Ms Pauline (Algonquin, $29.00), is a wonderfully entertaining book—funny, sad, and beautiful all at once. McCaulay writes with a lithe, knowing skill, creating characters who are psychologically acute, believable, and richly realised Caribbean archetypes. The result is a novel that is both poignant and prescient.
At its centre is Ms Pauline St. Clair, ninety-nine years old and nearing the end of a very long life. She lives in Mason Hall, a rural village in Jamaica, where most of the people she grew up with are now dead or gone. Ms Pauline—as she insists on being called—is a “facety” woman: strong, vibrant, and intolerant of perceived slights. Once a successful ganja farmer, she is the mother of two grown children—a son who has died and a daughter living in New York with early-onset dementia—and a grandmother to one granddaughter. She lives alone in the stone house she built with her “baby-father,” Clive, who has long since died. Never married, Ms Pauline chose that life deliberately.
She recalls a lineage of unforgettable Caribbean heroines: Mary Mathilda, the stalwart septuagenarian of Austin Clarke’s The Polished Hoe, and Marie-Sophie Laborieux of Patrick Chamoiseau’s Texaco. Like those novels, A House for Ms Pauline belongs to a tradition of historical Caribbean fiction centred on older women who have endured the degradations of colonialism and lived long enough to claim agency and speak plainly about it. These women are uniquely positioned to recount the colonial and postcolonial experience—they were born into it, survived it, and now testify to it. Central to all three novels is the women’s profound attachment to land—“where their navel strings were buried.” For Ms Pauline, that attachment is embodied in the house she and Clive built on land they have no legal title to, a house now threatened with removal. Defending it ignites her final great battle.
Sometimes loving, sometimes abrasive, Ms Pauline is a magnificent creation—a character of depth, humour, and substance, with the gravitas of a real Caribbean great-aunt or grandmother. Her “facety” nature, in Jamaican patois, signals a blunt, tell-it-like-it-is insouciance that allows for an unvarnished distillation of lived experience. The details ring true. When Mary Mathilda recounts her sexual abuse by a white planter in The Polished Hoe, and Ms Pauline describes being molested by her teacher, the continuity of women’s vulnerability within colonial societies becomes starkly apparent. Yet Ms Pauline is no figure of resigned despair. When she is abused by the same teacher who rapes her friend, she responds with a memorable, self-affirming toughness—an assertion of agency that makes her indelible.
Ms Pauline has lived her entire life in the place of her birth. At ninety-nine, she senses the end approaching and judges her life full. She loved well, raised her children, and built her home from the ruins of an old plantation mansion on land once worked by her enslaved foreparents. The novel moves fluidly back and forth across her long life—through natural disasters, hunger, childbirth, love, and loss, including the death of Clive. Her final challenge comes in the form of the “Backra”—the patois term for white people—specifically Turner Buchanan, who arrives with papers claiming ownership of her land. Ms Pauline’s fierce response, rooted in self-preservation and devotion to her home, becomes the moral centre of the novel.
When the stones of her house begin to speak, Ms Pauline understands that she must make peace with herself and with others. She reaches out to her granddaughter, Justine, and to a local boy, Lamont, for help navigating the internet, and even extends herself towards Turner Buchanan’s children. These gestures deepen the novel’s meditation on inheritance, connection, and reckoning.
A House for Ms Pauline is a fine and resonant novel—an exploration of colonial injustice and its lingering consequences, of filial bonds that unsettle and endure. Like Texaco and The Polished Hoe, it enshrines a Caribbean world that feels fully inhabited, alive with psychologically rich characters. McCaulay writes beautifully about love and friendship; the love story between Ms Pauline and Clive is subtle and deeply affecting. Her evocation of the natural world is vivid and exact.
The prose itself is lyrical, shaped by the inner music of patois. The novel moves with the rhythm of a reggae song—downbeat and upbeat, marking the rises and falls of Ms Pauline’s life. Time passes seamlessly, the narrative flowing forward with confidence and grace, ending exactly as Ms Pauline would have it.