By Berkley Wendell Semple

THE Caribbean imagined in Olive Senior’s new novel, Paradise Once (Akashic, $19.65), is both magical and unsettling—suffused with auguries, omens, ancestral gods, sacred rituals, and a profound sense of reverence. It is the Caribbean once—a world long gone—specifically, the year 1513, when the islands of the archipelago were still home to the Taínos, the region’s Indigenous peoples. The novel reads like fantasy, steeped in the tropes of epic quests and mythical landscapes, but it is, in fact, a historical novel—and a superb one.

At its core, Paradise Once is a quest narrative, reminiscent of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy. It follows the familiar structure of an arduous journey to protect or recover something sacred—something capable of reshaping the world. As in Tolkien’s work, a comitatus of companions forms to assist in this journey. While there’s no Frodo, we have Night Orchid, a teenage heroine of remarkable resolve and inner strength. Travelling with her are Heart of Palm, a fierce and morally conflicted warrior; Flint, a gentle healer; and Segu, an enslaved African of great emotional depth. Survivors of a brutal massacre, these four are tasked by Candlewood—the behike, or village shaman—with undertaking a journey that could determine the future of the Taínos.

Senior crafts a mythic odyssey led by a band of richly drawn characters. But no fantasy—Caribbean or otherwise—can succeed without effective world-building, and here Senior excels. Her imagined landscape is immersive, populated by believable peoples and structured societies. She constructs a world complete with its own history, cosmology, political systems, and social hierarchies. It is, crucially, a fictionalisation of the real—a reimagining of a Caribbean that once was.

Looming over this world is a familiar archetype—the Dark Lord. In Paradise Once, this role is filled not by a singular villain, but by a regiment of Spanish colonial soldiers driven by an insatiable hunger for gold. As they move from island to island, they pillage, murder, and destroy, forcing Taíno communities into hiding in the mountains, where they become cimarrones—the first maroons, early symbols of Caribbean resistance. The violence is shocking in its senselessness. Even when the Taínos offer their gold freely, the Spanish remain unsatisfied. Conversion to Christianity—ostensibly a civilising mission—is revealed as a hollow pretext for domination and plunder.

Senior does not flinch in her critique. Through the historical figure of Bartolomé de las Casas, a Spanish priest who gradually becomes disillusioned, she examines the moral collapse of the colonial project. De las Casas’s spiritual and ethical reckoning after witnessing the slaughter of entire communities—including women and children—is rendered with clarity and force. Senior does not sanitise history; she faces it unblinkingly.

What makes Paradise Once particularly compelling, however, is its emotional resonance. We come to care deeply for its characters—especially Segu, the enslaved African brought from Spain to serve a Spanish commander. Segu is literate, complex, and morally ambivalent, embodying the painful identity fractures that would come to define much of Caribbean history. Like Heart of Palm and Flint, he is fully realised—sympathetic, flawed, and human.

Much of the novel is devoted to situating these characters within a richly textured Caribbean past—a world unfamiliar to modern readers, yet fully alive on the page. Senior accomplishes this with both a historian’s rigour and a poet’s sensitivity. Her pre-Columbian Caribbean is vibrant, deeply cultural, and politically intricate. We are immersed in Taíno religious practices, belief systems, tribal hierarchies, and spiritual cosmologies. It is an Edenic world—but, as with all Edens, a serpent lies in wait. That serpent is Shark Tooth, an ambitious Taíno whose lust for power sows discord among his people. Paradise here is not idyllic in a naïve sense; it is layered with internal tensions—class divisions, tribal rivalries, and personal ambition—all echoing the enduring complexities of human society.

And yet, Paradise Once is not a fantasy novel, and Olive Senior is not a fantasy writer. She is perhaps the Caribbean’s finest short story writer—and much more besides: a poet, an essayist, and a tireless documentarian of Caribbean life and history. Her landmark non-fiction work, Dying to Better Themselves: West Indians and the Building of the Panama Canal, was lauded for its meticulous research and emotional resonance. That same intellectual rigour and emotional clarity are present here.

Paradise Once is not fantasy in the traditional sense. It is a fictionalised history—anchored in real names, dates, geographies, and cultural specificity. It is a novel of recovery and reclamation, and its success rests on the strength of its research and the richness of its imagination. In this, Senior is in her element. Her fiction—whether in Summer Lightning and Other Stories, Discerner of Hearts, or The Pain Tree—is marked by psychological insight, historical fidelity, and lyrical beauty.

All of these qualities converge in Paradise Once. Though not a fantasy by genre, it possesses the mythic power of one. It is, at heart, a historical novel—one that resurrects the Caribbean’s pre-colonial past with urgency, beauty, and heartbreak.