by John Lennard - Humanities-Ebooks

8
Introduction
“a cloud shaped like his island home”
Like its author, View from Mount Diablo is powerfully hybrid—a verse-novel that
won the Jamaican National Literary Award in manuscript in 2001, and was
published in the UK by Peepal Tree Press in 2003. Ralph Thompson (b.1928) is a
white Jamaican, of crypto-Jewish and Irish stock, who received a Jesuit education.
Through his absent father’s US nationality he was eligible for military service, and
after graduating in law from Fordham University in 1950 spent two years as a USAF
officer in Japan, but he is married to a Jamaican and has lived in Kingston save for a
brief period in the 1970s when political violence forced the family overseas.
Thompson’s career was largely in business, with Seprod Ltd (a large firm supplying
household commodities and consumer products, for whom he was a long-serving,
highly successful CEO), but included educational activism with extensive
journalism, exhibitions of paintings, and latterly two well-received poetry
collections—The Denting of a Wave (1992) and Moving On (1997) 01 —before
expanding with View from Mount Diablo to embrace the verse-novel. Itself
intrinsically hybrid, that form is stretched by the generic models for Thompson’s
plot, the Bildungsroman and the crime novel, and additionally distorted by wideangle
narration bending an account of Jamaican social and political history from the
1930s–2000s into one truncated and foreshortened fictional life.
The protagonist, reporter and family-man Adam Cole, remembers the war-years
of the 1940s, and cannot be much younger than Thompson himself—born sometime
in 1930–5. He married after graduating from university, c.1955, and by chapter 6 has
a daughter of 15, making it the early 1970s. The violent, tragic events that dominate
chapters 6–12 thus seem at first to invite mapping onto the ‘Manley Years’ (1972–
80), and the final killings might be thought specifically to summon the later 1970s, a
very bloody time in Jamaica—but the ‘Manley Years’, however neat a tag, marked
an escalation as much as an inception, and all later events in the verse-novel
subsume continuing, generically similar events of the 1980s–2000s. The particular
role of the cocaine trade in the dénouement also points to a more recent date than the
1970s, and it is clear the Jamaican history Thompson presents, if profoundly verisimilar,
is as much an archetypal assemblage of chronic political and psychological
1
Both are published by Peepal Tree Press.