The Caribbean Review of Books (New vol. 1, no. 19, February 2009)

The Caribbean Review of Books, February 2009
Family matters
By Melissa Richards
Pynter Bender, by Jacob Ross (Fourth Estate, ISBN 978-0-
00-722297-1, 452 pp)
The title character of Jacob Ross’s first novel is born
blind, a full two days after his twin brother. He has
the eyes of a white man and is viewed with suspicion
both by his family and by Old Hope, the community
of plantation labourers in which the novel is set. He
is a jumbie boy, “one of de Old Ones come again.” Specifically,
he is believed to be the reincarnation of Zed Bender, a
rebellious slave who died at the hands of his master.
When the novel opens, Pynter has gained his sight through
the intervention of the village mystic, and Ross beautifully
captures the world that the boy discovers with his “new and
delicate” eyes:
Pynter left home, let the slant of the hill carry him down
towards the water to watch them wash and talk the day away
. . . He just sat there, feeding his eyes on the glitter and the
green and on the throbbing reds and yellows of their washing
spread out on the soap-bleached stones . . .
Each woman had her own little acre of stones on which
she spread her washing. Up to their knees in water, they beat
the clothing against the boulders and flashed their soapy
corn husks over them. He’d grouped their names in his head
according to the sound of them — Ursula, Petra, Barbara and
Clara, Cynty, Lizzie, Tyzie, Shirley. And then there was Miss
Elaine, her name all pretty and by itself, just like the way she
was.
Pynter is a sensitive, intelligent child, and Ross conveys both
his curiosity and his vulnerability while gradually making us
aware of the complex family relationships that surround him.
When the narrative opens, he and his brother Peter are the
only children in a family of strong but often powerless women,
and men who are absent or else planning their escape.
This complicated extended family lives in a yard that
Pynter’s grandfather John Seegal spent ten years blasting
out of the rocks above Old Hope Road, creating a space for
each of his three daughters (his only son is required to make
a way for himself): Tan Cee, the eldest, childless, and devoted
to a philandering husband, arguably the strongest maternal
influence in Pynter’s life; Elena, the twins’ somewhat distant
mother; and Patty, the family beauty, but also the one who
will prove herself closest to Pynter’s intellectual equal. Deeka,
the matriarch, is eternally grieving for John Seegal, the first of
the book’s men to “walk.” Openly hostile to Pynter, she is convinced
that he is destined for an early death, and on occasion
we worry that this may come at her own hands. Then there is
Birdie, a gentle giant of an uncle, able to achieve miraculous
things with bread, but unable to keep himself out jail for any
extended period of time.
Strange circumstances surround Pynter’s conception, and
during his extended stay on his own with his father Manuel
Forsyth we are introduced to a hostile half-brother. We hear
the name of Gideon, Pynter’s half-brother, well before the
character is introduced, so it is little surprise when his appearance
threatens the idyll that has been created between father
and son. Gideon’s relative wealth (and we learn quickly
that money is at the heart of the enmity) is a reminder of the
vulnerability of Pynter and his family, and by extension all of
the rural poor.
It may be significant that it is Pynter’s time with his father
that creates the opportunity for him to be educated, and
exposes him to the poetry of a mysterious, long-dead uncle
whose possessions Pynter finds. This is also when Pynter
meets Paso, a nephew many years his senior, who will have
an influence on his actions later on.
Ross is at his best when describing the knotty connections
and intricate patterns of rural life, and within the first
hundred pages of his novel he has introduced everything we
need for a complex, layered portrait of life in the shadow of
the sugar cane plantations. Pynter Bender should be an engaging
story about rural Caribbean life in the 1960s, a charming,
beautifully told variation on the Caribbean Bildungsroman.
But Ross appears to lose faith in the power of the complex
domestic tableau that is at the emotional centre of his novel.
He wants more for his central character — and perhaps for his
novel too — and thus overreaches himself.
The multiple strands that Ross has begun to develop
around Pynter’s family relationships, both maternal and
paternal, are slowly abandoned as ever more characters are
introduced into the plot. This is especially frustrating because
Ross proves himself adept at building suspense. In the early
part of the book a subtly crafted tension is allowed to develop
around specific characters. It seems a marker to the relative
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