The very title of Elizabeth Nunez's gripping and richly imagined sixth novel, Prospero's Daughter, distances her work from both the original "Tempest" (in which the daughter, Miranda, is perhaps the least developed of all Shakespearean heroines) and from the many postcolonial reactions to the play that have focused on the clash between the duke, Prospero, and his slave, Caliban, over ownership of the island. By contrast, Nunez's novel, set in the early 1960's on Chacachacare, a tiny island and former leper colony off the northwest coast of Trinidad, takes off from the most disconcerting moment in Shakespeare's play — Caliban's enraged response to Prospero's accusation that he attempted to rape his daughter. Nunez, who is a master at pacing and plotting, explores the motivations behind Caliban's outburst, hatching an entirely new story that is inspired by Shakespeare, but not beholden to him.
— The New York Times
Prospero's Daughter
Narrated by Simon Vance
Elizabeth NunezUnabridged — 12 hours, 30 minutes
Prospero's Daughter
Narrated by Simon Vance
Elizabeth NunezUnabridged — 12 hours, 30 minutes
Overview
Peter Gardner, a white scientist from England, is exiled after performing dangerous experiments on patients. He flees with his beautiful young daughter, Virginia, to the Caribbean, where he raises her in isolation among few people-all natives. One of those natives is Carlos, a young boy of mixed-race. Virginia and Carlos develop a forbidden friendship, which later blooms into a love that binds them above all cultural, racial, and paternal resistance. This is a touching love story and a haunting coming-of-age tale.
Editorial Reviews
Nunez (Bruised Hibiscus; Grace) critiques colonialist assumptions about race and class in this ambitious reworking of The Tempest, set in her native Trinidad in the early 1960s. Dr. Peter Gardner (the Prospero figure) arrives on the island with his baby daughter after a botched medical experiment in England made him an outlaw. The novel's Caliban is Carlos, a mixed-race orphan whose house on an outlying island the doctor steals. Gardner teaches the boy biology, astronomy, music-"an exclusively European education," Carlos later reflects-but his natural brilliance far surpasses anything the doctor can impart. Inevitably, Carlos and Gardner's daughter, Virginia (Miranda), fall in love; the doctor, in a paroxysm of rage at the thought of a sexual union between his daughter and a dark-skinned man, accuses Carlos of attempted rape. As the criminal charge is investigated, Nunez reveals Gardner to be the real criminal-not only toward Carlos, but also toward his native servant, Ariana (Ariel), and Virginia herself. With its strong themes and dramatic ironies, this story should speak for itself; Nunez, however, overexplains her material, forecasting plot developments and leaning, at times, toward didacticism. But while her portrait of demonic scientist Gardner remains superficial, readers will find her love story-which has a refreshingly happy ending-very sensitively told. (Feb.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
Peter Gardner, an English medical doctor, is on the run from the law for poisoning his patients. He is a master of deception, hiding his crimes, his racism, and his madness with lies and innuendo. He and his three-year-old daughter, Virginia, appear on a tiny island near Trinidad the day after a tremendous storm. Five-year-old Carlos, an orphan, lives on the island in the care of his dead mother's housekeeper, who is dying of cancer. The housekeeper lets Peter move in, and he begins to manipulate the situation to his liking. Although Peter has other plans for his daughter, Virginia and Carlos grow up and eventually fall in love. In the end, Peter's madness overtakes him. The novel, narrated by Simon Vance, features well-drawn and sympathetic characters; the helplessness of the children is chilling. Recommended. Joanna M. Burkhardt, Coll. of Continuing Education Lib., Univ. of Rhode Island, Providence Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.
Exquisite retelling of The Tempest, set in a leper colony off the coast of Trinidad in 1961. Inspector Mumsford has been called to the island of Chacachacare to investigate a rape allegation lodged against mixed-race teenager Carlos. English scientist Peter Gardner has filed the complaint on behalf of Virginia, his 15-year-old daughter. Gardner, a scientist exiled from Britain due to his experimental work on cloning body parts, landed at Chacachacare 12 years earlier, on the heels of a violent storm. Once there, Gardner and his young daughter met the orphaned Carlos, who remained in his family's house along with the housekeeper, Lucinda, and her daughter, Ariana. Gardner used his cunning to take the house, treating the Trinidadians as servants. The five live there in almost complete isolation, as Gardner is afraid of contracting leprosy. He tutors Virginia in the history of the British empire, proclaiming English superiority and the imperfections of Caribbean flora and fauna. But conflict creeps into the enclave. Tempted by his daughter's budding figure, Gardner protects her "virgin knot" by making Ariana his sexual slave. Drawn together by their fear of her father, Virginia and Carlos become friends and later sweethearts. When the scientist attempts to marry his teenage daughter to a rich American, Virginia and Carlos finally decide to stand up to the despot. The tale unfolds through the eyes of Mumsford, Carlos and Virginia, who desperately tries to understand her father. Nunez's masterful story plays out against the backdrop of Trinidadian hopes for independence, achieved the following year. Simply wonderful.
"A story about the transformative power of love . . . Readers are sure to enjoy the journey."
"The very title of Elizabeth Nunez’s gripping and richly imagined sixth novel, Prospero’s Daughter, distances her work from both the original Tempest (in which the daughter, Miranda, is perhaps the least developed of all Shakespearean heroines) and from the many postcolonial reactions to the play . . . Nunez, who is a master at pacing and plotting, explores the motivations behind Caliban’s outburst, hatching an entirely new story that is inspired by Shakespeare, but not beholden to him."
Advance praise for Prospero’s Daughter
“[An] exquisite retelling of ‘The Tempest’. . . . Masterful. . . . Simply wonderful.”
–Kirkus Review (starred review)
“[Elizabeth] Nunez critiques colonialist assumptions about race and class in this ambitious reworking of The Tempest, set in her native Trinidad in the early 1960s. . . . [It has] strong themes and dramatic ironies. Readers will find her love story–which has a refreshingly happy ending–very sensitively told.”
–Publishers Weekly
“A stunning achievement. With fluid, vivid writing, Elizabeth Nunez guides the reader through a magical and dangerous landscape. Beneath the unrelenting tropical sun, against the currents and tides of the sea, a Caribbean island of secrets and shadows is laid bare. This is a novel of thrilling twists and turns. In painterly prose, Nunez unveils a landscape tempered by colonialism, unmasks the colonizer, and lifts the curtain that has been drawn across history.”
–Michelle Cliff, author of Free Enterprise
“Like Zadie Smith’s On Beauty, Prospero’s Daughter is a classic take on an enduring classic. Elizabeth Nunez takes us on a journey through the heart and murky underbelly of forbidden love. This is probably her finest work to date.”
–Colin Channer, author of Passing Through
This variation of THE TEMPEST is ingenious and ambitious, if often unconvincing. The amoral English doctor Peter Gardner (Prospero) is so entirely wicked that it’s hard to believe his daughter, Virginia (Miranda), isn’t heartily sick of him by the time he has stolen young black Carlos’s (Caliban) house, regularly abused Ariana (Ariel) since she was 9, and falsely accused Carlos of raping Virginia. Set on an island off Trinidad in the ‘60s, the book and skillful reading by Simon Vance have much to admire, but I question the choice of a male narrator altogether. This book is not titled “Prospero”, or “Caliban,” or written by a William--and a female narrator might have given Virginia and Ariana more (and much needed) credibility. B.G. © AudioFile 2006, Portland, Maine
Product Details
| BN ID: | 2940176859621 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Blackstone Audio, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 08/01/2006 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
Read an Excerpt
Prospero's Daughter
Chapter One
One
He tell a lie if he say those two don't love one another. I know them from when they was children. They do anything for one another. I know. I see them. I watch them. I tell you he love she and she love him back. They love one another. Bad. He never rape she. Mr. Prospero lie.
Signed Ariana, cook for Mr. Prospero, doctor
John Mumsford put down the paper he had been reading and sighed. He did not want the case, but the commissioner had assigned it to him. Murder and robbery were the kinds of crimes he preferred to investigate. Hard crimes, not soft crimes where the evidence of criminality is circumstantial. He preferred a dead body, a ransacked house, a vault blown open, jewels and money missing, tangible evidence of wrongdoing, not cases that depended on her word against his word.
In 1961 no one had figured out that dried sperm on a woman's dress could be traced irrefutably to its source, at least no one in the police department in Trinidad. So as far as Mumsford was concerned, notwithstanding the fact that there could be some damage to the woman--torn clothing, scratches on the body, sometimes blood--these matters of rape were better handled as domestic quarrels, some of which could certainly end in murder, but in the absence of murder, not worth pursuing. In the end, there was always a persuasive argument to be made about a woman dressed provocatively, a woman alone, in the wrong place, in the dead of night. A woman flirting. A woman asking for it.
There was the case the week before, buried in The Guardian on the fifth page. A black woman from Laventille had filed a complaint with the police claiming that her fifteen-year-old daughter had been gang-raped in a nightclub in Port of Spain by three American sailors who had locked her in the restroom and stuffed her mouth with toilet paper. The reporter presented the facts as they were apparently given to him by the mother of the fifteen-year-old, but he went on to comment on the sad conditions of life for the residents of Laventille: "Houses, no hovels," he wrote, "packed one on top of the other, garbage everywhere, children in rags, young people without hope, dependent on charity. It's no wonder."
That "no wonder" set off a deluge of letters to the newspaper. Four days later, on its second page, The Guardian printed three. "A wonder, what?" one person wrote. "A wonder that her mother wasn't in the nightclub also selling her body? What do those women expect when they dress up in tight clothes and go to those clubs? Everybody knows the American sailors go there for cheap girls. She had it coming. How could her mother in good conscience call what happened to her daughter rape?"
That seemed to be the consensus of God-fearing people on the island. Soon witnesses surfaced who swore they had seen the girl the night before with the same three sailors.
Mumsford agreed with the consensus: The girl had asked for it. Yet for no other reason than that the hairs on the back of his neck stood up at the mere mention of Americans, he also believed that the sailors had taken advantage of her.
It was a matter of schadenfreude, of course. Mumsford was En- glish, and though he readily admitted his country had needed the Americans during the war, they irritated him. They were too boisterous, too happy-go-lucky, he thought. They waved dollar bills around as if they were useless pieces of paper; they laughed too loudly, got too friendly with the natives.
Trinidad's black bourgeoisie didn't approve of the Americans either, but they knew it was the English colonists who had given them this leave to swagger into town as if they owned the island. Which, indeed, they did, partially, that is, when the British gave them Chaguaramas, on the northwest coast of the island, not far from the capital, Port of Spain, to set down a naval base, and then Waller Field in central Trinidad, for the air force. It helped that the British explained that they needed the twenty battleships the Americans offered in exchange, but not enough to quell rancor in some who were making the American military bases a cause celebre in their demands for independence.
Still, the simmering resentment of the American presence, shared by both the colonizers and the colonized, though for different reasons, was not enough to gain sympathy for the girl. How could it be rape when she was dressed like that, a fifteen-year-old girl with her bosom popping out of a tight red jersey top, and a skirt so short that, according to the nightclub owner, you could see her panties?
But, of course, the case the commissioner had assigned him was different. The woman in question, the victim, was English; the accused, the perpetrator, the brute, was a colored man.
The commissioner himself had come down to the station where Mumsford was posted and had spoken to him in private. "Mumsford," he said, "you are the only one I can trust with this job."
The job involved going to the scene of the crime, Chacachacare, a tiny, desolate island off the northwest coast of Trinidad, where the reputed rape had occurred, and taking the deposition of Dr. Peter Gardner, an Englishman, who had lodged the complaint on behalf of his fifteen-year-old daughter, Virginia.
"It is a delicate matter, you understand," the commissioner said. "Not for a colored man's ears or eyes."
The commissioner was himself Trinidadian. He was born in Trinidad, as were his parents and grandparents and great-great- grandparents. He was what the people in Trinidad called a French Creole. He was white. That is, his skin was the color of what white people called white, though it was tanned a golden brown from generations in the sun. Local gossip had it, though, that none of the white people in Trinidad whose families went back so many generations had escaped the tar brush, and indeed the telltale signs of the tar brush were evident in the commissioner's high cheekbones, his wide mouth and full lips, and in the curl that persisted in his thick brown hair. These features made him handsome, but skittish, too, for he had a deep-seated fear of being exposed, of finding himself in good company confronted by a man whose resemblance left no doubt that he was a relative with ancestors who had come from Africa.
The French had come in 1777 at the invitation of the king of Spain, who had neither the time nor the inclination to develop the island, one of the smallest of his "discoveries" in the New World. Preoccupied with the more alluring possibilities of gold in El Dorado on the South American continent, the king opened Trinidad to the French, who already had thriving plantations on the more northerly West Indian islands, thanks to slave labor from Africans they had captured on the west coast of Africa. The Spanish king thought he had struck a clever bargain, a cheap way to clear the bush in Trinidad while he was busy with weightier matters. The French brought thousands of African slaves to Trinidad from Martinique and Guadeloupe. Twenty years later, in 1797, the British seized Trinidad from the Spanish, but the French stayed on, claiming ownership of large plots of land, even after Emancipation in 1834.
Mumsford knew something of this history. He knew, too, that though the French Creoles on the island were linked to the English by the color of their skin, they were, nevertheless, culturally bonded to the Africans in Trinidad who had raised their children. More than once this knowledge had caused him to wonder whether, in a time of crisis, he could count on the commissioner's loyalty. Would he side with the English, or would he suddenly be gripped by misguided patriotism and join forces with the black people on the island? He was always a little put off by the commissioner's singsong Trinidadian English, though he had no quarrel with his grammar. On the question, however, of how to respond to Dr. Gardner's allegation, the commissioner put him completely at ease.
"Only we," the commissioner said, stressing the we and sending Mumsford a knowing look that sealed his trust, "can be depended upon with a matter of this delicacy. Don't forget, Mumsford, that girl, Ariana, has already come up with her own lies and can make a mess of this for all of us."
Us. The commissioner had a French-sounding last name, but Mumsford was satisfied that he was on his side.
Mumsford picked up the paper he had shoved aside and read Ariana's statement again. He never rape her. She had written she, not her, but he could not get his tongue to say it. Dropping the d from the verb was bad enough.
"Attempted rape, not rape," the commissioner had cautioned him. "In fact, Mumsford," he said, "if you can avoid using that word at all, so much the better. We can't have that stain on a white woman's honor."
And so it would have been--the nightmare of any red-blooded Englishman who had brought wife, daughters, sisters to these dark colonies--had that man, that savage, managed to do what no doubt had been his intention.
He had to remember to be careful then. It was not a rape, not even an attempted rape. There was no consummation. He must not give even the slightest suggestion that consummation could have been possible, that the purity of an English woman, that her unblemished flower, had been desecrated by a black man.
The woman, Ariana, had not put her letter in an envelope. She had glued together the ends of the paper with a paste she had made with flour and water. Mumsford was sure it was flour and water she had used, not store-bought glue. He was there when the commissioner slit open the letter. The dried dough, already cracked, crumbled in pieces, white dust scattering everywhere. He had leaned forward to clear the specks off the commissioner's desk and was in mid-sentence, rebuking Ariana for her lack of consideration for others--"What with the desk now covered in her mess"--when the commissioner interrupted him. It was good she had sealed it, whatever she had used, the commissioner said. They needed to be discreet. Then he paused, scratched his head, and added, "Though there is no guarantee she has not told the boatman. People here talk." He wagged his finger at Mumsford. No, they had to nip this in the bud. If they were not careful, the whole island would soon be repeating her version of what had happened on that godforsaken island. Soon they would be whispering that a white woman had fallen in love with a colored boy.
" 'I tell you he love she and she love him back.' " The commissioner read Ariana's words aloud. He threw back his head and laughed bitterly. "A total fabrication," he said. "How could it be otherwise?"
Mumsford did not need convincing. They love one another. Bad. That had to be a lie.
But it was not only Ariana's reference to rape and the pack of lies she wrote in defense of the colored boy that irritated Mumsford this morning. It was also her presumption--what he called the carnival mentality of the islanders, their tendency to trivialize everything, to make a joke of the most serious of matters, turning them into calypsos and then playing out their stories in the streets, in broad daylight, on their two-day Carnival, dressed in their ragtag costumes. Yes, an En- glish doctor of high repute would be addressed as Mister, but he was sure Ariana did not know that, and certain that she knew that the doctor's name was not Prospero, but Gardner. He was Dr. Peter Gardner--Gardner, a proper English name--not Mr. Prospero, doctor, as she had scrawled next to her name.
Ordinarily Mumsford would have left it at that, dismissed the name Ariana had given to Dr. Peter Gardner as some unkind sobriquet, loaded with innuendo, taken from one of those long-winded tales the calypso-rhyming, carnival-dancing, rum-drinking natives told endlessly. For Prospero had no particular significance to Mumsford, though he had guessed correctly that it was the name of a character in a story. What story (it was a play by Shakespeare, his last) he did not know. Mumsford was a civil servant who had worked his way through the ranks of Her Majesty's police force. Like all English schoolboys he had read Charles Lamb, not the plays, and then not the story about Prospero. Nevertheless, he was on a special assignment and could leave nothing to chance. He had the honor of an Englishwoman to protect. So he made a note to himself to question Ariana. Question for Ariana, he wrote in his notebook. Why do you call Dr. Gardner Prospero?
He would have to speak to her separately, not in the presence of Dr. Gardner. That was the directive from the commissioner. Mumsford would have preferred otherwise. He wanted to expose her in front of Dr. Gardner for the liar she was, but when he argued his point, the commissioner stopped him. "I don't think that would be wise," he said.
For a brief moment, the tiniest sliver of a gap opened up between the Englishman and the French Creole. Would he, in the end, choose them over us? the Englishman wondered. For they could not always be depended upon to be grateful, even the white ones born here. The man stirring up trouble in the streets of Port of Spain with his call for independence was not grateful. And yet there were few on the island that England had done more for. England had educated him, England had paid his way to Oxford, but when he returned to Trinidad, the ungrateful wretch bit the hand that fed him: Independence now! Thousands were gathering behind him.
"You mean Eric Williams?" he asked the commissioner.
The commissioner ignored the question but he winked at him when he said, "We'll have time sufficient to deal with the girl."
Was the wink conspiratorial? Did he mean that England still had time in spite of the ravings of this troublemaking politician?
Mumsford tried again. "This is still a Crown Colony," he said.
The commissioner slapped him on the back. "Let's not cause the good doctor more grief, okay, Inspector?"
Mumsford had to be satisfied with his response, for the commissioner kept his hand firmly on the small of Mumsford's back and didn't remove it until he had walked the inspector out of his office.
Continues...
Excerpted from Prospero's Daughter by Elizabeth Nunez Excerpted by permission.
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