Heartlands

Nora Robson was a writer living in Montreal.

Philip Kreiner’s first collection of stories, People Like Us in a Place Like This, is set in the Canadian North and is based on his experiences while working for the Cree School Board in James Bay. The collection was nominated for a Governor General’s award. Heartlands, his first novel, is set in Jamaica, where Kreiner taught for several years.

Heartlands is only partly the story of Vikki, a recent Toronto divorcee who has flown to Montego Bay to visit her brother, Jimmy, in his Caribbean home. She is looking forward to life as depicted in travel brochures. But the Jamaica she encounters has little in common with the advertised island paradise. Vikki meets a strange cast of characters: Mina, for example, who drives around all day in a fast car, nuzzling her baby pig, Porcolino. Mina likes to boast about her sexual exploits with uniformed police officers. Then there’s Etta, the black woman who sleeps with Jimmy to allay his fears, real and imagined. Etta is loveable and vulnerable. She is also the only real character in the novel and the only one capable of eliciting empathy. Carlton, the handsome Jamaican at the hotel who likes to make it with all the white tourist-ladies, is a stock cardboard character. The man who accosts Vikki by her swimming pool, persuades her to help him pick breadfruit and then tries to have sex with her is the most pathetic of the group. His failure, due to impotence, acts as a metaphor for the entire island situation.

In Heartlands, Kreiner attempts to create an atmosphere of underlying tensions between native Jamaicans and white intruders. Some of the methods he uses include writing the entire novel in the present tense, elongating some paragraphs to the length of a page or more, and employing much word and phrase repetition.

About Vikki, he says, “Since the collapse of her marriage, she no longer feels so attractive. She’s beginning to feel old and worn out. She’s not yet 35, but she’s beginning to feel old and worn out. She feels too worn out to work at making herself look good for a new man. She’s too tired to work at it” (pp.73,74). Can we truly call all that repetition and redundancy good writing? New authors are constantly harangued to “Experiment. Be different.” Kreiner has accepted the advice. Unfortunately, use of the present tense throughout the novel makes it sound contrived.

Despite these drawbacks, Kreiner paints a compelling scenario. The reader does sense the fear and the hostility in Jamaica. There is also reason to feel that strides have been made toward understanding and knowledge.