But is no use dreaming. Is no use lying down there on your backside and watching the wallpaper, as if you expect the wall to crack open and money come pouring out, a nice woman, a house to live in, food, cigarettes, rum. And sometimes in this fantasy he used to rub the wall, remembering Aladdin and the wonderful lamp, just to see if a geni wouldn’t come and ask him: ‘What you want, just tell me what you want, no matter what it is, I could get it for you.’
The opening paragraph of the novel sets the tone for the narration to come. This is a strange sort of third-person narration that almost seems to verge into first-person territory. But it isn’t. The narrator doesn’t have a name and remains a totally anonymous cipher, but he can penetrate into the minds of others easily and let the reader know in a stream-of-consciousness fashion what those other characters are thinking. He is not individualized in any real sense yet it is clear that he is not just some godlike observer from nowhere. He fits in with the characters. He is one of them, but he is not actually one of the characters. He embodies the essence of them all.
To see him straggling along, is as if he take the place of Gallows, who was always the one trying hard to buttards. (That’s a good word, but you won’t find it in the dictionary. It mean like if you out of a game, for instance, and you want to come in, you have to buttards, that is, you pay a small fee and if the other players agree, they allow you to join. It ain’t have no word in the English language to mean that, so OUR PEOPLE make it up.)
The narration is presented in a West Indian vernacular, but not necessarily a West Indian dialect. This is not one of those novels featuring what some might consider impenetrable dialect-based dialogue or narration that contains language the way it sounds rather than the way it is spelled. It is not a book filled with words like “dey” instead of “they” or “de” instead of “the” but it is a book filled with a distinctive non-standard British feel to it. And on top of that is the occasional introduction of words native to the narrator that white Anglo cultures may not be familiar with, such as this example of a word that never quite made the transition into English slang.
Now, I will have to digress with a ballad about Syl, which will help to explain why Syl ain’t laughing.
The novel has no real plot in a conventional sense. It is episodic in nature and episodes that focus on a single character are referred to by the narrator as a ballad. While episodic in nature, that does not mean the novel is unstructured. In fact, it is more tightly structured than many novels dependent upon plot mechanics, it is just that the story thematically structured. The storyline is all about the “lark” of finding a communal house for a group of characters, but it is the characters rather than plotting out of this scheme of getting the place to live that connects everything together. And it is within these ballads that the structural cohesion is most finely executed.
