Miss Pauline is not your average 99-year-old. She’s a feisty, cursing, former ganja farmer in Jamaica who feels vulnerable for the first time because of a recent and deeply unsettling development: the stones of her simple, self-built home have begun to rattle and shift in the night, making her worry about her own mental soundness. She feels suddenly “empty with a cavernous loss, hollowed out by a force she doesn’t understand”.
Now that she believes that the walls are talking to her, she doesn’t want to spend time at home, so she makes her faltering way daily through the local village of Mason Hall, where “youngsters laugh at an elder swearing, the church sisters shake their heads”, no longer entirely trusting her increasingly unreliable limbs. Can she even make it as far as the post office? Like her, it’s “a creature of another time, long past its relevance. She’s fading, her brain cells flaking like paint, her spine crumbling, joints fusing, the past seeking its reckoning.”
Miss Pauline, once a brave, resilient young woman who became the parish’s largest ganja farmer to help her family survive and, when warned that “ganja bring killin’”, brusquely responded that “starving bring dyin’”, is now troubled by secrets, regrets, the memory of the harm inflicted upon her as a child by a perverted pastor and by the mysterious disappearance of a white man who came to reclaim the land on which she built her home.
Diana McCaulay, an award-winning Jamaican writer and environmental activist, possesses a Steinbeck-like social awareness of injustice and prejudice, and her prose flows with a poetic rhythm that makes it profoundly pleasing to read.
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Understanding the Jamaican Patwa or patois can be challenging and requires commitment and concentration. And the main characters’ responses to a significant development in the story are somewhat implausible, yet this does not detract from this absorbing and moving novel. A House for Miss Pauline is a beautiful, poetic novel that makes me want to explore McCaulay’s entire back catalogue.
Julia Kelly’s latest work is the memoir, Matchstick Man
