Butterflies. (Of Marriageable Age - Sharon Maas)

Member Name: QueenElf

Product:	Of Marriageable Age - Sharon Maas
Date:	23/04/08 (88 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Wonderfully evocative of different times & places.

Disadvantages: See review.

Once again I've found another new author, a woman with vision, strength and a powerful imagination. Sharon Maas was born in Guyana in 1951, educated there and later in England. As a journalist she lived in India for some time and also in her birth-place of Guyana. She is now married with two children and lives in Germany. This is her first novel, though she has since written another three.
If you want to know more about the author, then she has her own website. When introducing a new author, I like to give some basic background. This is a natural progression from the book, where the author is drawing in part from her own life. For a first novel this is exceptionally powerful, though it was written in the year 2000, the subject matter is still a controversial topic. (more later).

Story Outline.
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This epic story spans the years from the 1920's to the late 1960's and covers the lives and loves of several families that come within the same orbit of fate. Chapter headings are given the name of the person whose story is being narrated. This is essential as the narrative does move around in time. However, this is not one of those books that use this way of story-telling to be clever. Rather that it's an unusual story that actually benefits from this way of writing.
The story opens with Nat aged four, (formerly called Paul by the misguided nuns who run a ramshackle orphanage in the years following WW2), rescued by Doctor David, who becomes his adopted father. Through later chapters David's story is also told, the son of English parents living in India in the declining years of the British Raj.
Nat's story starts in 1947, David's in the 1920's. Interspersed between these dates and into the future years of the 1960's, are a host of other characters whose lives are bound up with the main characters. Chief among these are Savriti, the daughter of the servants of David's parents and their own special friendship which leads to a doomed love-affair.
Then there is Saroj(ini), the daughter of Savriti, whose life as a teenager in a strict Indian family leads her to rebellion, and brings her into the conflict of African Americans and Indians in the Guyana uprisings.
Ultimately though, it's still a love-story that spans a life-time of the main characters.

Characters.
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This is one of those rare books that are driven by both the plot and the characters. It's not an easy thing to do, but the author manages this with consummate ease. I suppose we all have a general idea how characters should act, even within a framework of different eras and racial differences. E.g. English in India are racial prejudice, treating their servants as little more than slaves.
Equally, the Indian families are caste conscious, especially within the Hindi. Arranged marriages are the norm, with all the anguish this brings to the swinging sixties morality.
Certainly these issues are covered in some depth and the characters suffer through the social stigma of those times. But the author also manages to inject some new life into these age-old struggles, giving the reader something new to think about.
For me, the strongest and most enigmatic character had to be that of Savriti. Born just after David, her mother becomes a wet-nurse to David and the children are bound together from the start of their lives. But Savriti is no shrinking violet. Rather she is a butterfly, a bright capricious child who becomes a breath of life to each person she meets. Her story is told over the largest part of the book, so it wouldn't be fair to a reader to say much more. But there is something uncanny about Savriti, something which she will pass onto one of her children.
Nat is another of the special characters and perhaps fairly unique in a book where the women are described in more detail than the men. For me he was a special child, growing into an even better adult. What I really liked about him was that when he was sent to England for his education, he became just as rebellious as any other young man of those times.
To mention each character would make this a long review and spoil some of the surprises. I couldn't not mention Saroj though, whose own story is a large part of the book.
Escaping from an arranged marriage, she makes friends with Trixie, the Afro-American friend whose life is intricately bound up with her own.

Different places/ different faces.
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Although the book starts with David (the English doctor who sacrifices his life to caring for his poverty-stricken patients), adopting Nat and taking him back to the village just outside Madras, the book crosses continents as befits the story.
From India in the 1920's, to Guyana in South America, just before the racial riots and taking in England, the author speaks with authority. Some of the story must have its roots in the author's own history, but if it does, she isn't telling us directly.
Its common knowledge that families from India were recruited to work in British Guiana during the early 1900's, to take the place of the liberated slaves of South America. What is left unsaid is that these Indians eventually merged into the background so quickly that caste differences became almost obsolete. It's a part of history that I knew little of, and its compelling reading.
Its here that Savriti comes from India to start her second family, the first are long dead. Her new husband is a petty tyrant, a man full of his own importance, whose old-fashioned views contrast sharply with the new freedom of the early sixties.
Then there is England and the freedom that allows people from all races to mingle and even marry outside their faith.
This was my teenage era, and it's good to find an author like Maas whose vision of those times is as perceptive as my own memories.

My Thoughts.
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In the last decade there have many books written about racial tensions and the impact that different cultures make on their own and other societies. As a nation, Britain once ruled a great empire, only letting go of its peoples in later years. Some readers might think this is another book on the same lines. Told by immigrants or those left to struggle alone when granted their independence as India was in 1947.
Some of these issues are touched on in the book, but not to the point when it becomes the story rather than part of the whole. Mainly it's a gloriously indulgent love story that just happens to weave a pattern throughout the telling.
Sharon Maas has that rare gift of story-telling. She says of her book that she had planned it as a puzzle to be unravelled. What she doesn't say is that her characters are so believable and that although there was great tragedy in the past - the future was brighter as the caterpillars emerged as butterflies.
Wonderfully evocative, brightly patterned, this is a book that begs to be read and believed in. I loved every moment, though the paperback text is small and at 528 pages its no easy read. It can be put down and picked up again though, making it an ideal holiday read, or one for long cold winter nights.

I paid £1 plus postage for my copy. It's available on Amazon and other good book-sellers. I do hope you will read it and find that little spark of magic that lives in some special books.
Thanks for reading.
© Lisa Fuller. April 2008.

Summary: A big book with a big theme and a timeless love-story.