The White Woman on the Green Bicycle by Monique Roffey

This story begins at the end of the love story. At the close of the happy ever after when day-to-day routine takes over from the passion. And I do think that this is a love story. The traditional love story of a man and a woman, but also the love story of a man and a country and the love story of a country and a politician.

This is the story of Sabine, a vital and beautiful Frenchwoman who meets and falls in love with George Harwood. For love of him she agrees to move with him to Trinidad for three years for work in 1956. She intends to thrive where other English wives have wilted and returned to England before their three years are up. But as we begin in 2006, we get to see the darker, more destructive side of George and Sabine’s love. We quickly learn that Sabine’s love of George has kept her in a place in which she has barely survived. The island has almost driven her mad over the course of fifty years and George seems to neither notice nor care. His selfishness is maddening, the heat Roffey conjures up so vividly is cloying and the entrapment that Sabine feels extends to the reader. George is a frustrating character, so obsessed with the island that he is ignorant of his wife’s needs, mindless of the dangers of asking others to stand up to authority and eventually obsessed with several shoeboxes he finds in the attic. The shoeboxes are filled with the letters his wife wrote in secret to the politician Eric Williams, first Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago, confessing her unhappiness and hatred of the island her husband has condemned her to.

So as we know the end of the story, now we just need to know how it came to this.

In 1956 Sabine doesn’t count on George falling in love with Trinidad or his determination to build the sort of wealthy lifestyle for them that he could never have created in Harrow-on-the-Hill. The years pass, they have children, George builds a house, Sabine builds a friendship with her maid Venus and Trinidad falls in love with Dr Eric Williams. Sabine is notorious as the woman of the title, turning the heads of the whole island, including that of Eric Williams. It is Eric Williams, charismatic leader of the PNM that Sabine becomes obsessed with, first cutting out every piece she can find about him in the newspaper and eventually pouring her heart out in a succession of letters to him that George will not find for half a century.

This is a delicious book, a book that conjures up the lushness of Trinidad but without turning a blind eye to the corruption that has been rife there for years. The characters are not straight forward – they are by turns disgusting, selfish, selfless, stupid and brave.

The use of place is glorious, Roffey is a master of it. I was most struck by how the relationships in the book are affected by this place and its politics. Would Sabine have made friends with her maid if she hadn’t felt so alone? Would her relationship with her daughter and George’s with his son be so strained if they had stayed in Harrow-on-the-Hill? Clearly, their daughter would have been a very different person and the effect that place can have on you as a person really struck me.

That George loves Sabine is never in doubt:

“You can fancy lots of other people. But the heart is small and fussy: it knows exactly who it wants. You only have room in it to love one or two people in a lifetime.”

But this book is weighted with the place in which it is set. As much as the characters lives and emotions are affected by Trinidad, so is the book. Without this lush, humid setting it would be a lesser story. But it isn’t. It’s a fantastic book which I would highly recommend.

 

Simon and Schuster, 2009. ISBN-10: 1847375006. 448pp.

[Nikki occasionally daydreams about a green bicycle on her blog The Possibility Engine]

Advertisement