Mayaro Gold : The Fiction of Michael Anthony - Roydon Salick

 The absence of a full-length study of the fiction of Michael Anthony is a lamentable gap in West Indian Literary criticism. Roydon Salick sets out to correct this lacuna in a balanced study of fifteen of Anthony’s works of fiction, in which he assesses the strengths and weaknesses of this writer of tales, short stories, and novels. The author makes a convincing case for Anthony as an important populist writer whose works are written with the average reader in mind through simple plots, a lucid style and uncomplicated narrative techniques. For Salick, Anthony’s real strength as a writer lies, not in his ability to fashion absorbing plots but in his ability to depict memorable characters and create a sense of place. He may not have produced anything as great as A House for Mr Biswas or as trend-setting as A Brighter Sun, but any writer whose work so memorably puts the town of San Fernando or the village of Mayaro on the literary map, so successfully marries island history and fiction, so tellingly depicts so many facets of Trinidadian culture and so movingly explores the world of adolescence, is one who must be taken seriously, pedestalled and cherished.Ken is an important contribution to our understanding of Trinidad and Trinidadian Letters. Michael Anthony is our oldest living writer, stubbornly rooted in the landscapes of his birthplace and his early life (Mayaro, and San Fernando-Pointe-à-Pierre) where many of his better short stories and his first three novels are embedded. Roydon Salick’s introductory study is the first book-length survey of a seminal and innocently figurative writer too often described as ‘simple’. It sets the scene for a rediscovery of an original and radically native writer who refused to bring his life in England into his fiction and who wrote back to colonialism by conveying the essence of his native land, the naturalness of his characters, and the truth of the voices and the language they shared with their author. Nothing can be more political than that. Salick’s book quite properly offers a detailed overview of Anthony’s life and family relations, lays out and classifies the writings for a new generation of readers, and is very clear about what the critic considers the major novels and better short stories. The book understands well enough the combined force of the fictions and the social, cultural and historical works in which Anthony builds a unique history of Trinidadian cultures and historic moments. It invites new readers to take a serious look at Michael Anthony as an educator who makes it exciting to find out who we are.