McTair explores people, past

MY Trouble with Books and Other Works of Short Fiction by Trinidadian Roger McTair, former professor of film and photography at Ryerson University in Toronto, is a collection of 13 short stories which examine the relationship between people and their past.

For the characters featured in these stories, often written with a wry wit, there is no escaping the past, and the present often riles up uneasy memories.

In Ceremonies there is the irony of facing Discovery Day in Canada, which commemorates Christopher Columbus’s “discovery” of the New World, when in truth, Beckles and Bledsoe are struggling to discover and define themselves in a foreign culture. That struggle for self-identity in a foreign culture is a theme repeated throughout the book using cricket, Carnival, the streets of Toronto or even a hotel bar in Barbados as places to expose characters’ frailties.

Each story has multiple, subtle layers, one of which often examines monetary gains vs aesthetic goals. Concrete, set in St James, offers a humorous look at poetry through the eyes of a taxi driver listening to poetry on his radio while Ronald, his passenger, recognises his poems being butchered on the government programme. The dialogue between the taxi driver and passenger reveals much about our expectations of poetry to enrich and enlighten. Visiting, the first story in the collection, is my favourite. Set at a hotel bar in Bridgetown, Visiting exposes the underlying tension that tourism imposes on island life.

Solomon, a tourist from Trinidad, is having a conversation with Clapham, the Barbadian bartender, when an obnoxious American man claims he is being ignored. Clapham tries to maintain his dignity in an embarrassing and degrading situation. When the American jumps behind the bar saying he will serve people, the whole disdainful scene takes on a condescending tone, which suggests tourism erodes self-dignity and true independence.

Most of the stories feature titles fashioned from puns that set up the themes of multi-layered stories. The conversation between a mother and her daughter At Union Station reveals the disunion between the two as well as the mother’s disconnect with modern society. A train station is a fitting place for such a story.

Again, this theme of disconnection plays out in the title story, My Trouble with Books, which features a bibliophile’s desperate attempt to get back the books he has sold to a second-hand bookstore so that he can reclaim his past.

My Trouble with Books… offers much to contemplate. Like all books – especially self-published books – it could have benefited from a good editor – in this case not for the sake of grammar or mechanics, but for ways to explore a more effective structure. Some stories required a better blend of dialogue and narration. Many of the stories feature the same character, Ronald, and this became disconcerting. One wonders how a traditional editor would have shaped and ordered McTair’s stories, which are memorable, insightful and worthy of a traditional publisher.

Also, most impressive was a foreword complete with an element of mystery written by the author’s son Ian Kamau Prieto-McTair, who captured the spirit of the author and his work.

My Trouble with Books will be launched at the AV Room at the National Library on December 4.