Pink Icing by Pamela Mordecai
One of Pamela Mordecai’s biggest strengths as a writer is her ability to disappear. So, you’re thinking, ‘Wow, that’s the most backhanded compliment I’ve read.’ But it’s true.
She writes in the Caribbean dialect, which is challenging to read initially. Once you relax your eyes, though, and settle into her voice, the rhythm of her sentences lulls you into some warm place where your skin is slightly scaly with dried ocean air and a glimmering sun flickers through the canopy of palms. Her words dissolve and leave you immersed in the world of story, occupying the same patch of grass or gravel road as the characters.
There are no overwhelming crises in Pink Icing, no plot to overthrow the government or imminent threat of the island teetering on extinction. Mordecai carefully mines the nuances of everyday life, finding the tiny universal dramas that coalesce into the amalgam of existence. Her restrained prose is economical and turns many a phrase without drawing attention to the writing itself, eschewing any chance of pulling you out of the story. She layers the cadence of dialogue to create texture in her settings, and sometimes-as in the superb ‘Hartstone High’-what isn’t said reverberates more that what is said. This negative-space of dialogue gives the pieces a more expansive feeling, allowing the related themes to flow from one story into the next, and in the end you’re experiencing the island more than various groups of characters.
And really, isn’t that all you ask of fiction?
Review by Nik Korpon
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Pamela Mordecai: The Author
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