The Frequency of Magic

Multi-levelled and diverse in tone, 'The Frenquency of Magic' traverses across the gritty realism of village of life, the speculative imagination of Luke's travels through a mythic landscape in perpetual battle with is nemesis, the midnight robber, carnival figure of 'The Great Bandit,' and the psychological odyssey of the musician, long separated from the village, a jazz saxophonist, travelling from gig to gig, occasionally meeting up with his lover, Ella. Time in this richly ambitious novel is both circular and simultaneous, but moving, as Raphael ages, towards a sense of dissolution both of persons and of the culture of the village. But if there is a tragic realism about the passage of time, there is also a constant aliveness in the novel's love affair with the language of Creole Trinidad.