The new novel by British Ghanaian author and performance poet Nii Ayikwei Parkes is set in a fictional Caribbean country called Fumaz, an island nation whose history is strikingly similar to that of Cuba. It has been under a US trade embargo ever since a leftwing revolution in 1959, and was for many years economically dependent on sugar exports to communist Russia; the collapse of the USSR in 1991 plunged the islanders into severe hardship. The primary protagonist, Yunior, is a talented crop scientist hired by the Fumaz government in the mid-90s to help diversify their agriculture. The novel recounts his early life as a child migrant from Ghana, his musical exploits with a popular salsa band, and his ill-fated romance with a local police officer. A second, parallel narrative concerns Emelina, the US-raised heiress of a wealthy Fumaz rice merchant, who leaves the North American “Sun Coast” (read: Miami) for her ancestral homeland when she inherits her grandfather’s estate.
Yunior’s life revolves around his twin passions: music and nature. When he isn’t playing guitar he is tending to his allotment: “Rotating peppers, spring onions, tomatoes, sweet potatoes and cabbages with assorted frijoles, okra … he prided himself on a garden that was both colourful and nutritious.” These two themes are often intertwined in the novel’s descriptive language: “Through [music] he blended with the countryside – its fertility, its undulating earth, its cycles, the muted music of its flora flourishing and fading, its temper when hurricanes flashed by.” On stage, he “oscillates his guitar in a pattern that mirrors the map-making loops of honey bees that have found nectar in a far flung patch of petals”.
Emelina’s narrative, meanwhile, is mainly focused on her family’s backstory. Like many children of émigrés, she has only a loose grasp of her heritage; her mother’s stories – “vivid, intricate canvasses awash with longing” – provide a vicarious point of access. In its early years their family business gained a competitive edge by growing its rice in sugar-infused water, which made it taste sweet; hence the novel’s title, Azúcar, the Spanish word for sugar.
Azúcar is Parkes’s second novel and comes 14 years after his prose debut, Tail of the Blue Bird. During this long interim he has published several children’s books and three poetry collections, and it’s fair to say his writing style owes more to those forms than to the novel as such. There is something of the bedtime story in his sing-song narration (“Let us begin with a single note of music …”); the abundance of metaphorical flourishes, excessive by the standards of literary prose, is par for the course in spoken word, where a heightened register can be an end in itself. Some of them are pleasing: the constancy of Yunior’s parents’ love “made him think of dew, how it could be counted on to settle on plants in the morning, although they spent most of their hours without it”. The trouble is the sheer quantity, which lends a syrupy texture to the narrative: we have “herbs punching the air in pungent ecstasy” and a lover’s “belly of kumquat freshness with down as fine as a kiwifruit’s skin”; the echo of music off walls “became the murmurings of a forest – the rustle of rodents in undergrowth, the lingering of fragrance of fallen flowers, the cries of crickets and cicadas”.
Though loyal to the regime, Yunior does express occasional misgivings, prompting the minister of agriculture to recap the revolution’s USP: “We sell the masses on education … they see wealth because our wealthy are educated. That’s the power of illusion; that’s the engine of hope.” Hope, indeed, is the watchword of this neatly crafted if somewhat schmaltzy fable. It pays tender homage to the staying power of migrant communities; the gist is underlined in a number of allusions to sunflowers – a symbol of resilience and longevity since biblical times. As the narrative strands converge towards a fairly predictable romantic ending, Emelina reflects: “Plants are not so different from us; they find ways to settle, to survive, to belong.” This is wholesome, life-affirming stuff, if a tad too saccharine for some palates.
• Azúcar by Nii Ayikwei Parkes is published by Peepal Tree (£10.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
