J—, Black Bam and the Masqueraders

This is the final installment in a quartet of novels that explores the lives of the small St Lucian middle class in the years around independence. Peter, after years abroad, has resumed his marriage with his long abandoned wife Phyllis, and is now working as a lecturer in Jamaica. His brother Paul remains in St Lucia, disgraced and sacked from professional employment by his refusal to marry his pregnant girlfriend. He has acquired a reputation for madness, though whether this is a contrived mask or an actual breakdown is left uncertain. J—, Black Bam and the Masqueraders intercuts Paul’s confessional letters to Peter with the narrative of Peter’s marital relationship with Phyllis, his affairs and descent into despair, drunkenness and domestic violence. St Omer offers a bracingly bleak portrayal of a middle class beset with hypocrisies over race, sexism and class privilege.

Garth St Omer was born in Castries, St Lucia in 1931. During the earlier 1950s St Omer was part of a group of artists in St Lucia including Roderick and Derek Walcott and the artist Dunstan St Omer. During the 1960s he travelled widely, including years spent teaching in Ghana. His first publication, the novella, Syrop, appeared in 1964, followed by A Room on the Hill, Shades of Grey, Nor Any Country and J-, Black Bam and the Masqueraders in 1972. In the 1970s he moved to the USA, where he completed a doctoral thesis at Princeton University in 1975. Until his retirement as Emeritus Professor, he taught at the University of Santa Barbara in California.