The Games Were Coming by Michael Anthony

First published: 1963

Type of work: Social realism

Time of work: From January to April during a year in the early 1950’s

Locale: The town of Marabella and the city of San Fernando in southern Trinidad, British West Indies

Principal Characters:

• Leon Seal, the protagonist, a competitive cyclist in his early twenties
• Sylvia, his girlfriend
• Dolphus Seal, his preadolescent brother
• Fitz Seal, Leon’s father and trainer
• May, a friend of Sylvia

The Novel

Two events not only reveal but also contribute to the central conflicts in the novel: the Southern Games (including the fifteen-mile Blue Riband cycling race) and Trinidad’s most important annual event, its colorful and hedonistic Carnival. These two events are to be held only weeks apart, and for the first time, Leon Seal turns his back on Carnival and single-mindedly prepares to win the race which will establish him as one of the country’s cycling stars.

Under his father’s guidance, he quits his job at the Pointe-a-Pierre oil refinery and avoids any activity which might strain a muscle or weaken his body. Accepting the popular mythology, he decides to abstain totally from any physical involvement with his devoted girlfriend, Sylvia, during the several months of his training. Leon’s carefully calculated regimen and his iron discipline are coolly and rationally directed toward the goals of heroic action and personal glory; Leon’s assumptions concerning the people close to him and the importance of his quest, however, fail to take into account the feelings and needs of Sylvia, who is in love with him but has little real interest in cycling. Intellectually she accepts her diminished position in Leon’s life, but emotionally she is hurt and confused by his treatment of her.

Leon further complicates the situation by sexually arousing Sylvia during the occasional visits he permits her, only to turn away from her abruptly with a show of his self-control. The situation leads Sylvia to reassess her relationship with Leon and to question her own social and moral views. Frustrated and resentful, she is forced to conclude “Bicycle is his woman!” and consider other options. Mirroring and contributing to her inner turmoil is the general excitement building in the population as Carnival approaches with its loosening of inhibitions and its invitation to bacchanalian abandon.

Sylvia is gradually drawn into an affair with her employer, Imbal Mohansingh, and becomes pregnant. She seeks help from her friend May in obtaining an abortion but is refused. She decides to take May’s advice and pretend that the baby is Leon’s. May urges Sylvia to forget her troubles and enjoy the Carnival: “This is Trinidad. And you young, and you ain’t dead yet!” Yet, as often happens in the novel, the external world reflects the psychological or moral state of the characters: “In the street all the calypsoes were twisted into obscenities and were on the lips of young and old alike.”

Sylvia persuades the unsuspecting Leon to promise that if he wins the Blue Riband race he will marry her immediately, but she knows that Leon is fully capable of putting her off for another year if his goal is not achieved. The tension of the entire novel becomes focused on the last chapter and the expertly controlled account of the fifteen-mile race on which ride the fortunes, for better or worse, of the central characters. The novel’s last sentence indicates that Leon has indeed won the race. Yet Michael Anthony’s skill in creating characters who live in the imagination forces the reader to speculate on the true nature of that victory for both Sylvia and Leon.

The Characters

Although the physical action of the novel centers on Leon’s preparation for the Blue Riband bicycle race and his eventual triumph, the novel’s most important and interesting developments take place within the mind and heart of Sylvia. Leon simultaneously values and pities Sylvia for her seeming lack of a personality independent of his own; “she was always cool, always easy, always pliable to his will.” It is a view with which Sylvia herself concurs; her enforced loneliness and the boredom of her job, however, cause her to become more reflective and self-aware. At twenty-one, she leads a life of slightly prudish respectability, but her growing friendship with the disreputable May and her consciousness of the hypocrisy which often lies beneath the veneer of Trinidadian propriety lead her to recognize her own potential for coarse thoughts and immoral behavior.

Sylvia’s heightened awareness of Carnival and her liking for the melodies of calypsoes whose Iyrics she considers “vile” and “almost all immoral” reflect the moral ambiguity which soon leads to acquiescence in her seduction by Mohansingh, a married man. Sylvia’s decision to trick Leon into accepting Mohansingh’s baby as his own is not only an act of desperation and retribution but also an admission of moral weakness and the acceptance of a sense of debased self-worth.

Leon’s quest for glory illustrates an aspect of the importance of sport in preindependence Trinidad, a poor country where opportunities for respectable members of the working class to distinguish themselves were severely limited. Leon’s participation in cycling is predicated on an obsessive will to win and not on enjoyment of sport for its own sake. He is proud of his strong body and is willing to endure pain to turn it into an efficient instrument of his ambition, but the constant monitoring, massaging, and observation of his physique verges on the narcissistic; in his own way, he is every bit as preoccupied with the flesh as any Carnival reveler. Leon feels some shame for his treatment of Sylvia. Naively oblivious to the changes he has caused her to undergo, he believes her still to be “simple and good.... Perhaps more like a faithful dog than like a woman.” Although he looks forward to the ecstasy of making love to Sylvia, he feels that “the real ecstasy” will be in winning the race.

Contained within Leon’s wish to isolate himself from the undisciplined mob of vehicles which could wreck his bike and from the Carnival crowd which could sap him of his strength and weaken his resolve is not only a desire for calculated and ordered activity but also an element of disdain for the ordinary man. In the race he shows that he is no team player; his drive for preeminence is totally selfish in its aims. Paradoxically, in the elaborate ritual of proving his manhood and identity, he denies an important part of his own humanity and irreparably damages the life of the woman who once loved him.

Anthony has an unusual talent for providing even minor characters with a roundness and psychological depth which breathes life into them. Dolphus Seal, Leon’s younger brother, is a wholly believable little boy despite his obvious functions within the novel’s schematic design. Because the attentions of the adults are focused on Leon, Dolphus is left alone to weigh the modes of life represented by the different activities surrounding the Southern Games and Carnival. Sometimes Dolphus tends, like Leon, to see the events as discrete and mutually exclusive, but more often he synthesizes them naturally as one reminds him of the other. Anthony is best known for his skillful depiction of the minds of children and youths; it is through the filtering consciousness of Dolphus— as in the long and Iyrical passage where he tries to decide between being a cyclist or a steelband musician—that the most evocative details of both the games and Carnival are presented.

Leon’s father, Fitz Seal, is a reserved man in his early fifties who, his wife Melda informs the children, once was a drinking, dancing Carnival man. He has since reformed and settled into the responsible yet less exciting role of husband and father. His values of order and discipline have been passed on to Leon, for whom he serves as trainer and through whom he vicariously pursues some of the dreams of his youth.

May acts as a catalyst for Sylvia’s change in personality. She has two or three illegitimate children and has had several abortions. At first, Sylvia simply dismisses May as being beneath her socially and morally, but as her own life becomes complicated she turns to May for help and advice. May is not simply a “good-time” girl but also a victim to a common West Indian pattern of life and attitudes toward women. May resents Sylvia’s initial innocence and air of propriety. Despite some feelings of sympathy, May experiences a vindictive satisfaction when Sylvia is brought down to her level.

Critical Context

Michael Anthony was born of Afro-Caribbean ancestry in the remote Trinidadian village of Mayaro. He published poems in local newspapers before moving to England in 1954. Encouraged by the success of fellow West Indian writers Samuel Selvon and George Lamming, he began to produce more poems before being urged by V. S. Naipaul to concentrate on fiction. He had several short stories published or broadcast by the British Broadcasting Corporation and embarked on the novel The Year in San Fernando (1965), which was not published until after The Games Were Coming. He has published more than a dozen other books of fiction and popular history~ including the novel Green Days by the River (1967) and the collection of short stories Cricket in the Road (1973). In 1968, Anthony moved to Brazil before returning in 1970 to Trinidad, where he received his nation’s highest civilian award, the Order of the Humming Bird, for his achievement in literature.

The Games Were Coming is characterized by a limpid, unaffected prose style which is deceptive in its surface simplicity. By exploiting the full range of language—from dialect to standard English—available to the West Indian writer, Anthony is able to convey the world and thoughts of his dialect-speaking characters to the reader in a manner which feels natural and unmediated despite the sophisticated technique required to accomplish it. Because Anthony never treats the details of Trinidadian life as exotic, the novel is also impressive for its sensitive and authentic presentation of West Indian characters on their own terms.

Bibliography

Barratt, Harold. “Michael Anthony: A Critical Assessment,” in Bim. XVII, nos. 66 and 67 (1983), pp. 157-164.

Niven, Alastair. “’My Sympathies Enlarged’: The Novels of Michael Anthony,” in Commonwealth Essays and Studies. II (1976), pp. 45-62.

Ramchand, Kenneth. An Introduction to the Study of West Indian Literature, 1976.

Smyer, Richard I. “Enchantment and Violence in the Fiction of Michael Anthony,” in World Literature Written in English. XXI, no. 1 (1982), pp. 148-159.