The Wine of Astonishment by Earl Lovelace

First published: 1982

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Social realism

Time of work: 1940’s-1950’s

Locale: Bonasse, Trinidad

Principal Characters:

• Eva, the narrator, the wife of the leader of the Spiritual Baptist Church in Bonasse
• Bee, Eva’s husband of twenty-three years
• Bolo, the warrior turned “badjohn,” the champion stick fighter of the area
• Ivan Morton, the village scholar and hope of the village
• Prince, the policeman who is relentless in his pursuit and suppression of the Baptist religion in Bonasse

The Novel

The Wine of Astonishment is the story of the struggle of a Spiritual Baptist community, from the passing of the Prohibition Ordinance in 1917 until the lifting of the ban in 1951. It is told by one of the members of the church. Eva begins her narrative of the trials and sufferings of those of the Spiritual Baptist faith with the notion that there is a purpose behind it all.

The only hope for the villagers of Bonasse, as they see it, lies in Ivan Morton, a teacher turned politician, the new man in the legislative council of the country. They would like Morton to intervene on their behalf to lift the ban so that they can be free to worship in the way that they choose. Morton disappoints them and reveals his loyalty when he abandons the “house that his father build with his own two hands.” With his wife, he leaves the village, taking nothing, to live in the big house “on top of Bonasse hill looking over the sea and the whole village.” The house, which some say is haunted, has itself been abandoned by the Richardsons, colonials who have returned to England.

Meanwhile, the village undergoes significant changes with the coming of the war. An American base is established in the country, resulting in prostitution and the corruption of the youth. At the same time, the Spiritual Baptists suffer persecution at the hands of the police and government. At the center of this harassment is the cruel and relentless Corporal Prince, whom Bolo, the warrior and champion stick fighter, suggests should be killed. Bolo challenges Prince as Prince takes the worshipers to jail, but he is beaten and arrested by the police while the others look on passively. For his action, Bolo is sent to jail for three years of hard labor.

While the warrior Bolo is in jail, the people of Bonasse, believing this to be the time of the intellectual, work to elect Morton to the legislative council, seeing him as “a man to plead [their] cause, to change the law, to right the wrong that is going on against [them] for those long years.” Bolo returns from jail only to find his efforts at making an honest living frustrated by the bureaucracy.

Contemptuous of the community, Bolo challenges the stickmen to do battle with him, but no one obliges. From this point on, the warrior in Bolo degenerates into the “badjohn.” He terrorizes the Bonasse community “with his recklessness and vexation and wickedness boiling up in him.” The community’s outrage reaches a limit when Bolo takes the two daughters of one of the villagers to live with him. Determined to show him “we is a people,” Bee, the leader of the Spiritual Baptists, decides that they “have to go against him with strength and anger.” They must take up their “manhood challenge that [they] turn away from for too long.” Bolo is finally killed by the police in a showdown.

Shortly thereafter, with the approach of elections, a law is passed allowing the Baptists the freedom to worship in their own way. When the church congregation gathers to celebrate its freedom, however, the “Spirit just wouldn’t come,” in spite of the impassioned preaching, incense burning, and candle lighting. The sadness that Eva, Bee, and the others experience at this realization is assuaged by the music of the steel pans that they hear on their way home. They are convinced that the pan music has in it “the same spirit that we miss in our church.”

The Characters

Since all the characters in the novel are presented through the eyes of Eva, it is important that she is presented as a credible character. A member of the Baptist church herself and an ordinary peasant woman, she is capable of insightful thinking and profound analysis of her society. Lovelace’s effective use of dialect in Eva’s mouth makes her that much more reliable in her judgment of people and events.

Bolo, the warrior turned “badjohn,” represents rebelliousness within the society. As warrior, he is both admired and feared. He is the only one to stand up to the police and proclaim the rights of the people, but when the people refuse to support him and fail to stand up for their rights, he turns to terrorizing them, forcing them to find their “peoplehood.”

Bee represents the voice of moderation and patience. Unwilling to challenge the authorities directly, he seeks to use the political and legal machinery to change things. His slow approach results in a falling off of the church’s membership and the loss of the Spirit in the church. Bolo tries to show Bee the inadequacy of this approach. In time, Bee echoes Bolo’s sentiments: “We . . . shoulda never stop worshipping in the true Baptist way” and “we shoulda fight them, we shoulda kill Prince.” Eva, with her commonsense approach to survival, reminds him of the wisdom of his decision.

Ivan Morton’s character is used to discuss a phenomenon within Caribbean society, that of the self-seeking politician who takes the people for fools, bribing them at election time but doing nothing for them for the rest of his term. Morton is the typical neocolonial puppet who seeks to take over from the colonial overlord while perpetuating all the bad habits of his predecessor.

Armed with his colonial education, Morton thinks of himself as the natural leader of the people, but when he is elected, he abandons his village, rejects the dark-skinned Eulalie whom he had made pregnant, and goes to live in a colonial mansion overlooking the village. From this vantage point, it is easy for Morton to betray the interests of the community.

The lack of third-person narration in the novel places limitations on the depth of characterization, since it is from Eva’s restricted knowledge that the characters are presented. Moreover, characters are presented as types or symbols; they are one-dimensional. Each one represents a specific type or mode of social behavior. No one changes except Bolo, who moves from being a warrior to being a “badjohn” with respect for no one.

Critical Context

Fourth among his published novels, The Wine of Astonishment shares with Lovelace’s other works his continuing concern for the black oppressed people of the Caribbean. Lovelace is not afraid to confront the social issues of the day. The prevalence of political corruption, the destructiveness of misguided warriorship, the Western and class bias against African culture (in this case a religion), and betrayal by black middle-class intellectuals are issues that plague the postcolonial societies of the region.

Lovelace, unlike other writers who address the problems of the society, is not altogether hopeless in his prognostication. The ills of the society and the corruptibility of individuals and institutions are balanced by the ability of the people to adapt and survive, constantly creating new cultural forms to ensure their dignity and personhood. The “spirit” may leave the church, but the steel band is created to inherit that spirit.

Another achievement of Lovelace’s The Wine of Astonishment is his ability to deliver his narrative through Eva, herself a Spiritual Baptist. He captures both the language and the sentiments of the Baptist community with a sensibility that suggests a deep understanding of that religion. That he can sustain both for an entire novel is truly a mark of great skill as a writer. In the introduction to the 1986 edition of his text, critic Marjorie Thorpe notes that this linguistic skill “from the outset, encourages the reader to believe that he is in fact listening to the artless, unstructured narrative of a simple peasant woman.”

Just as he had infused the rhythm of the steel band and calypso into the language of the ordinary folk in The Dragon Can’t Dance, Lovelace infuses the rhythm of the Trinidad dialect and the Baptist sermon into the language of Eva in The Wine of Astonishment. At times, this language reflects the spirit possession characteristic of the Baptist church. As he had done in his previous novel, he eschews grammatical convention and chooses to focus on capturing the rhythm of the Baptist religious service in his writing.

Bibliography

Booker, M. Keith, and Dubravka Juraga. The Caribbean Novel in English: An Introduction. Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 2001. Overview and analysis of The Wine of Astonishment, as well as seventeen other significant texts in the history of the anglophone Caribbean novel.

Cudjoe, Selwyn. “A Critical Analysis of the Works of Earl Lovelace.” Trinidad and Tobago Review 6, no. 10 (1982): 14-15. Contends that the thrust of the novel is to counterpose the badjohn/warrior tradition to the intellectual/scholarly tradition. Criticizes Lovelace for not making a more comprehensive analysis of the social forces that cause the breakdown of the society. Faults the text for not adopting a socialist perspective on the problems of the society.

Green, Jenny. “Lovelace’s Wine of Astonishment.” Trinidad and Tobago Review 6, no. 4 (1982). Points out that Lovelace deals with the significance of history and roots as well as the implications of social reliance on the intellectual. Lovelace is able to capture the voice of the people in his use of the language. Green sees the characters as symbols of forces at work in Trinidadian society.

Lowhar, Syl. “Ideology in The Wine of Astonishment: Two Views.” Trinidad and Tobago Review 10, nos. 11-12 (1988): 41-43. Taking a historical approach to the novel, Lowhar sees the major events of the novel as having their parallels in the actual history of the society and explores the implications of these events.

Thorpe, Marjorie. “In Search of the West Indian Hero: A Study of Earl Lovelace’s Fiction.” In Critical Issues in West Indian Literature: Selected Papers from West Indian Literature Conferences, 1981-1983, edited by Erika Sollish Smilowitz and Roberta Quarles Knowles. Parkersburg, Iowa: Caribbean Books, 1984. Argues that the “search for a hero-figure establishes the basis of Earl Lovelace’s four published novels.” Insists that Lovelace makes the distinction between false heroes, whom the society esteems, and true hero-figures, whom the novelist celebrates.

Thorpe, Marjorie. Introduction to The Wine of Astonishment, by Earl Lovelace. London: Heinemann, 1986. Notes the literary advantages of choosing Eva as a narrator of his novel. Argues that Lovelace focuses on the theme of betrayal. The Wine of Astonishment celebrates a people’s struggle for freedom and dignity as human beings. It speaks to “the oppressed everywhere.”