The Violins of Saint-Jacques: A Tale of the Antilles. Patrick Leigh Fermor. 1953.
I didn’t like this book very much. It wasn’t for me. Maybe it will be for you? I can’t really tell you that, but I do think talking about why I didn’t like it would be useful, for me anyway.
Patrick Leigh Fermor primarily wrote travel books; this is his only novel. And though the island at the center of the novel is fictional, this is still more travel book than novel. Fermor obviously cared a lot about setting the tone of a place - in conveying not only what a place looks like but what it feels like to be there. He was good at it, though there’s something remote about his tone and perspective. Once you read the book you probably won’t need to be told that he was a son of the English upper classes, one who was educated when the British empire was still powerful. He seemed to come to foreign shores with a sense of inherent superiority: a king surveying his kingdom. The world is there not for itself, but for him (and his readers) to see and enjoy - and exploit. I don’t know if Edward Said ever wrote about Fermor - I can’t find that he did. But I thought of Said when I read this; there’s ample room for post-colonial analysis.
Which is fine - Said used the framework he developed in Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism to critique some of my favorite novels, and I don’t love them any less for what he found in them. I think Mansfield Park is richer, more interesting for the holes Said poked in it. The trouble with The Violins of Saint-Jacques is that once you poke the holes, there doesn’t seem to be much left behind. The plot is flat, the characters are thin. There’s nothing there but an apologia for the dying empire, and if you don’t agree that the death of the empire is a tragedy, that apologia comes off as absurdly comical. I kept waiting for something to actually happen, apart from the loving descriptions of rich people being waited on by people of color in a tropical paradise.
Of course, something did happen: a volcano erupts and plunges the whole island into the ocean. Which, honestly, is what all of the Europeans on the island deserved, but you can’t shake the impression that Fermor wrote that by accident. It’s a profoundly racist novel; the Black and native characters are both fetishized and overlooked, as voiceless as the local flora and fauna, merely there to provide literal color to the landscape. The aside that most of the servant class were of mixed race, fathered by local European landowners, is treated as a kind of titillating bit of information that amounts to nothing. Fermor wasn’t even capable of the kind of (often unintentional) racial enlightenment of writers like Melville or Faulkner or Chopin, or even in his more lucid moments Thomas Jefferson; they at least understood that the racial hierarchy was unsustainable, was built on something everyone knew was a fraud, and would have to be paid for one way or another, sooner or later. Fermor wrote a novel about colonizers being punished for their crimes, but he seemed to think something beautiful was lost. It wasn’t.
I find this book most interesting as a time capsule, written after World War II when the most perceptive could see that the British empire was finished for good - it’s really about the death of the empire. It was the end of a world where the English could travel happily anywhere and believe themselves surrounded by nothing but lovely landscape and accommodating natives. It was the end of a world where Fermor could write the kind of books he wrote without the natives writing back, or at least, it was the end of the world where he could pretend they couldn’t. If there’s a critic besides Said whose take on this I’d love to see, it’s probably C.L.R. James. I think he’d recognize what Fermor was writing more than Fermor himself could.