The Pink House at Appleton
The subject of the title is the home of the estate manager of a sugar plantation in Jamaica. Harold Brookes, a native Jamaican, is a proud and ambitious man and is determined that his worth be acknowledged, which it soon is. Together with his wife Victoria and children Barrington, Boyd and Yvonne, he moves into the house and their future seems assured. But the arrival of Ann Mitchison, wife of the newly appointed assistant manager, makes him question and betray his own values.
In 1957, when the book is set, Jamaica, and the world, are changing and the book touches on these changes without allowing them to deflect from the story; most noticeable is the attitude of the better-off Jamaicans towards their poorer countrymen – Harold Brookes does not want his children to grow up like ‘those people’.
Meanwhile, nine-year-old Boyd, fuelled by his books of art and, most importantly, Great Expectations, fantasises about the women who surround him; eight-year-old Susan Mitchison has similar feelings, her world surrounds Shakespeare’s As You Like It. She becomes the main object of Boyd’s fantasies, yet somehow they never seem to get into a position where they can make their feelings known to each other until just before the end of the story.
Jonathan Braham has written a book which is beautifully descriptive and characters that you can see clearly in your imagination. The complex character of Boyd is the main protagonist but the opinionated Harold Brookes is a very strong creation indeed.
The book is divided into three parts and covers around twelve months in all; the first part, in all honesty, is quite slow, building up the characters, but the pace picks up through parts two and three and the ending is as fast as it is, in its way, brutal.
The beauty of the writing carried me through the slow parts and the ending did leave me thinking that it was all worthwhile.
