Cascade

Inaugural Fiction Award, UWI Press, 2010

Foreword, Book of the Year Finalist, 2011

A guesthouse in Jamaica’s mountains offers the ideal retreat for elderly friends weary of changes that have transformed their city, and a plan takes shape to retire together in the country house overlooking the sea. Terrorized by gunmen in their Kingston home, however, Ellie and Dan relocate to Trinidad instead, splintering off from the group to join their daughter’s family, yet keeping in close contact with Dan’s sister, whose stepson will run the home. Against the development of Cascade, under its dangerously inept manager, unfolds a tale of violent intrusion and dislocation, of cold-blooded exploitation and murderous resentment.

Yet it is also a tale of love and courage persisting through physical and mental deterioration as a brilliant and compassionate woman struggles with a disease that can wreck the relationships she treasures most. Damaged by Alzheimer’s and irrepressible by nature, Ellie proves thoroughly disruptive even within her own supportive circle. Beyond it, relocated to Cascade, she becomes a witness haunted by fragments of excruciating memory. As time
overtakes the main characters, tricks of the mind intersect with actual events and with the increasingly menacing forces that close in on the fragile Ellie.

Cascade recounts the gathering trauma of psychological dismemberment and poignant efforts to connect against a background of social turmoil. The novel engages with the challenges of Alzheimer’s disease in a Caribbean context, where displacement, memory, identity loss and resistance remain crucial and enduring preoccupations.

Cascade is an accomplished work of fiction by a writer of obvious talent. It examines the subject of growing old with sensitive honesty, through the stories of three main characters. Ellie succumbs to Alzheimer’s disease, her husband Dan suffers slow physical debilitation even as his mental faculties remain sharp, and Dan’s sister’s Rosemarie, though still sound in body and mind, finds her freedom impaired by the selfishness and cruelty of younger relatives.
“The author skilfully delineates the separate characters through the nuances of their speech and memories, and draws a poignant portrait of educated middle-class Jamaicans from independence to the present. . . . Few if any works of Caribbean literature have described so thoroughly and so movingly the tragedies, great and small, of aging.” – Nicholas Laughlin, Editor, Caribbean Review of Books.

Barbara Lalla is Professor of Language and Literature, Department of Liberal Arts, University of the West Indies, Trinidad and Tobago. Her publications include Postcolonialisms: Caribbean Re-reading of Medieval English Discourse; Defining Jamaican Fiction: Marronage and the Discourse of Survival; Language in Exile: Three Hundred Years of Jamaican Creole and Voices in Exile: Jamaican Texts of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (companion volumes both co-authored/co-edited with Jean D’Costa); and articles on Caribbean literature, discourse and language history. Texts on writing at the tertiary level include English for Academic Purposes and Writing about Literature, co-authored with Paul Morgan. She has also co-edited two volumes with Jennifer Rahim, Beyond Borders: Cross-Culturalism and the Caribbean Canon and Created in the West Indies: Caribbean Perspectives on V.S. Naipaul. Her first novel, a Jamaican family saga, Arch of Fire, appeared in 1998 and has since been translated into German.