Books review: The Old Slave And The Mastiff

Review by Alastair Mabbott

Born in Martinique in 1953, the Prix Goncourt-winning author Patrick Chamoiseau is a leading figure in the Créolité literary movement, and his short 1997 novel, now that it’s finally translated into English from French and Creole, is revealed as a thing of rare beauty and mythical grandeur.

The story is set, presumably, in Martinique, on a sugar plantation before the abolition of slavery. One of the slaves is a legend in his own lifetime: an old man, no one knows how old. Even he doesn’t seem to remember whether he was born on the island or was brought there by ship. Chamoiseau gives him no name, referring to him only as the old slave, but he’s greatly respected by the others, who seem to recognise that, in his inscrutable way, he somehow holds the community together. Even the Master felt moved to call him Papa once, though the name didn’t stick.

The old man has been a model slave all his live, never losing his composure, never once breaking out of his servile role. And he has always been immune to the sudden madness that comes over some slaves, when they are gripped by an irresistible urge to try to escape by running into the forest. Until, that is, one day, when, without warning, he races into the trees and disappears. The old slave runs like a young man, his legs fast and powerful, carrying him deeper and deeper into the interior. Towards what? Freedom? The word doesn’t even consciously form in his head. He’s driven purely by instinct.

The Master has a way of dealing with runaways. If slaves ignore his warnings that they’ll be swallowed up by monstrous fantastic creatures in the forest, and try to make a break for it, he sends his fearsome mastiff in after them. The beast is intractable, unstoppable and always gets its man. But this time something is different. The story of a man trying to outrun a dog becomes a battle between two elemental forces in a setting which is more than mere forest but an unknowable, primal force in its own right.

The old slave is indeed swallowed up. Not by fanciful creatures, but by the hallucinatory visions that crowd into his mind the deeper he goes. In passages that are like kaleidoscopic torrents of language, imagery and thought tumbling around each other, the narrative switches from third person to first person as the old slave finds himself and makes a connection with souls of the long-dead indigenous population of the island. There’s an amazing fluidity to these sections, as Chamoiseau appears to be rearranging the very building blocks of meaning before our eyes.

As its translator, Linda Coverdale, writes: “In this novel, language not only tells the story; it is the story, an enactment of the subversive action it describes.” The Old Man and the Mastiff goes beyond telling a story to embody a culture and a way of seeing. Chamoiseau is a gifted writer, one committed to the power of words as a force for transformation, and by cleaving as closely as possible to his vision, Coverdale’s translation is a heroic effort in itself.