There is a large, even painful, degree of consciousness about Trinidad’s social and colour divides, and about how a rich white kid fits into this complicated society. In fact, one might say he is intensely embarrassed (as only an 11-year-old boy can be) by his social status, and much else. His is a privileged background, and he is all too aware of it. It deals with Alan, the son of well-to-do white Trinidadians, who is growing up some time in the 1950s. To equate the first-person fictional voice with an autobiographical memoir would lead us all into a great deal of trouble should we accuse Albert Camus of not loving his mother because he wrote L’Etranger? And what to make of authors like Joseph Conrad or Salman Rushdie, who deal with questions of enormous moral ambiguity through the “I” form?īut the charge of depicting the Indian-descended people of Trinidad as “crude and contemptible” is a serious one, and it is worth looking at what McDonald is trying to do in this much-acclaimed novel, recently republished by Macmillan Caribbean. Nor does it mean that the ideas expressed by the narrator are in any way those of the author. This might lead us to suppose that the book is, in part at least, autobiographical in inspiration, but it hardly means it is an autobiography. The main protagonist and narrator, like McDonald once was, is a boy of 11, white, and born in Trinidad.

First published in 1969, it is written in the first person - which may explain the confusion - but is nonetheless unmistakably a novel. So I was surprised to read on a website from Guyana a rather bitter attack against the author Ian McDonald, who was accused of pandering to racist and anti-Indian prejudice in his novel The Humming-Bird Tree. Perhaps there is only a thin line between reality and the world of the imagination, but it’s one we mostly manage to negotiate.

Some readers apparently write abusive letters to authors, more or less accusing them of murdering or otherwise abusing their characters. I’ve heard there are TV viewers who religiously follow developments in soap operas as if watching the day-to-day business of real people, rather than actors. Or, if you prefer, between what real people say and do, and the actions and words of invented characters. There are some people, we are led to believe, who simply can’t distinguish between fact and fiction.

The humming bird tree by ian mcdonald