Leaves in a River

What brings Charlo Pardie, a peasant farmer on the edge of old age, to leave his wife, family and land and take himself to the house of Ismene L'Aube, known to all as a prostitute? And what, three years later, takes him home again? Earl Long writes with great empathy but no sentiment about two people who are desperate for fulfilment and choice, but who, at crucial moments in their lives, give way to their impulses or to the imperatives of the moment and pay for their decisions with an inevitability that Thomas Hardy would have seen as a truth of life. In portraying the intertwining of their lives from the point where Charlo, out respect to her late father, takes the teenage Ismene into his home as an adopted daughter, Earl Long creates a powerful narrative of a forbidden attraction that neither is able to resist, made tragic by their chastened sense of responsibility for their actions.Set in a small Caribbean island (with strong resemblances to St Lucia), where human life is always subject to the hostilities of nature, Earl Long draws a vivid and inward portrait of a rural community with all its tensions between a desire for pleasure and a fearful sense of an all seeing and judgmental God. By contrast, the novel deals with the effects of mental illness, infidelity, abortion, greed, murder, love and friendship on family ties with compassionate understanding.