The Caribbean island of Tobago is the setting for Oonya Kempadoo's second novel, Tide Running. The story's narrators are handsome, brooding Cliff, a reserved 20-year-old living in Plymouth, one of the roughest towns on the island, and Bella, a mixed-race woman who comes to live on Tobago with her English husband and young son.

While Cliff and his brother Ossie live in unemployed boredom and poverty with their mother, sister and baby niece (fathers and responsible adult males do not figure here), Bella and Peter--a high-flying corporate lawyer--live in a David Hockney-inspired architect-designed home fit for a film star. Surprisingly, an unlikely friendship develops. Although innocent at first, with the brothers happy to hang out at the house watching videos, or on day trips to the island¹s beaches, something darker, and unsettling, begins to surface. Street-wise, cheeky Ossie takes a back seat as his quieter brother slowly lowers his guard. Before long, Bella finds herself drawn to Cliff's striking beauty, and a sexual tension, charged with excitement and danger, hangs in the steamy Tobagan air. Unwittingly, though, it seems that Bella has unleashed a dangerous undercurrent and can only watch, helpless, as the backwash gathers speed and events spiral towards the inevitable.

Kempadoo has not only switched continents for Tide Running--her highly acclaimed debut Buxton Spice was set in Guyana--she has also changed tone, from the flowing exuberance of childhood sexual awakenings to an altogether more serious, troublesome tale of trust and responsibilities. If you can cut through the challenging Tobagan patois­-this is not a book to be rushed--Tide Running is an illuminating, if disturbing tale of modern-day Caribbean life and the repercussions of Western culture. --Carey Green

Unmoving and pedestrian, 04 Sep 2006
Kempadoo's `TR' is the story of a European couple (Bella and Peter) who settle near the town of Plymouth, on the Western end of Tobago. Bella and Peter are free-spirited liberals, but Plymouth is a town with a reputation for drugs and crime, even among Tobagans. They befriend a pair of local brothers, Cliff and Ossi, and gradually draw Cliff into their Bohemian lifestyle, even to the extent in involving him in ménage a trois. Friends warn them not to get involved with the locals, but they ignore them. Eventually however, they begin to suspect Cliff's motives for his friendship and their trust in him starts to slip.
`TR' was one of those books that completely failed to interest or move me at all. The characters were not developed well enough for me to care about their fates in the slightest, and the development of the plot (such as it was) was so pedestrian that I hardly notice when the book had finished. It was supposed to be about a weighty culture clash between the Tobagan youths and liberal Europeans, but it just seemed to be about a couple having a little domestic difficulty with their alternative lifestyles. Maybe I wasn't shocked enough at the book's concept, or maybe it was all a bit alien to me, but `TR' is a book that I won't be recommending to anyone I know.

The Caribbean island of Tobago is the setting for Oonya Kempadoo's second novel, Tide Running. The story's narrators are handsome, brooding Cliff, a reserved 20-year-old living in Plymouth, one of the roughest towns on the island, and Bella, a mixed-race woman who comes to live on Tobago with her English husband and young son.

While Cliff and his brother Ossie live in unemployed boredom and poverty with their mother, sister and baby niece (fathers and responsible adult males do not figure here), Bella and Peter--a high-flying corporate lawyer--live in a David Hockney-inspired architect-designed home fit for a film star. Surprisingly, an unlikely friendship develops. Although innocent at first, with the brothers happy to hang out at the house watching videos, or on day trips to the island¹s beaches, something darker, and unsettling, begins to surface. Street-wise, cheeky Ossie takes a back seat as his quieter brother slowly lowers his guard. Before long, Bella finds herself drawn to Cliff's striking beauty, and a sexual tension, charged with excitement and danger, hangs in the steamy Tobagan air. Unwittingly, though, it seems that Bella has unleashed a dangerous undercurrent and can only watch, helpless, as the backwash gathers speed and events spiral towards the inevitable.

Kempadoo has not only switched continents for Tide Running--her highly acclaimed debut Buxton Spice was set in Guyana--she has also changed tone, from the flowing exuberance of childhood sexual awakenings to an altogether more serious, troublesome tale of trust and responsibilities. If you can cut through the challenging Tobagan patois­-this is not a book to be rushed--Tide Running is an illuminating, if disturbing tale of modern-day Caribbean life and the repercussions of Western culture. --Carey Green

Unmoving and pedestrian, 04 Sep 2006
Kempadoo's `TR' is the story of a European couple (Bella and Peter) who settle near the town of Plymouth, on the Western end of Tobago. Bella and Peter are free-spirited liberals, but Plymouth is a town with a reputation for drugs and crime, even among Tobagans. They befriend a pair of local brothers, Cliff and Ossi, and gradually draw Cliff into their Bohemian lifestyle, even to the extent in involving him in ménage a trois. Friends warn them not to get involved with the locals, but they ignore them. Eventually however, they begin to suspect Cliff's motives for his friendship and their trust in him starts to slip.
`TR' was one of those books that completely failed to interest or move me at all. The characters were not developed well enough for me to care about their fates in the slightest, and the development of the plot (such as it was) was so pedestrian that I hardly notice when the book had finished. It was supposed to be about a weighty culture clash between the Tobagan youths and liberal Europeans, but it just seemed to be about a couple having a little domestic difficulty with their alternative lifestyles. Maybe I wasn't shocked enough at the book's concept, or maybe it was all a bit alien to me, but `TR' is a book that I won't be recommending to anyone I know.


Unmoving and pedestrian, 04 Sep 2006
Kempadoo's `TR' is the story of a European couple (Bella and Peter) who settle near the town of Plymouth, on the Western end of Tobago. Bella and Peter are free-spirited liberals, but Plymouth is a town with a reputation for drugs and crime, even among Tobagans. They befriend a pair of local brothers, Cliff and Ossi, and gradually draw Cliff into their Bohemian lifestyle, even to the extent in involving him in ménage a trois. Friends warn them not to get involved with the locals, but they ignore them. Eventually however, they begin to suspect Cliff's motives for his friendship and their trust in him starts to slip.
`TR' was one of those books that completely failed to interest or move me at all. The characters were not developed well enough for me to care about their fates in the slightest, and the development of the plot (such as it was) was so pedestrian that I hardly notice when the book had finished. It was supposed to be about a weighty culture clash between the Tobagan youths and liberal Europeans, but it just seemed to be about a couple having a little domestic difficulty with their alternative lifestyles. Maybe I wasn't shocked enough at the book's concept, or maybe it was all a bit alien to me, but `TR' is a book that I won't be recommending to anyone I know.