The Ventriloquist's Tale
SynopsisPlot
Unforgettable characters illuminate the theme and plot: Sonny, the strange, beautiful, and isolated son of Beatrice and Danny, the brother and sister who have a passionate affair at the time of the solar eclipse in 1919; Father Napier, the sandy-haired evangelist whom the Indians perceive as a giant grasshopper; Chofy McKinnon the modern Indian, torn between savanna life and urban future. This is a novel that embraces nearly a century, large in scope but intimate as a whisper, where laughter is never far from the scene of tragedy; a parable of miscegenation and racial elusiveness, of nature, defying culture, magic confronting rationalism and of the eternally rebellious nature of love.
Story
About this book
The Ventriloquist's Tale by Pauline Melville is set in Guyana, South America, and follows two layered storylines separated by decades. In one strand, a British woman writer travels to Guyana and becomes involved with Chofy McKinnon, a man of Scottish and Indigenous descent who works as a cattle rancher on the savanna. Through their relationship, a buried family story surfaces: the affair between Chofy's ancestors, the siblings Beatrice and Danny, which took place around the time of a solar eclipse in 1919.
The novel moves between the interior savannas and forests of Guyana and its urban life, spanning close to a century. Among its cast is Father Napier, an evangelist whom the local Indigenous community sees as a giant grasshopper. Chofy himself is pulled between the world of the savanna and a possible urban future. The book operates as a story within a story, connecting past and present through a single extended family.
Melville, who has Guyanese roots, uses the structure to explore tensions between nature and culture, rationalism and local belief systems, and the complicated legacies of mixed ancestry in a post-colonial South American setting. The solar eclipse of 1919 anchors the historical timeline and marks a turning point in the family's history.
