Pictures of a Dying Man

Employing a richly varied chorus of voices and excerpts from diaries and journals, Barbados native Kamau explores the enigmatic character of Gladstone Belle, former minister of tourism and culture of a small Caribbean country, in this followup to Flickering Shadows, Kamau's acclaimed debut. After Belle's body is discovered hanging in his bedroom, friends, relatives and acquaintances recount their interactions with the fallen bureaucrat, and a nuanced picture gradually emerges of a man who was at once a flamboyant, charismatic politician and a retiring private figure. As in his first novel, Kamau has assembled an impressive supporting cast: Isamina, Belle's unfaithful wife; Sonny-Boy and Esther, his colorful parents; Pee Wee, a heartless thug; and Carl, the clueless husband of Debra, one of Belle's former lovers. Each one presents a different and conflicting vision of Belle. Meanwhile, Sonny-Boy, Belle's wise, insightful and incorruptible father, is shown to be a character nearly as complex as his son. Feeling like an outsider in his native land, Sonny-Boy left for America, where he lives in Florida and works as a janitor, returning to bury the son he never knew, and participating in a communal grieving process that brings every rumor and deceit into the open. While Isamina recalls her husband's excessive brooding and drinking in the weeks before his death, she wonders whether the cause for his fall was political, romantic or spiritual. Did he really have a man killed to cover up an act of agency fraud? Did he know about her affair? As the evidence piles up, Kamau imparts wisdom on issues of race, class, political corruption and reform, and moral decay in this multilayered puzzler about a man whom nobody really knew. (Sept.)