[.ca] The Polished Hoe (ISBN 0887621341)

Amazon.ca:
Austin Clarke, Toronto resident and Barbados native, maintains that he doesn't write for the limelight, but alas the honours have come in: the Rogers Communications Writers' Trust Fiction Prize for The Origin of Waves, a Governor General's Award nomination for The Question, the W.O. Mitchell Prize for his literary mentorship and his outstanding body of work, and finally Canada's largest and most esteemed annual award for fiction, the Giller Prize, for his novel The Polished Hoe. (Some hushed murmurs have blighted the last of these kudos, calling it a verdict skewed by political correctness rather than literary merit, as if a black man writing about slavery were a recipe for mainstream adulation.) Clarke's ornately polished Hoe unfolds in less than 24 hours, but it explores the fate of black people, past, present, and future, paced by the Great Time--the place where all those times meet--of African and Caribbean oratory tradition. Clarke plunks his muses down on the isle of Bimshire--Barbados in cloak--in the "Wessindies." It's an unsettling postcolonial landscape, soiled by the "sickening power of poverty"--among other routine brutalities, woman and mere girls can be and are dragged off and forcibly taken atop heaps of agricultural refuse. As Clarke's story begins, Mr. Bellfeels, the tyrannical "red-nigger" plantation overseer of Flagstaff Village, has been chopped down. After Bellfeels's concubine, the dignified Mary-Mathilda, hails up the law, resident barkeep Manny huffs, "Any one o' we have reason to kill that son-of-a-bitch." Having pined for Mary-Mathilda for close to 40 years, Percy, a church choir-chanting, lily-livered police sergeant who gets around on a three-speed bike, is called up to the Great House where Bellfeels has installed his mistress (and their Oxbridge-educated son who can pass as white) to take her statement on the crime. But Percy doesn't want to hear it, "the powers-that-be don't. The public don't. And the Village don't." Bloody facts aside, island justice sensibilities have decreed that Bellfeels's slaying was a public service. So while Percy intermittently nods off or quashes the "impetus to rape," Mary-Mathilda--a polished ho in her own right, well aware that the other villagers call her a "brown-skin bitch"--unloads a soliloquy on village history, specifically her existential alienation "ordered through the destinies of paternity" and "paid for by her body." The rest of us are left to measure this epic against other grand island overviews like Patrick Chamoiseau's Texaco. There's no doubt, this Hoe swings sure and true. --Sigcino Moyo

I wanted to love this book but I didn't:
I wanted so much to love this year's Giller Winner. Austin Clarke was the underdog against such big hitters as Wayne Johnston and Carol Shields but I found The Polished Hoe to be a long rambling tale with an unsatisfying climax. Mary Gertrude Mathilda Bellfeels, a plantation field worker who luckily or unluckily caught the favor of the plantation manager Mr. Bellfeels becomes his mistress and bears him his only son. As a reward she lives and raises her son (he grows up to become the village doctor) in the Great House and no longer has to work other than being little more than a \omistress\c to a man you come to truly hate. The novel covers one long night of Mary giving her statement to a Sargent who has loved her from afar since they were both only 10 years old. In the build up to her crime, what she did and why she did it, we get the story of her almost 60 years on the plantation through anecdotes of the horrors of black life in the village of Bimshire in the West Indies where blacks are still treated like slaves even if they work for a wage. The problem for me was that this book rambled over the same territory continually and although some of the history was compelling this novel lacked a continuity or a narrative that kept you wanting to read on. The carrot is that you know she's probably killed someone with that hoe she used to use in the north field but you don't find out who and why until the last 10 pages of the book and by then I just wanted to be done. This is a good book for a sense of place, time and culture but don't look for a great love story or a novel of suspense in The Polished Hoe.

repetitive and wordy:
this is the first of this author's books i have read, impulsively ordering it after hearing of his award. I am less than 1/3 of the way through and doubt will finish, having scanned through to the end, little changes. honest, well written characters do not make up for the repetitiveness and general boredom of this book.

Painful:
I agree with all of the other reviewers. This book was painfully slow! Generally, I like character driven books, but I did not care about these characters. I kept hoping for a big ending, but nothing ever really seemed to happen. My book club read this book and it received 3/10, our lowest rated book to date (after 2 years)!

This book is terrible!:
Man this book was awful! I took it out of the library b/c it had won the Govenor General's Award, so I figured it had to be good. Boy was I ever wrong! This book is dull. It is s-l-o-w moving from start to finish and it is written in this slang type speech (which I suppose was common for the age but) which makes it very difficult to read. So put all of these issues in a blender and you have one horrible book/story. Avoid this book like the plague.

The Polised Hoe:
I read this book for our bookclub and out of 21 women none of us liked it. We all thought the ending was so unbelievable. We couldn't see where the book had wanted to take us. I wouldn't recommend this book to anyone.