SOURCE: “Adam and Eve,” in El Dorado and Paradise: Canada and the Caribbean in Austin Clarke's Fiction, University of Western Ontario Press, 1989, pp. 131–51.

In the following essay, Brown discusses the roles of Clarke's men and women in his fiction.

There is a certain familiarity about the image of May Thorne at the conclusion of Proud Empires—a matronly Eve in the middle of a decayed plantation Eden. The image actually confirms John Moore's speculations, in The Prime Minister, about the basis of political power in the Caribbean. Women, Moore muses, know that they exercise ultimate power through their sexuality: “Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste brought death into the world … Power? Or the corruption of power?” (p.120). The question combines Miltonic loftiness with popular double entendre. Adam and Eve are seduced to taste the forbidden fruit of knowledge, because in their pride they crave the power that...