SOURCE: “Myth as Affirmation,” in El Dorado and Paradise: Canada and the Caribbean in Austin Clarke's Fiction, University of Western Ontario Press, 1989, pp. 186–91.

In the following essay, Brown delineates Clarke's transformation of New World myths, and claims that Clarke's work is part of the New World literary tradition.

As satire, Clarke's fiction is a sustained attack on moral and social failures in both Canada and the Caribbean. But his satiric contempt for individual and collective corruption does not wholly define his work. It coexists with an affirmative idealism which is reflected in the typical ebullience of his style and characterization, and which counters the social malaise of the everyday world with an insistence on the creative possibilities of life itself. Life is energy, the kind of energy that he so often discovers and affirms in language and personality. It is an irrepressible vitality that always seems to endure...