I would have made more space for Paule Marshall's The Chosen Place, The Timeless People if the author herself had made less. This is a depth-study of a remote Caribbean village, 'chosen' by a benevolent American organisation for a rehabilitation scheme. The inhabitants of Bournehills are timeless in the fierce pride with which they hold to their customs and their history, but also because the time for their way of life is running out. Paule Marshall's great strength is characterisation, and she gives us dozens of telling portraits, catching the haggard unease of the Jewish social scientist with as much accuracy as the headlong chatter of the black hotel matron, the stiff pseudo-Englishness of the local grandees. Unfortunately these characters are so numerous, and their confrontations developed at such length, that the significance of their story is partly lost. This is an impressive fat book with a superb...