It is a rare thing to find a novel that takes neither a definitively post-colonial, nor a revisionist, approach to Afro-Caribbean history. Nii Ayikwei Parkes’ languid odyssey from Ghana to a fecund and magnificently ripe fictional Caribbean island is an astonishing achievement, embodying, instead, the history of slavery, of exploitation and of the development of thriving indigenous cultures within its efflorescent descriptions, as though a sense of historical determinism was secondary to the teeming joy, and sometimes sadness, of the present. Had Parkes’ narrative not compassed West Africa and Florida within its provenance and economic reach, Fumaz would remain an Illyrian microcosm, a chimera of colour and energy whose story is set only three decades ago and is blind, or at least robustly resistant, to the inveigling pressures of former iniquities, because they are absorbed into its fabric. The narrator builds a picture of dynamism in constant flux, an ever-youthful island nation riding – in song, dance and an admirable capacity for comestible self-sufficiency - its past more or less free from self-lacerating introspection, as is befitting of its hybridity, and its open-hearted willingness to accept the ètranger.

Oswald Kole Osabutey Jnr. is an immigrant to Fumaz, an ètranger from Ghana whose hope and ambition exceed the limitations of his pocket. Arriving in this recognisable facsimile of Cuba, it is significant that Oswald is soon renamed Yunior, a process of assimilation that prepares the reader for the latter’s grateful embracing of his new home’s social mores, as it also bespeaks a national attitude of welcoming inclusivity. A cultural bricolage of Hispanic, South American and native African ethnicities, Fumaz is, on the surface, as disparately functional as the refulgent range of fruit and vegetables that thrive under its omnipresent sun.

Which is not to suggest that the island is slipping the knot of its colonial history. The shadows of the plantation obtain into the present, in a concessionary fashion: if slavery is now replaced by rice businesses with one eye on the maintenance of global market share – the soil sweetened by generations of sugar cane production have given rise to the legendary, and illusory, phenomenon of Soñada Sun rice – then the heightened corporatism of the US exercises a kind of insidious control over the island’s economic direction, even against a backdrop of Communist control. The brutal excesses of the right wing tyrannies of the earlier decades of the twentieth century were overthrown in the Fifties by the bearded and charismatic figure of Guererro Rosario, a thinly-veiled imprint of Fidel Castro, and one dictatorship has been replaced by another – albeit enlightened, and committed to the provision of health care and education for the island’s citizenry.

Parkes tries to resolve a complexity of motive and purpose, an ambiguous dialogue between the past and the present, in a fluid negotiation of identity: the by no means perfect state of Fumaz finds in its figurehead a paradox of pragmatic control, a shifting of the goalposts to suit a national agenda. The elderly leader whose fulsome hair and beard resemble the topography of the island over which he disports, is obliged to concede intellectual defeat when his theories are compromised in the vagaries of practice. A group of students climbing the walls of an engineering college to fix a clock, without government authorisation, induce mental inertia in Rosario, who “cannot decide whether to condemn as nonconformist or praise as pioneering”, the student action. Naming it as an act of ‘peopleism’, Rosario concludes his customary weekend speech in a torpor of righteous vacuity that somehow makes amenable sense.

‘Peopleism’ is the catch-all word for forward-thinking, socially conscious consensus, and it carries a wider meaning in the context of a nation whose glass is never less than half full. For all its questionable practices and unexpected points of compromise, Parkes’ reading of Fumaz is wholesome and generally hopeful. Not least for Yunior, whose powerful sense of ambition is fed and watered by opportunities denied him in the poverty of West Africa. Arriving as a young boy, Yunior quickly climbs the ladder to agricultural enlightenment with a university level education. Picked out by the Fumaz ministry for the extreme acuity of his diagnostic skills, Yunior devises a scientific approach to crop management, in order to replace the overworked land’s monocultural reliance on sugar – Azúcar is sugar in Spanish – and to blight the threat of drug-growing cartels with new strains of pest.

The second thread in Yunior’s impressive tapestry is his instinctive ability to play salsa guitar comme un native, and soon he is performing in night clubs with a band. The easeful blending of artistic and scientific aptitudes, of Art and endurance, and of music and the landscape, is a satisfying characteristic of Parkes’ tone throughout Azúcar. Refracting the colour and form of existence as though in one light, as though food and music and alcohol and sun might be moulded into a unitary approximation to identity, his story is both narcotic and hugely persuasive, an extrapolation of meaning from synaesthesia and emotion. Parkes’ writing is beautiful, his paragraphs - both titanic and measured - amplify sensory perception in the accumulation and reinforcement of subordinate clauses that are as satisfying to the receptors as Proust’s:

“In the swelling darkness, he let his hands play over the full range of keys and experimented with the bass pedals at his feet. From the seeds of his experiments, reeds and leafy shoots of music rose in the shadows, enveloping Yunior in their juxtapositions. The echoes of the walls became the murmurings of a forest – the rustle of rodents in undergrowth, the lingering fragrance of fallen flowers, the cries of crickets and cicadas. He was lost in a new world of sound.”

Parkes’ natural lyricism is a seductive reflection of Yunior’s increasing subsumation in the culture of his adoptive home; he is, as the grand-patriarchal figure of Diego Soñada Santos notes of the wider hinterland of island experience, a “sign that disparate things can belong in one place.” And the same could be said of the character of Loretta, who tries to ensure the smooth running of the state’s machinery in the manner of a Cuban secret police lackey, yet whose natural inclination, though ideologically committed, is life-affirming and conciliatory. One more personification of a structure that is cognitively dissonant, and whose political and economic mandate are gently caricatured at every turn by the Fumazero capacity for joie-de-vivre, Loretta is one of the many paradoxes that give Parkes’ fine novel its impetus. For the people of Fumaz are gloriously inconsistent, as seems entirely reasonable for aspirant citizens who have been liberated by education but are exposed to the blandishments of US opulence just over the water on the ‘Sun Coast’:

“’It’s not very peopleist, but I want a swimming pool. Like this one.’ She stood, shedding a monogrammed hotel towel and dived into clear blue water.’”

If Loretta’s instinctive detachment is enforced by an ideological commitment to her role, then her sense of emotional purpose is restored to the ascendant as she falls in love with Yunior, and becomes a kind of émigré to her career, another form of ètranger. Her premature death from a pancreatic cancer that she has been concealing is heartbreakingly drawn by Parkes: the shattering of Yunior’s world, compounded by the loss of their child, is the shattering of a glass, the breaking of a bond that compasses the landscape, the family and cultural cohesion within its purview, and trawls the writer’s deepest metaphorical waters to find a sense of loss:

“Blinded by grief, Yunior is a ghost moth spinning unanchored in the relentless white light of Loretta’s absence.”

The third biographical string in this effervescing and multivalent narrative is Emelina, the US-reared inheritor of the mantle of the multi-generational Soñada dynasty’s Fumaz rice empire, which occupies an ambivalent place in the psychological terrain of command and subservience, of post-colonial paternalism and control. With as little interest in the increasing sterility of overly-sugared paddy soil as Yunior is intrigued by its potential for renewability, she is bequeathed the family estates in her grandfather’s will, in order to repay the debt the family owes to Fumaz and the Fumazero. Her detachment, tempered by a profound sense of ancestral connection, enables an overview, an enlightened means of reconciling the past with the present, and of giving clarity to the whispering voices of identity.

Circling each other throughout the story, like separate elements of the same hyper-sensual life-force, Emelina and Yunior are archetypes. Symbols of positivity, of productivity and of moving forward from the ‘half-time’ of Fumaz’s cultural hiatus, it is significant that when they do coalesce, their ongoing story dissolves into a narrative present tense, as if to declare a kind of consummation. Finding a perfect metaphor for the island’s regenerative spirit, Yunior entertains the possibility of producing a uniquely-nuanced rum in that same sterile soil. The irony is as delicious as the discovery is symbiotically fitting – a perfect concluding irony in a book of joyful juxtapositions and energies given wing by the experience of hunger and of a paucity of choice.

Parkes is at his very best when lost in a freefall of images, images that find riveting connections, that draw the many threads of a very particular experience into the wider universe of cause and consequence, of music and flowers, of death and beauty:

“In the melody’s undertow, the ping of strings pulled between chords, there was the whirl and swirl of international politics, the crouch of enamoured youths under the incandescence of luminous moths and fireflies, the treachery of ghosts and pancreatic cancer. Beneath the chorus was the yawn of death, the red-eyed fatigue and fading yellow sunflower inertia that followed, the bellow of loneliness, a voice echoing in a room of notes.”