In contrast to his elder brother Selwyn, Galton has neither self awareness nor self confidence, ascribed to his bad tempered and controlling mother and leaving him withdrawn and misogynistic. This wanders through fatally toxic masculinity remaining ambiguous as to responsibility with regard to it. Galton and certain other characters are repulsive and all are flawed and fairly shallow. ( )

Roy Heath writes quite compelling tales of oddball Guyanese people, set against a vivid backdrop of life there.
Galton Flood - from a "decent" family, but alienated, damaged by his relationship to his mother, finds himself a dropout, in a seedy lodging house, attracted by his landlord's daughter.
As Gemma's past (and Galton's imaginings) combine, a terrible situation arises... ( )

This is the story of Galton, a Guyanese man who grows up under the thumb of his repressive mother. He has always wanted to be like his older brother Selwyn, who escaped his mother's influence and leads a "normal" life, happily married with children and successful in business. Galton is not so fortunate. While ultimately he marries Gemma, he and Gemma live unhappily in a wharf-side tenement, occupied by seedy characters like "the Informant." The book records Galton's slow descent into paranoia and his eventual murder of his wife.

Heath is a Guyanese writer, and the novel is infused with a sense of place. Much of the dialogue is in Guyanese dialect (largely easily understandable). He has said that his work is "intended to be a dramatic chronicle of twentieth century Guyana." This novel won the Guardian Fiction Prize for 1978, and is included in the Modern Library: 200 Best Novels in English Since 1950 by Carmen Callil and Colm Toibin.

This is a good book, but I wasn't blown away.

3 stars ( )