INDIGO

Marina Warner

3.55

286 ratings by Goodreads

ISBN 10: 070113531X ISBN 13: 9780701135317

Publisher: Random House UK, 1992

Two young women--brash and confident Xanthe and self-conscious and uneasy Miranda--return to the island of Enfant-Be+a7ate, where their ancestor landed three hundred years before, to find fortune and adventure. 12,500 first printing.

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From Kirkus Reviews:

From British writer Warner (The Lost Father, 1989, etc.), an uneven--if politically correct--reinterpretation of The Tempest that's weighed down even further by heavy-handed dollops of magic realism. When the young and second wife of her distinguished grandfather, Sir Anthony Everard, gives birth to beautiful Xanthe, Miranda, a child herself, hears an old princess at the christening wish upon the baby a ``kind of imperviousness--the heartlessness of a statue.'' Having neatly indicated mythic and legendary undertones, the story then moves back to the 17th century--to the Caribbean island where the Everard family made its fortune in indigo and sugar. There, island sorceress Sycorax miraculously rescues a baby from a drowned slave, establishes her own compound at the end of the island where she grows indigo, and advises the islanders. The baby, the original Caliban, is soon joined by another outcast, an Arawak baby girl called Ariel. Eventually, Caliban, haunted by his African roots, leaves--but Ariel stays, only to be seduced by the first Kit Everard come to claim the island for his own. Their Eden threatened, the islanders rebel, a now-returned Caliban is killed, and Everard and his men are saved by a fluke. Forward, then, to the 20th century when Xanthe and Miranda, different in temperament and experience, are invited to the island to celebrate the anniversary of the first Everard landing. Xanthe makes a marriage of convenience and sets about restoring the family fortunes through tourism, but the islanders resent her efforts. A revolt breaks out; Xanthe, who finds love too late, is killed--a sort of long-deferred expiation of Everard guilt; and Miranda, returning to London, marries a black actor and finds happiness. The tempest seems finally over. Better on the past than on the present, with the story coming most alive when Warner describes Sycorax and the pristine island. Otherwise: too much pretentious profundity and polemical handwringing. -- Copyright �1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Publishers Weekly:

The award-winning British novelist ( The Lost Father ) and feminist critic ( Monuments and Maidens ) produces a tour de force with this lavishly imaginative and sophisticated work. Invading and colonizing The Tempest , she restores Sycorax, Shakespeare's "blue-eyed hag," to power on an indigo-producing Caribbean island at the time of its 17th-century "discovery" by the British. While Prospero remains unidentified, Caliban and Ariel are her foster children; Miranda is born three centuries later in WW II London, a descendant of the island's British conqueror. But invasion--literary, political, sexual--constitutes only one of many themes. An epigraph, from Derek Walcott's Omeros , begins, "Men take their colors as the trees do from their native soil"; this novel's sections, named after colors (like the novel itself), take their hues from Warner's ineffably sensuous descriptions of the island, suggesting a non-chronological approach to historical narrative--the indigo-stained Sycorax's way of seeing. Into this already lush ground, Warner introduces the gripping, cannily rendered story of Miranda and her attempts to address a problematic psychological legacy and to participate in establishing a new order. Consistently inventive, complex in its implications, this is an altogether dazzling achievement. (Richard Wiley's novel Indigo , published by Dutton, is reviewed in this issue.)
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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