The White Woman on the Green Bicycle

Sabine Harwood has never much liked living in Trinidad. It’s hot, and it’s confusing. She agreed to come with her husband, George, because she thought it would be for only three years. But George has refused to return to England, so now, 50 years later, Trinidad remains their home. When Monique Roffey’s novel begins, it’s 2006, and Sabine has made something of a life in Trinidad, but she’s never come to love it. It’s her husband’s mistress, and the hills are the body of a woman who taunts Sabine. George has had other mistresses too, but it’s the island that has come between them. And its history of racial injustice has become inescapable.

Written in the third person, the first third or so of the novel paints a detailed picture of Sabine and George’s life in 2006 Trinidad. Roffey parcels out bits of information on their past marital conflicts, the island’s political unrest, and missed opportunities to move back to England. The situation is not good, and it hasn’t been for a long time. Just how long can it stay this way? Will Sabine’s life continue to be one of quiet desperation, or will some explosion force a change?

After we see where Sabine and George’s lives will end up, Roffey returns to the beginning, to 1956. Sabine then tells the story of her arrival in Trinidad. Knowing where things will end up makes this something other than a typical fish out of water story. We know Sabine won’t grow to love the island. What we don’t know is precisely what prevents her from ever feeling at home. I love books that tell stories backwards. Unlike Jenny, I hardly ever read the end ahead of time, but I still find the question of why and how something happened far more interesting than the question of what happened.

I know nothing of Trinidad or of its politics, but I found Roffey’s depiction of the island fascinating. Roffey herself was born in Trinidad, and her mother, like Sabine, used to ride around Trinidad on a green bicycle. Her descriptions allow readers to feel the heat, as well as the tension between the British colonial government and the burgeoning movement for independence, led by Eric Williams, an Oxford-educated intellectual. Independence doesn’t resolve the tensions; it just changes them. The situation is complex—both thrilling and frightening—and Sabine doesn’t know what to make of it.

Roffey makes the brave choice of letting Sabine live in the complexity, instead of taking a side. She believes in equality between the races and even becomes entranced with Williams when she hears him speak against the white colonial powers. She’s happy to see him gain power and hopes that he’ll bring a better life to the people of Trinidad. But her beliefs in freedom and equality don’t stop her from continuing to go to her all-white country club, where she feels safe. And when reading about how she is harassed and threatened during Carnival simply for being white, I can hardly blame her for her fears.

As Sabine grows to know Trinidad better, she realizes just how deep-seated the problems are. It’s not just a matter of becoming independent. A whole new way of doing things is needed. Independence won’t necessarily bring running water to the homes of the poor. It won’t end corruption or stop abuses of power. Sabine expresses her frustration in a series of letters she writes to Williams (but doesn’t mail). She criticizes him for not truly breaking free of the old ways:

A national inheritance? You’ve lost the plot. You are overwhelmed and overturned. You are indentured. You are enslaved. You are colonial. You are stuck in the revolving door of all these past methods. All men are born equally stupid and greedy.

She has hard words for Williams, but even harder words for her own people:

I was white. White in a country where this was to be implicated, complicated, and, whatever way I tried to square it, guilty. Genocide. Slavery. Indenture. Colonialism—big words which were linked to crimes so hideous no manner of punishment was adequate.

These crimes are so hideous that they infect everything. Sabine and George’s marriage, George’s career, Sabine and George’s relationships with their children and their neighbors—nothing is untouched. There are moments of transport, points where you almost believe that something better will come. The fact that the painful end is revealed ahead of time makes those moments all the more difficult to take. But to make this story anything but a difficult one would feel dishonest. I prefer honesty.