The River's Song

The article analyses Jacqueline Bishop’s first novel The River’s Song. A well known poet, Bishop surprises the reader with a work that makes excellent use of the Modernist writer’s tool and takes the reader for a ride into the heart of the Caribbean. A feeling of uncertainty and a sense of foreboding – of some unknown, impending danger – seizes the reader of The River’s Song right from the first lines of its opening page and never lets up until its last. What the reader experiences early in this amazing debut novel, is best defined by the term Unheimliche, or the uncanny. The uncanny effect has been described by Sigmund Freud in his essay Das Unheimliche as something leading to a “state of complete bewilderment,” a sense of intellectual uncertainty, the feeling that a familiar scene might hide, beneath its tranquil surface “something which ought to have remained hidden but has come to light.” It is, in short, the “horror of the familiar.” Questions begin to mount in the reader’s mind while reading the opening lines. None of the questions would remain open for too long, but right after quickly flipping the page looking for some answers the reader is taken back to the past through the use of time-shift. From the somber and disquieting beginning, dominated by silence and sorrow, we are transported to a place full of joyous “sounds of early morning coming into the house through the jalousie windows,” a place where the dark-blue mountains – the blueprint of Kingston – come into view, casting a spell over the narrative, the narrator, and also the reader.