In her second novel, The Lost Love Songs of Boysie Singh, Costa-winning author Ingrid Persaud takes up a project that’s become increasingly popular in contemporary literature: telling history from the perspective of women. It’s an admirable task, suited perhaps uniquely to fiction, since the true stories of women often go unrecorded. It can also be an interesting exercise in perspective – we view well-known figures through a new lens.
In this case, a real-life bogeyman is under scrutiny. Boysie Singh was a gangster in mid-20th century Trinidad whose name became so notorious it was what parents would evoke to spook misbehaving children. Persaud portrays him as a ruthlessly violent and murderous figure who, when it comes to “running girls, gambling, protection money” has whole parts of the Port of Spain “locked down tight in he hand”. With the exception of his son, Chunksee (“the only thing Boysie truly cares for”), he seems incapable of love or even basic compassion, though crucially, he is gifted at convincing others to fall for him. And as is often the case with notorious gangsters, a great many did.
The love songs of the title are those of four women: Rosie, a friend who knew him as a “barefoot, raggedy child”; Popo, a sex worker; Mana Lala, the mother of his child; and Doris, his eventual wife. Told in a Trinidadian vernacular that modulates for each alternating character, the book is unflinching in its study of what it is like to be the woman behind the man – these women hold Boysie’s secrets, facilitate his schemes, bear his unchecked tempers in scars on their bodies. And while they have agendas of their own, from escaping troubled lives to climbing the social ladder, Persaud never endows them with implausible levels of agency.
A strong sense of place and social dynamics are a forte of the novel. 1950s Trinidad, its postcolonial history, its folkloric superstitions, its melée of religions and cultures, provides an interesting backdrop for this tale of lawless criminality and oppression.
But while these ingredients ought to make for a compelling novel, The Lost Love Songs of Boysie Singh never quite adds up to the sum of its parts. Episode after episode pile up one after the other. Five-hundred-odd pages in, and without a tight structuring device, this becomes repetitive. Overall, there’s much to pull readers into these pages, perhaps not quite enough to pull them through to the end.
