Novel
Voices Under the Window
John Hearne · 1955
Synopsis
In Kingston, a riot breaks out in front of the House of Representatives, fuelled by the anger of unemployed men who had been promised work. Mark Lattimer, a lawyer committed to the poor and to the nationalist movement, is gravely wounded with a machete by a man who sees in him a white man of the well-off class. Sheltering in a room with two companions, he relives his life: a privileged childhood, the war in the British air force, his love affairs, his marriage, his choice of the dispossessed.
Context
The novel appeared in 1955. Critics praised its writing and its tight plot, and the way it binds love, violence and politics to questions of class, colour and race. The book is partly autobiographical. Peepal Tree Press reissued it in 2005, with an introduction by Kwame Dawes, and the novelist Colin Channer sees in it a Molotov cocktail that raises questions of race and power.
Who it is for
To read a Jamaican novel of the fifties about colour, class and political commitment.
Prizes and reception
The novel received the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize in 1956, reserved for Commonwealth authors under the age of thirty.