Sugar Money by Jane Harris (Faber & Faber, £14.99)\
The brothers are slaves. Lucien is 12, hot-headed, hormonal and impetuous, while 28-year-old Emile is cooler and wiser. He is also full of dread for what lies ahead.
Their master Father Cleophas has commanded them to take “a motley gang of slaves… in a perilsome escape” from the island of Grenada, now under brutal British control, and bring over 40 of them, some old or sick, to work in the monastery’s sugar plantation on Martinique.
Jane Harris pitches you headfirst into this outstanding, heartbreaking story of siblings, slavery and the savagery of the colonial past. The “reckless venture” takes place over a few short weeks in December 1765 and is recounted by Lucien in a beguiling mixture of English, French and Creole.
He longs for a swashbuckling, piratical adventure where “we two brothers – somehow armed with cutlass and musket – fought skirmishes with red coat soldiers among the carnage at Fort Royal”. But the reality is far more treacherous.
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The brothers arrive by boat, captained by Bianco who pretends to be deaf and dumb but is anything but, as he reveals to the siblings after they have discussed their secret plans in front of him.
It is not a good omen and, as Lucien says, “Both of us perturb by how gullible we had been.” Determined to act more sensibly, Emile, who could “out-slink a cat”, constantly urges caution on their unenviable endeavour but Lucien, prickly and “all up in the snuff with him for flinging orders at me what seem like a thousand times per second”, always manages to make their predicament more precarious.
And it is precarious, scary and dangerous, too. Jane Harris is unflinching in her descriptions of their horrifying lives. Lucien’s back “is ridged with an island of scars, a map of tyranny, and a permanent reminder of our father”, a slave owner who beat him with a table leg and punched him until he passed out.
On Grenada, the “Goddamns”, English and Scottish plantation owners, are beyond vicious. The rape and abuse of female slaves is commonplace and the punishment meted out for minor mistakes is horrific. Augustin, who loves the French language so is reluctant to speak in English, is nailed by his ear to a hut while others have iron weights around their ankles or spiked collars on their necks.
The cost of being caught would be great and Harris ramps up the tension. In a landscape where “every shadow held a threat”, the resourceful, proud brothers, who are so protective of each other, are unbearably vulnerable. Unwilling participants in a deadly escapade, their fate and the fates of their fellow slaves are beyond their control. As this superb novel reveals, they are at the mercy of the merciless.