Wednesday, 2 October 2019

The Caribbean

Poul Anderson, The Devil's Game (New York, 1980), THE ISLAND, pp. 13-15.

A completely unexpected comparison with Ian Fleming -

Anderson refers to England's lost empire in the Caribbean, including Jamaica:

"...the antique English tongue..." (p. 14);
reproductions of local pronunciation;
Methodist churches;
Biblical place names;
coconut trees;
turtle nets;
mangrove swamps.

This recalls Fleming's descriptions, in three James Bond novels and one short story, of Jamaica, where he went each year to write the next novel.

1 comment:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

I've also thought of Anderson's Nyanza, in "The Game of Glory," a warm, tropical, oceanic planet, where we see Dominic Flandry trying to track down a Merseian agent. And the "antique English" mentioned in THE DEVIL'S GAME as its analogs in Flandry taking particular note of the varied accents and dialects of Anglic to be heard there.

Ad astra! Sean