A Harlot's Progress

(Paperback)

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Can we ever know the truth about the past David Dabydeen liberates the black slave boy from Hogarth's 1732 engravings to tell his own story in an exhilarating, vivid series of half-truths, myths and fantasies. A HARLOT'S PROGRESS reinvents William Hogarth's famous painting of 1732 which tells the story of a whore, a Jewish merchant, a magistrate and a quack doctor bound together by sexual and financial greed. Dabydeen's novel endows Hogarth's characters with alternative potential lives, redeeming them for their cliched status as predators or victims. The protagonist - in Hogarth, a black slave boy, in Dabydeen, London's oldest black inhabitant - is forced to tell his story to the Abolitionists in return for their charity. He refuses however to supply parade of grievances, and to give a simplistic account of beatings, sexual abuses, etc. He will not embark upon yet another fictional journey into the dark nature of slavery for the voyeuristic delight of the English reader. Instead, the old man ties the reader up in knots as deftly as a harlot her client- he spins a tale of myths, half-truths and fantasies; recreating Africa and eighteenth-century London in startlingly poetic ways. What matters to him is the odyssey into poetry, the rich texture of his narrative, not its truthfulness. In this, his fourth novel, David Dabydeen opens up history to myriad imaginary interpretations, repopulating a vanished world with a strange, defiantly vivid and compassionate humanity.

Reviews

David Dabydeen's new novel takes as its starting point Hogarth's painting of 1732...and sets out to release the people it represents - prostitute, merchant, quack doctor and slave boy - from easy moralism, both the artist's and our own... Dabydeen has an imaginative mastery of the period, and can render it a hundred ways * Observer *
Exhilarating...Beguiling and provocative * The Times *
The best of the younger generation of Caribbean novelists -- Penelope Lively
His strong vision suggests that, for the recreation of lost meaning, it is necessary to strike off the fetters of narrative, and be released into poetry. -- Hilary Mantel * The Independent *

Author Bio

David Dabydeen was born in Guyana. He has published three novels and three collections of poetry, and has won a number of prizes. His last novel, "The Counting House," was shortlisted for the 1997 IMPAC Award.