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Ancestors
A gripping story of the author's search for his family tree. In the early '90s Paul Crooks undertook an amazing journey from London to the Caribbean and from there to the Gold Coast of Africa where his story began 300 years earlier. His journey to trace lost ancestors is the compelling theme of this novel-fiction based on terrible fact.
- GenresHistory
308 pages, Paperback
First published April 1, 2002
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
March 7, 2024
A gripping read in the genre of Alex Haley's groundbreaking 1976 book, Roots.
It is the story of an African boy captured and sold into slavery. The grim sea crossing to Jamaica, and his life on a plantation. Unlike Roots, and maybe modern films like Django, the author Paul Crooks, allows the oppressed in his story to develop deep characters, and the moral conflicts they face daily to comply with their slave status, which has its own hierarchy, privileges, resistance, and seemingly ordinary life, if that were possible? Perhaps defined by older community members growing their own food in their gardens, to share with those younger? Also, plentiful supplies of rum.
There is the ongoing tension between slaves born in Africa and those born in Jamaica, as the latter have never known a free existence.
Also is the news from faraway England of Wilberforce and new laws to abolish slavery. Hopes rise and fade over the years. Will they be implemented in Jamaica? Should slaves rebel?
The idea of escape is ever present, but in the distant hills are communes of escaped slaves, who in order not to be repressed by militias, tend to kill or return any slave trying to join them to protect the status quo.
As time progresses, Crooks ever patient protagonist, by now married with children, has been taught to read by the local English priest, and can politely hold his own in moral and theological debate, finds his own aid of rebellion causes untold punishment and incarceration.
It appears his eventual liberty is as much down to global economics, as abolitionist laws in London. The plantations have become unprofitable, perhaps due to the European markets replacing Caribbean sugar cane with locally grown sugar beet? Many plantation owners and their agents / managers remain, knowing they will never have such a quality of life if they return to England, but the tide is against them.
The ending is kept hopeful.
Crooks concludes with his lengthy deep dive into his ancestors, and we learn the protagonist is his actual great great great grandfather. The story is built around real documents, people and places from historical archives.
The genius of the work, is how Crooks imagines, creates, builds and conveys the dialogue, lives, thoughts and relationships of so many characters he forms over the decades.
It is the story of an African boy captured and sold into slavery. The grim sea crossing to Jamaica, and his life on a plantation. Unlike Roots, and maybe modern films like Django, the author Paul Crooks, allows the oppressed in his story to develop deep characters, and the moral conflicts they face daily to comply with their slave status, which has its own hierarchy, privileges, resistance, and seemingly ordinary life, if that were possible? Perhaps defined by older community members growing their own food in their gardens, to share with those younger? Also, plentiful supplies of rum.
There is the ongoing tension between slaves born in Africa and those born in Jamaica, as the latter have never known a free existence.
Also is the news from faraway England of Wilberforce and new laws to abolish slavery. Hopes rise and fade over the years. Will they be implemented in Jamaica? Should slaves rebel?
The idea of escape is ever present, but in the distant hills are communes of escaped slaves, who in order not to be repressed by militias, tend to kill or return any slave trying to join them to protect the status quo.
As time progresses, Crooks ever patient protagonist, by now married with children, has been taught to read by the local English priest, and can politely hold his own in moral and theological debate, finds his own aid of rebellion causes untold punishment and incarceration.
It appears his eventual liberty is as much down to global economics, as abolitionist laws in London. The plantations have become unprofitable, perhaps due to the European markets replacing Caribbean sugar cane with locally grown sugar beet? Many plantation owners and their agents / managers remain, knowing they will never have such a quality of life if they return to England, but the tide is against them.
The ending is kept hopeful.
Crooks concludes with his lengthy deep dive into his ancestors, and we learn the protagonist is his actual great great great grandfather. The story is built around real documents, people and places from historical archives.
The genius of the work, is how Crooks imagines, creates, builds and conveys the dialogue, lives, thoughts and relationships of so many characters he forms over the decades.
March 4, 2025
This had the potential to be really good, and it was interesting in places.
However there are so many characters, and most of them aren't introduced properly, so it's difficult to follow who's who. The time passing isn't explained either, and so whole periods of the main character's life passes but we only realise later.
It's a shame because the time period covered is really interesting, and there are flashes of this in the novel. Books about the end of slavery usually frame it as a benevolent thing done by The White Man. They conveniently ignore the multiple slave rebellions that brought the system to its knees and forced Britain to abolish slavery before Jamaica became another Saint-Domingue.
But these flashes are let down by the confusing way time and characters are presented, and brings my rating down to a 3.
However there are so many characters, and most of them aren't introduced properly, so it's difficult to follow who's who. The time passing isn't explained either, and so whole periods of the main character's life passes but we only realise later.
It's a shame because the time period covered is really interesting, and there are flashes of this in the novel. Books about the end of slavery usually frame it as a benevolent thing done by The White Man. They conveniently ignore the multiple slave rebellions that brought the system to its knees and forced Britain to abolish slavery before Jamaica became another Saint-Domingue.
But these flashes are let down by the confusing way time and characters are presented, and brings my rating down to a 3.
April 15, 2013
Paul Crooks busca a sus antepasados en la Jamaica esclavista y colonial de finales del siglo XVIII y comienzos del XIX. Se hace una recreación histórica desde la captura como niño hasta la manumisión (abolición) como adulto de August Crooks, primer antepasado jamaicano del clan, hijo de africanos. Recuerda la famosa obra Raíces, pero en versión británica.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews