Equal to Mystery (In Search of Harold Sonny Ladoo)

When, as the editor of a Trinidadian literary journal in the radical years of the early 1970s, Christopher Laird was sent Harold Sonny Ladoo’s novel, No Pain Like This Body (1973) to review, he knew he was looking at something revolutionary in Caribbean fiction. It is a novel that has recently been republished as a Penguin Modern Classic. But the next news Laird heard of Ladoo was that he had returned to Trinidad from Canada and had been found dead – very probably murdered – in the canefields outside his family’s village of McBean. A posthumous novel followed, Yesterdays, a rawer and less artistically shaped novel that combined broad satire of the Canadian Christian missions in Trinidad with an unwavering look at the sometimes sordid nature of peasant village life. For Laird, it became an obsession to try to discover the writer behind these novels and what had brought about his untimely end. Equal to Mystery – words written by Ladoo – is the record of that pursuit. Laird discovers, for instance, that Ladoo’s public version of his biography bore only a tangential relationship to the truth, that his inventiveness as a writer extended to the management of his persona.