A Quality Of Violence

'Catastrophe in Jamaica breaks down barriers of convention and unleashes dormant orgiastic practices'. This is a novel about the primitive emotions which emerge among the bush villagers of St. Thomas-in-the-East, in the interior of Jamaica, when the parish suffers one of the worst droughts in its history. The time is 1900, seven years before the Great Earthquake that completely destroyed Kingston, an adjacent parish. The drought breeds violence which affects the Marshalls, a young married couple with a daughter of five, Linda; the Parkins, a childless couple; and Dada Johnson, an obeah man, and his wife.   Christianity and Pocomania—a mixture of pagan and Christian ritual—are the two forces which dominate the lives of a people attracted at once to barbaric Africa and westernized enlightenment. After a while, Christianity and Pocomania collide and begin to resemble each other. And it is then that a kind of madness, far more catastrophic than the drought, takes possession of the poverty-stricken people of St. Thomas-in-the-East.