Roger Célestin’s debut novel, The Delicate Beast, consists of over 400 pages of dense text, circuitous paragraphs, and serpentine sentences imbued with seemingly endless, granular detail. Does Célestin’s narrative merit the commitment that reading this novel entails? Absolutely. The timely theme concerns the effect of the imposition of cruel, dictatorial regimes on citizens of peaceful societies.
The Delicate Beast‘s first half is set in the “Tropical Republic” – a stand-in for Haiti, the author’s native country. The omniscient narrator details the idyllic childhood of the young protagonist in the compound in which his elite family lives in the hills above the teeming capital city.
Roger Célestin periodically layers in expert brushstrokes foreshadowing the arrival of the Mortician, a fascist whose ultimate takeover, supported by his coterie of armed men in nice suits visiting nonchalant and unspeakable violence on the elite, is portrayed with slow-motion inevitability. Of an “undressed adolescent daughter whose throat has been slit, one of the sharply dressed men says, … ‘Old enough to bleed, old enough to be slaughtered.’ The house is burned down. They leave. They continue their rounds.”
The second half opens in an apartment in the Bronx, New York. The connection of this half of the story to the novel’s first half and its Prologue is unveiled at the same slow pace.
Eventually, the protagonist, now a young man, leaves New York for school in Paris and then travels to Greece and other foreign venues. In his travels, he observes how despotism’s infective chill suppresses daily life in the shadow of authoritarianism. In the aftermath of a Greek military takeover, for example, the young man attends a performance of Agamemnon at the foot of the Parthenon, the birthplace of democracy. As an actor announces, “Our king is coming back”, one person applauds and is forcibly arrested by police.
As the adult life of the young man unfolds, it becomes clear that his encounter with a brutal regime has rendered him emotionally detached. In Greece, he marries Eve and returns to teach at a college in Connecticut, spending days each week on campus, away from his new wife in New York City – an arrangement that is fine with him. In their apartment, he awakens to hear her crying in the kitchen.
“He began to enter the kitchen and saw that Eve was sobbing; he headed for the bathroom very quietly [and] never asked her about her crying.”
Nor does he react when a very close friend dies from AIDS. The young man has become emotionally hollow.
The plot of The Delicate Beast could be considered well-worn – individuals who barely survive a brutal dictatorship are scarred for life. In addition, the density and granularity of the narrative could be considered excessive. Such critiques, however, are misplaced. Engagement with this novel is satisfyingly worthwhile. The Delicate Beast provides a unique pleasure due to Roger Célestin’s masterful writing style.
He tells his tale in exquisite, crystalline detail. The description of the young child’s golden days in the Tropical Republic provides an intimate sense of living through this idyllic period and the overhanging approach of the family’s fate – a childhood of “bliss and … brutality.” The post-Tropical Republic narrative displays the minute details of the protagonist’s travels and his striving to live in a comfort zone detached from his past.
Yet, this level of detail, vividly putting the reader within every scene, is not the principal virtue of Roger Célestin’s writing. Rather, the rhythm and repetition of his prose set up a mesmerizing cadence, providing the narrative with a beating heart that impels the reader onward. The repeated foreshadowing, as the reign of the Mortician incrementally tightens its grip, is chilling, beginning with a random encounter with the child:
“There were signs. One Sunday morning the harbinger is a lean young man glaring at the boy… ’What’s he doing here, that little roach’ … a label applied to the old guard being brought to heel.”
The rhythmic narrative pulse is reflected in breaking the description of the final brutality into many short passages, scattered throughout over 100 pages, before finally stitching all of those fragments together, verbatim, in a retelling almost 40 pages later. Indeed, Roger Célestin’s writing advances The Delicate Beast‘s plot via the tension of potential energy becoming kinetic, rolling waves gathering coiled force through adeptly crafted repetition and detail before expanding to extend the storyline and then contracting into the next cycle.
The author of more than one hundred academic books and articles, Roger Célestin presents in his debut novel a timely tale displaying the establishment of autocracy as inexorable once the process has begun. What sets The Delicate Beast apart is Célestin’s bravura writing, which is unusually confident and risky for a debut novelist. This novel deserves and richly rewards attention.