From Publishers Weekly
Clarke, considered one of Canada's finest political novelists, but less well known in the U.S. (a memoir, Pig Tails 'n Breadfruit, was published by the New Press in 2000), gets a new launching in this country with this eloquent, richly detailed novel, awarded Canada's Giller Prize. A murder takes place in the 1950s on the fictional Caribbean island of Bimshire (a stand-in for Clarke's native Barbados), where the culture of English gardens and cricket contrasts sharply with the legacy of slavery. The murderer is Mary Gertrude Mathilda, a respected elderly black matriarch. But the identity of the victim is less clear. In the 24 hours covered by Austin's tale, Mary is determined to tell the police about the lifetime of degradations that led up to her homicidal rage, and Sgt. Percy Stuart, a black member of the police force, is determined to stop her. Percy is in love with Mary, but his life has been a continual compromise with the still-lingering plantation system. Nobody represents the system better than Mr. Bellfeels, the white manager of the sugar plantation at the center of the villagers' lives. When she was 13, Mary was, in essence, bartered to Bellfeels by her mother, who was his previous mistress. For 38 years, she bore his groping and his children. Though he has helped their son, Wilberforce, become a doctor, Bellfeels has never shown Mary herself any kindness. At times, Clarke loses confidence in his characters and has them deliver forced sociological truths-for instance, when Mary gives a lecture about Christopher Columbus. Most of the story, however, unfolds through brilliantly written dialogue, a rich, dancing patois that fills out the dimensions of the island's painful history and its complex caste system. Like Texaco, by Martinique writer Patrick Chamoiseau, Clarke's novel, by harnessing the genius of Creole, shows how art can don a liberating face.Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
Clarke was born in Barbados and immigrated to Canada in the 1950s. His new novel won Canada's prestigious Giller Prize and is certain to be met with critical acclaim in the U.S. as well. Readers will need some patience with the first few pages, but that soon turns into complete absorption in this digressive but endlessly fascinating, even charming monologue delivered by one Mary-Mathilda, an old woman living on a big plantation on a West Indian island. Real time is a matter of hours, but the time covered by Mary-Mathilda's monologue, as she confesses her guilt in a major crime to the local constable, is the 1930s and '40s. As night draws on, Mary-Mathilda reminisces about her long life on the plantation, chronicling not only the history of the plantation but also the island itself. Mary-Mathilda "graduated" from field hand to servant in the main house to mistress of the plantation manager; the fabric of her existence has been woven with colonialism, racism, servitude, and sexual exploitation. A very creatively executed novel. Brad Hooper
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"When Mary-Mathilda, one of the most respected women on the colonized island of Bimshire (also known as Barbados), calls the police to confess to a crime, the result is a shattering all-night vigil. She claims the crime is against Mr. Belfeels, the powerful manager of the sugar plantation that dominates the villagers' lives and for whom she has worked for more than thirty years as a field laborer, kitchen help, and maid. She was also Mr. Belfeel's mistress, kept in good financial status in the Great House of the plantation, and the mother of his only son, Wilberforce, a successful doctor, who after living abroad returns to the island." Set in the period following World War II, The Polished Hoe unravels over the course of twenty-four hours but spans the lifetime of one woman and the collective experience of a society characterized by slavery.

FROM THE CRITICS

The New York Times

The question of Mary-Mathilda's guilt seems moot by the novel's end. Out of a single act of retribution, Clarke has in fact spun an entire history, one in which freedom, love and even languor all have their place. — Ihsan Taylor

The Washington Post

The beauty of the novel, which won Canada's Giller Prize for 2002, lies in the poetry of its telling and the marvelous voice of Mary-Mathilda. The value of the novel lies in its patient exploration of the sacrifices that are made for the sake of survival, in its careful investigation of how ordinary people must negotiate a system whose rewards depend upon the cowardice and complicity of an entire society, in how exploitation becomes ingrained in the institutions of the culture, in the depiction of slavery's true legacy -- the tragedies of how we do go on … Miss Mary-Mathilda is both a pleasure and a frightening force to contemplate. — Opal Moore

The New Yorker

This novel, by a Canadian writer born in Barbados, explores the brutality of plantation life, not as it was experienced in the fields but in the subtler cruelties inflicted on a worker named Mary, who, as a girl, catches the manager's eye and then becomes his favored mistress and the mother of his only son. Forced into a life of loveless "fooping" but also one of material comfort and privilege, Mary is separated both from her own people and from the white establishment, and spends decades in her home-prison contemplating the "ritual and arrangement of life on the Plantation." With an obvious affection for Caribbean cadence and its rum-soaked asides, Clarke unfolds Mary's story through the meandering statement she gives to the police after she has taken gruesome revenge on her "master" using the hoe of the title, the very tool that his attentions enabled her to drop.

Library Journal

Barbados-born Clarke's ninth novel, which earned him the 2002 Giller Prize (Canada's premier fiction prize) and the 2003 Commonwealth Writers Prize, is a tragic, complex story of postcolonial Barbadian life following World War II. Oppression still flourishes on Bimshire, an island controlled by "the Plantation," where women like Miss Bellfeels are basically chattel. Miss Bellfeels, known to the villagers as Mary-Mathilda, eventually escapes the toil of field labor and housework. But as the kept woman of Mr. Bellfeels, the powerful plantation manager, she is not accepted into the island's upper echelon. Her status isolates her from common folk like Sgt. Percy Stuart, her childhood friend. The 24-hour saga begins after Mary has murdered Mr. Bellfeels and Percy must record her all-night confession, an obligation complicated by his lifelong love for Mary. Through Mary's memories and thoughts, Clarke deftly reveals an abominable state of sexual oppression and racist tyranny and the revenge both can invoke. Highly recommended. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 2/15/03.]-Faye A. Chadwell, Univ. of Oregon Libs., Eugene Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews