RETURN TO ARCADIA, by H. Nigel Thomas, is a Caribbean-Canadian novel that deals with racial and class identities, homosexuality and psychological trauma. The story’s setting is divided among Montreal, the fictional Caribbean island of Isabella, and to lesser extents London, Madrid and Paris.

The land and people of Isabella, which is also a setting in Thomas’s other two novels, form sharp images in the reader’s mind. Subjective description is perhaps Thomas’s forte as a writer. For instance, he is very convincing in capturing the way the protagonist would recall scenes from childhood. The author also has a particular knack for describing faces and often for capturing speech patterns, in major and minor characters alike.

Thomas, in an interview, says that Return to Arcadia is intended to explore a hitherto unwritten dimension of Isabella Island’s society. "I am looking at what constitutes mental illness and how one gets out of it. Also, (the novel) focuses on a group of characters or a segment of Caribbean society that so far I hadn’t focused on: the powerful plantocrats (plantation-owning class), who controlled about 90 per cent of the arable land in St. Vincent."

Thomas’s native St. Vincent, he adds, is the primary inspiration for Isabella Island.

Return to Arcadia’s protagonist, Joshua, is an amnesiac who awakes in the psychiatric ward of Douglas Hospital, Montreal. Throughout the novel, he recalls his past — or sometimes hallucinates about it — as he struggles to reach a psychological resolution. Ultimately, with the aid of modern medicine and ancestral spirituality, he finds stability and attempts to reintegrate into his maternal culture.

The author’s interest in psychology is more than passing. Thomas studied psychiatric nursing in 1970 and then for six years he worked in Douglas Hospital. During his last year, he worked with child patients, in whom he saw the devastating formative effects that psychological trauma can have.

"I certainly believe," Thomas reflects, "that people are shaped by the forces that acted upon them, in much the same way as water on limestone. . . . The challenge, then, becomes how to live with the effects of that shaping."

Not surprisingly, then, the specifics of Joshua’s life and mental illness seem to reflect a deterministic premise. The narrative suggests that the character’s unresolved formative experiences explain, if not dictate, his behaviour. For instance, Joshua discovers he is a masochist, a condition which (in this literary representation) is analogous to feelings of guilt and blame that he has harboured since youth. As soon as Joshua starts to unburden himself of this guilt and blame, he ceases to engage in masochism. Similarly, Joshua is sexually exploited as a young teenager and as an adult he becomes an exploiter, buying sadomasochistic sex. However, he stops this behaviour too once he forgives himself and others for the past.

For readers who hold a less rationalistic view of human experience and behaviour or just less faith in psychiatric therapy, some of Joshua’s transformations might be hard to believe.

Even before struggling with his sexuality, Joshua has endured another psychological dilemma of concealed paternity, attempted infanticide, interracial adoption, sibling separation and parasitic wealth. Without revealing further plot details, it is safe to say that Joshua’s early years are laden with even more traumas and reversals than the average fictional childhood.

Thomas, who taught modern American literature at Laval, says that his novel’s structure owes a debt to American authors such as William Faulkner, Toni Morrison and Toni Cade Bambara. Like these novelists, Thomas makes extensive use of flashbacks and stream-of-consciousness narration. Another commonality between Return to Arcadia and the works of Faulkner and Morrison is an apparent fascination with portraying larger-than-life, dysfunctional families.

Like Faulkner, Thomas is also fascinated with Shakespearean symbolism. Joshua and his stream-of-consciousness narrator allude several times to the characters Prospero (the sorcerer) and Caliban (Prospero’s monstrous slave) from Shakespeare’s The Tempest. "The Tempest is really about colonization," says Thomas, echoing an idea that dates back at least as far as 1968, when French author Aimé Césaire wrote Une Tempête, a post-colonial reconstruction of Shakespeare’s play.

Return to Arcadia, then, bundles and reworks quite a lot of older concepts and motifs from established psychology and literature. The downside of this approach is that Joshua sometimes seems more like a funnel for ideas than a fleshed-out individual who attempts to act upon them. Joshua’s thoughts of redemption are many, yet his redeeming actions are few, even when he faces no apparent obstacle.

For instance, as a young man, Joshua inherits a fortune and makes a note to help impoverished acquaintances from his past. For almost 30 years, he neglects to do so. Then, he seems surprised to find that his surviving acquaintances are still impoverished.

The scenario is a hard one, for author and reader alike. What would Hamlet do if he outlived his major antagonists (his major benefactors, too) and received practically unlimited material means? Sink into a contemplative void, before eventually emerging to seek a simpler life in friendship with the common Dane?

Joshua does seek such an answer, even though most of Isabellan society violently reviles homosexuality and thus forces him to be discrete. Can such an environment be conducive to Joshua’s psychological convalescence? Common ancestry seems to trump cosmopolitan tolerance in Thomas’s construction of the character’s needs.

"Like my protagonist," Thomas says, "I don’t think there is a perfect society anywhere. Societies more or less respond to our needs and there will always be those needs that our societies will not fully cater to but it comes as part of the territory."

Return to Arcadia comes as part of a territory too. Thomas’s previous two novels, Spirits in the Dark and Behind the Face of Winter, follow the same patterns of recollection and self-reconciliation. They also address psychological questions about ancestry and sexuality. Long years of study at McGill precede a self-confrontation for both Joshua and the protagonist of Behind the Face of Winter. A grassroots spiritual guide plays an important role in the conclusions of both Return to Arcadia and Spirits in the Dark.

Thomas has a unique descriptive style and, in the form of Isabella Island, an elaborate, compelling setting and social context for his novels. He does, however, inherit a lot of baggage in terms of structure and concepts. By the end of Return to Arcadia, whether the reader finds the protagonist’s behaviour convincing hinges on acceptance or rejection of a very specific set of psychoanalytical premises — largely, the ones set forth by Joshua’s doctors. Regardless, some of this novel’s influences and its author’s talents render it distinct within the realm of Caribbean-Canadian literature, except for parallels with Thomas’s previous work.

— Joseph Howse