[We present a review by Berkley Wendell Semple, Guyanese poet and novelist. Semple is the author of several books, including Lamplight Teller, for which he was awarded the Guyana Prize for Literature in 2004 First Book of Poetry category, and Flight and Other Poems, for which he won The Guyana Prize For Literature in 2022—Best Book of Poetry category.]
By Berkley Wendell Semple
[The Girl in the Pink Pleated Skirt, Michael Jordan, Georgetown, 2023. Winner of the Guyana Prize for Literature Best Book of Fiction, 2023.]
Michael Jordan’s wonderful new novel, The Girl in the Pink Pleated Skirt is a gripping tour de force of murder and police corruption set in Guyana (circa 1978 and 1992). The novel is in the mystery genre, but it is not a whodunit, it is more a why was the killer able to get away with it. Politics and cronyism play a part; bumbling police work plays a part; moral turpitude and a disregard for human life plays a part. The novel is more akin to Truman Capote’s, In Cold Blood and Norman Mailer’s, The Executioner’s Song in that it is an examination of crimes and criminals; it is not like anything by Agatha Christie or Mickey Spillane. This is a dark novel, full of bad, worse and worst guys engaged in very dastardly things, including the murder of women and children.
The novel wears the imprimatur of exposé, in the journalistic sense. It exposes the underbelly of Guyanese city life: the hierarchies of class, police brutality, and a citizenry’s frightening tolerance for abuse by authority figures. There is a prescience in the novel that is reflective of the past and present of Guyanese reality. The book has its impetus in a real murder case.
In 1978, thirteen-year old Sandra Stephens is found propped up against a fence in an alley in Tucville. Her neck has been broken. The novel delves into the ramifications of her death on the community, how it affects her friends, parents, neighbours, the police involved in the investigations, and the suspected killer. But it makes a particular impression on fourteen-year-old Daniel McAlister whose sister was a friend of the murdered girl. Daniel is a savant of sorts, he remembers the fine details of nasty things. The crime will haunt him all the way into adulthood.
The story jumps forward thirteen years. Daniel is now an investigative reporter for the Chronicle. He is a novice, getting scooped often by his competitors. He is obsessed with solving the murder of Sandra Stephens even when he is admonished by his editor not to. The story follows Daniel in his investigation of a new murder of a young girl, which is similar to the one in 1978. Danny suspects that the deaths are the work of a serial killer and he follows the leads to prove it, despite doubts by others. The reader follows him into terrible darkness.
Danny learns of other young girls, raped, murdered and thrown like trash into city canals, all unsolved. We learn of police involvement in the cover-up of these crimes, and of other authorities who stayed silent while girls are being killed. Danny’s investigation leads him down what is analogous to circles in Dante’s Inferno where he encounters the bad, worse and worst guys, the pimps, rapists, and dope dealers. The novel reads in some places like a nightmare. The depiction of poverty is especially visceral and leaves an impression, like the stain of some injured creature dragging itself away to die in obscurity; like some of the murdered young girls in this vivid and upsetting book.
Like his previous novel, Kamarang, a wonderful pastiche of the horror genre, The Girl in the Pink Pleated Skirt races along at a breakneck speed to its surprising denouement. Unlike Kamarang, The Girl in the Pink Pleaded Skirt dispenses with long paragraphs of exposition for a more direct prose style that preferences dialogue over description. Jordan prudently leaves out those parts of a novel that a reader is apt to skip, no long meditations of the rain and the wind here, no rhapsodic rendering of the green woods of Guyana. Jordan’s no-frills prose is direct and unambiguous; it is the prose of crime beat reporters, with a dash of Guyanese creole sprinkled in, especially in the dialogue, to pepper the thing. It works well.
The Girl in the Pink Pleated Skirt is in some ways a political novel. Its comments and attitude toward government and the police are no recommendation, but explicit condemnation. This is not unwarranted in this novel where the police response to the murder of young women is to mouth such platitudes as “no stone shall be left unturned,” after each inquiry from reporters about the status of the murders. Meanwhile, they cover up crimes committed by a relative of a senior police official. In one scene of memorable casual brutality, ranks investigating a crime accost three youths on the street and treat the boys to what is called ‘the bubble’, which amounts to torture. One boy’s limbs are tied and he’s thrown into a canal. In another instant, two men with a reputation for thievery are found murdered when the new Assistant Commissioner moves into their neighbourhood. What is worse is that there is a quiet acquiescence to such treatment by the citizens, out of fear of retribution perhaps. In any case there is no real protest over their treatment by the police or even the murder of the young women, whose deaths go uninvestigated and unsolved. Every stone is left unturned. A terrible anguish underlies the author’s assessment of such callous disregard.
The Girl in the Pink Pleated Skirt is a dark book but it is not entirely absent of light. There is a love story between Danny and a girl he meets during his investigation, but this romance gets the Warm December treatment in the end. The author keeps it real at every instance, and he is never more real than when he describes the sounds, smells and desperation of human poverty and indigence, which may make the reader queasy at times.
These attentions paid to the politics and harsh realities do not take away from the entertainment value of the novel. It is an often witty and suspenseful novel, a book of tremors and shocks. The novel will keep the reader off kilter all the way through; it will entertain, amaze and enlighten all at once. Like any good novel of its kind, the reader will be riveted, holding on to find out the fate of the suspected killers, or of young Daniel, who has a habit of putting himself in harm’s way. The Girl in the Pink Pleated Skirt is a suspenseful wallop of a novel that holds the reader’s attention.
