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Friday, August 1, 2025

Braving the sea

by

20120916

When faced with the ques­tion, "Do you think read­ers en­joy the sto­ries of main char­ac­ters who are less like Greek gods and more like mor­tals?" Trinida­di­an-British writer Monique Rof­fey an­swers im­me­di­ate­ly. "Nov­els," she states firm­ly, "should be about the peo­ple we know." As part of her prepa­ra­tion for writ­ing her most re­cent nov­el Arch­i­pel­ago, pub­lished in Ju­ly by Si­mon and Schus­ter, Rof­fey reread Homer's epic po­em, The Odyssey. Arch­i­pel­ago is a tale of un­ex­pect­ed ad­ven­ture, a sto­ry of what hap­pens to a good, yet un­re­mark­able man when he feels that es­cape is his on­ly op­tion. Rof­fey found Odysseus to be a bor­ing hero: a man in­ca­pable of mak­ing ter­ri­ble mis­takes, one who "con­quers every bad-john." This Greek su­per­hero is un­able to fail, she adds, which makes it the kind of sto­ry she's not in­ter­est­ed in telling. "I think fail­ure is part of the hu­man con­di­tion," she af­firms, shar­ing that writ­ing about how we fall short can be just as sat­is­fy­ing as any oth­er.

Rof­fey, who launched Arch­i­pel­ago at Pa­per Based Book­store, The Nor­mandie, St Ann's, last Thurs­day, is no novice to the world of fic­tion. The hold­er of a PhD in cre­ative writ­ing, she teach­es writ­ing cours­es at the Ar­von Foun­da­tion in Eng­land and the Writ­ers' Lab in Sky­ros, Greece. Arch­i­pel­ago is her third nov­el, and has al­ready earned a stream of glow­ing re­views in Lon­don, where she is based at least half of the year. She spends the re­main­ing months in Trinidad, which is home to her in a way that oth­er places can­not quite cap­ture. In­deed, it was es­sen­tial for her to write Arch­i­pel­ago while here, to be, as she fond­ly puts it, "amongst peo­ple speak­ing the lan­guage, re­port­ing the news of the day, cap­tur­ing the sights and sounds of the coun­try." The writer be­comes qui­et­ly thought­ful as she mus­es, "It is my hope that lo­cal read­ers feel my close and in­ti­mate con­nec­tion with the re­gion, par­tic­u­lar­ly to Trinidad. Trinidad is my home." Arch­i­pel­ago's first draft took six months to write, and two years in to­tal from be­gin­ning pages to its fi­nal proof stages. The spark of this ex­tra­or­di­nary sto­ry had its gen­e­sis in a flood: the 2008 flood that bad­ly dam­aged Rof­fey's broth­er's home in Per­se­ver­ance, Mar­aval. It's chill­ing, too, to con­sid­er that her book is be­ing launched on the heels of the floods that dev­as­tat­ed Diego Mar­tin and en­vi­rons not more than a month ago. "Glob­al warm­ing and cli­mate change af­fect us all, even on our is­lands," she grim­ly notes, re­mark­ing that our sense of se­cu­ri­ty as Trinida­di­ans and To­bag­o­ni­ans can­not pro­tect us from what is oc­cur­ring every­where else.

The process of writ­ing Arch­i­pel­ago took her, very lit­er­al­ly, to the open sea, where she chart­ed the sail­ing jour­ney that her pro­tag­o­nist un­der­takes in the nov­el. She de­scribes the trip as vi­tal: a "No amount of re­search could have stood in for the re­al thing." Rof­fey is equal­ly free of re­gret when it comes to the sub­ject of her scan­dalous erot­ic mem­oir, With the Kiss­es of his Mouth, pub­lished last year by Si­mon and Schus­ter. Hailed as ground­break­ing writ­ing, and wide­ly tout­ed as "in­cred­i­bly brave," it isn't a mem­oir one is like­ly to see grac­ing most lo­cal book­shop shelves. (But check Pa­per Based Book­store for your copy, where it is in stock.) The writer ad­mits she thought long and hard about the con­se­quences of ex­pos­ing this as­pect of her life to the world. In the end, she says, she de­cid­ed not to wait un­til she was 70, un­til a po­ten­tial­ly "safer" time. The re­sult is a work which has drawn peo­ple clos­er in the de­sire to share their own ex­pe­ri­ences and long­ings, form­ing un­ex­pect­ed fel­low­ships and bonds across the globe. At work on an­oth­er nov­el, Rof­fey ap­pears com­mit­ted to pur­su­ing this ide­al: of telling sto­ries with­out shame, whether they take place in the bed­room or on the open seas. Hav­ing those ex­pe­ri­ences, she urges, is key: "A writer needs to go out in­to the world. There aren't that many things that can be writ­ten about on your own, in iso­la­tion."


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