The Wine of Astonishment Summary - Earl Lovelace - Masterplots II: British and Commonwealth Fiction Series

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At a glance:

Author: Earl Lovelace
First Published: 1982
Type of Work: Social realism
Time of Work: From the early 1930’s to 1951
Setting: Bonasse, a rural village in southwestern Trinidad
Characters: Bolo, Bee, Eva, Ivan Morton
Genres: Long fiction, Social realism
Subjects: 1950's, Culture, Tradition, Caribbean, Racism, Blacks, Social issues, 1940's, Villages, 1930's, Moral conditions, Catholics or Catholic Church, Warships
Locales: Bonasse, Trinidad, Central America and West Indies, Trinidad and Tobago

The Novel

Eva’s opening meditation begins in medias res as she describes her husband Bee’s frustration from the lack of change that has occurred since Ivan Morton’s election to the Legislative Council in 1946. The immediate occasion of Bee’s inner turmoil is Morton’s failure to lift a ban on the manner in which Bee’s church, the Spiritual Baptist Church, conducts its worship services. Eva, from her first-person limited omniscient point of view, describes Bee as “a spider trap in its web,” a man powerless to force a change in the laws that would allow his...

(The entire page is 2942 words.)

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