The Humming-Bird Tree

“Trinidad is still known as ’the land of the humming-bird’. Ian McDonald has chosen a peculiarly Trinidadian symbol of the garden of Eden, says Dr Gordon Rohlehr in his Introduction. ‘His Adam is Alan Holmes, a white Creole Trinidadian boy of eleven. His Eve is Jailin, the slightly younger East Indian kitchengirl. They share a first love that is predestined to fail. The serpent in the Garden is the Caribbean history of race and caste  prejudice and the adults who maintain this history by transmitting it as gospel, deeper than religion, to their children.'”