An Absence of Ruins

An Absence of Ruins is a politically engaged novel and an aesthetically daring one that simultaneously plots an often darkly comic narrative, and offers a serious parody of the middle-classness of the West Indian novel. There is nothing quite like it in Anglophone Caribbean fiction. When it was published in 1967, An Absence of Ruins bemused reviewers, who saw it as a nihilistic work out of sympathy with post-independence hopes. Now, forty-five years later, it is possible to see it as an unexploded bomb, still ticking and very much alive. Horace Orlando Patterson was born in Westmoreland, Jamaica, on June 5, 1940. He grew up in Clarendon in the little town of Maypen.