Fortune with black gold...a writer’s explosive love letter to Trinidad

Amanda Smyth's third novel, Fortune, is set in colonial Trinidad during the roaring twenties-based Dome fire in 1928 on a former cocoa estate in Siparia when 17 people–oil investors and their families–died watching an oil well spurt 'black gold'. It is the work of a novelist much at the height of her powers that you remain drenched in the story long after you put the book down.

Published by Peepal Tree Press, Smyth's novel has all the elements of a Greek tragedy. Eddie Wade, an oilman of raw physicality. Ambition sniffs oil in Trinidad and returns to make his Fortune.

It is Trinidad of the 1920s, oil spurts, the first plane flies to Venezuela, cinema arrives, gingerbread houses have sprung up, the Cadbury brothers in England have stopped importing cocoa, poverty is on the rise, there are water riots.

It begins with Eddie Wade, a charismatic and ambitious 'freshwater Yankee' with experience in oil in the US, persuading Sonny Chatterjee, a flailing farmer whose ancestral land is floating in oil, to allow him to drill there. Initially reluctant, Eddie breaks down Sonny over a series of visits mainly because Sonny's wife, Sita is unhappy about their reduced circumstances due to falling cocoa prices. After one of his visits to Sonny's estate, Eddie's truck breaks down, and Tito Fernandes, an older businessman stops, gives Eddie a lift into town and over time, offers to invest in Eddie's drill on Sonny's land. He introduces Eddie to his wife, Ada.

Tito is generous and expansive but also tormented to the edge of suicide after having unwittingly sanctioned the murder of his ex-fiancée's new lover. Tito’s beautiful and decades-younger wife, Ada, who he adores, and guards watchfully, is his Achilles heel. Ada, impulsive, stifled in Trinidad, under Tito’s controlling eye, is susceptible to Eddie's considerable charms, and Tito is painfully aware of this.

The rest is a kind of inevitability, a tale beautifully told of love, lust, greed, betrayal, overreaching and destiny.

In St Claire, as the characters draw close, waiters and maids serve champagne, women with crimson painted mouths dress in provocative silhouettes and foxtrot, and the men chew on their cigars. The story pivots on a very urban scene when Tito spots Ava outside a hotel where Eddie often boards and finally understands the full extent of the betrayal.

These pressing human desires of Smyths' characters are echoed in a landscape of Trinidad drawn by her in a manner so technicolour it is cinematic.

The close relationship between humans with beast and land is evident from the time Eddie runs over a dog and sees it suffering, so he runs over it again, crushing its skull. Later he kills a snake, removes baby snakes and throws them in a bucket for a cook up.

Desire, greed and betrayal are entwined with the landscape drawn intricately as a fresco. It brings a spectre of death and danger, sizzling heat, humidity, rain, mud, swarms of sandflies, deadly scorpions, mosquitoes 'firing high-pitched sirens', a cut-down silk cotton tree that looks like a woman in grey rags. There is immense beauty too–with clusters of 'pink wet fungus on leaves', 'the dawn sky is streaked as if a dye ran through it', sunsets are 'cracked with gold'. The rain is like 'jabbing needles that break the rivers' skin'.

After Ada and Eddie make love, Ada, stunned by her own infidelity, comes home in the rain and stands in mud and water that is knee-high before going indoors as if seeking both benediction and forgiveness. Fortune leaves you with timeless human questions of whether the wages of sin is death or the heart wants what it wants and flies unstoppable towards its destiny.

How do you entwine oil, Trinidad's landscape and the hearts of men in this novel?

This is a love letter to Trinidad. I come and go and not belong. Sitting in a house in Leamington, Trinidad’s landscape symbolises what I love and the connection I have to Trinidad. I saw the landscape as another character. The land is a canvas on which their longings play and are mirrored back to them. The characters see it differently, but the earth couldn't care less. A minor character, Scottish, finds Trinidad terrifying. She sees danger everywhere–people drown, swept into a whirlpool by the waters by a river on the coast, in African bees, in flying galvanise during a storm that slits off a neck of a local. She sees it as a place to die.

Ada feels trapped in Trinidad at times. The way everyone has eyes on everyone else. But the landscape liberates her. She takes Eddie to the Bamboo Cathedral and feels the benediction of a church; the sea breeze frees her.

Eddie sees the land as a means to fill his pockets, oil, gold, and he will do anything to get it, but the land will have none of it. It will do what it wants regardless of human wants and desires.

Sonny feels a guilty loyalty to his father’s land being drilled for oil. When the silk cotton tree is cut down, he cries as offerings to the spirits are scattered.

Tito talks about loving Trinidad. I know Trinis like that–they are never going anywhere. You go away to come back, but he is not that different from Eddie. He, too, wants to plunder the land.

What prompted you to write about this explosion?

Initially, I just wanted to write about an explosion. I was in Trinidad during the 2005 London bombings and would have been on that train as it was my route to work. I thought of the people who missed the train, were late, of destiny, and whether our lives are forecasted, plotted or random.

My mom, who lives here, said if you want to write about an explosion, go to the Dome.

Her partner's ancestor should have died there, but he struggled to get his coat on, and the car driver drove on. All the people in the car died. The late historian Angelo Bissessarsingh said, ‘Come to my house, and I’ll take you there.’ And he did.

My great grandfather put money in that well in Siparia. He was a Fernandes. I based Tito on him, so it ended up being a personal story on how a chance encounter with someone whose car breaks down can seal your fate.

How close have you kept to the original?

Father De Verteuil wrote about the explosion in four beautifully written pages.

In Trinidad's early days of oil, corporations and small investors were sniffing for oil. The land in Siparia was floating on a bed of oil. You could push your umbrella in and see it come up like molasses. Instead of having to drill 2,000 feet, they were hitting big funnels of oil at 400 feet.

The original investor had bought himself a beautiful Mercedes with his oil money among the first, with an ignition which he took to celebrate the oil gushing from the well in Siparia that night with his high-society friends.

While it got darker and darker, they were picnicking and drinking champagne not knowing the oil and gas were leaking.

That night the equipment wasn't working. They couldn't fix the blowout preventer, but they kept drilling. When they discovered the leakage, they pleaded with people from Apex or Texaco who saw it happening and had the equipment, to help, but they were fiercely competitive, furious they didn’t have a share and refused to help.

There was no moon, and they switched on the car lights forgetting about the ignition. The fire burnt for three days and took them all out. A big oil company let 17 people die. That's what oil did to people. My original idea was to have 17 points of view, but it changed as I started to write.

The saddest thing is one investor, Ralph Sammy related to my mom's partner, had two daughters and a wife. One daughter was in a boarding school in town. He went to the Dome with his wife and daughter, Flora. The daughter at boarding school was asleep and woke screaming just around the time the explosion took place. The nuns didn't know why. Shortly afterwards, her uncle came and drove her to Siparia, pointed at the fire and said, ‘they are all dead, your mother father and sister.’ She never cried about it until her 70’s when she read Father De Verteuil’s account at which point she sobbed.

How do you do the mechanics of an oil drill with such ease?

I read about it in technical books, actual mechanics of early oil drilling, and a drawing on my wall, a diagram of a derrick and how it worked. The engineering terms were lovely. diamond bits, derrick floor, blowout preventer. In those early days in oil, they experimented, tested new precarious ways of drilling. The investors were greedy, selfish, reckless, not bothering with safety equipment. They just wanted the oil, the money, and to get out.

What do your characters want from oil?

The women, though not as present, are the voice of truth and Sonny Chatterjee s wife, although she likes gold and material things, hates drilling on their estate, wants out, and once exclaims to her husband, 'You can't eat oil.’

Ada wants to feel fully alive, and it has nothing to do with the money or oil or the big house–it has to do with being in love with Eddie while also loving her husband.

The men–Eddie and Tito and Sonny–are all ego-driven, greedy, wanting more money, more oil, more...throwing themselves into this project that's a mess, chasing it down, rushing to disaster.

Fortune is published by Peepal Tree Press 2021. It is listed as among the best historical fiction of 2021 by The Times. The official launch of Smyths Fortune is on the 21st of July at 2 pm TT and 7 pm UK time. Log on to Eventbrite for free tickets.