Joseph has a deep Caribbean feel and figurative texture to his writing, and his descriptive power is both evocatively pictorial and powerfully moving. [...] his novel is primarily a praise-song to calypso, the very sonic blood of the eastern Caribbean which contains the essence and real commentary of life. [...] Joseph underlines this in his fine and epochal book, which is anything but a hagiography, and as much an exposition of human weakness as it is of cultural achievement – creating fiction with the same critical truth of the songs of the man he has memorialised
