Boston Globe
"Clarke’s waltzing speech rhythms and sly humor, reminiscent of V. S. Naipaul...[contribute] to a Wagnerian crescendo."
Daily Oklahoman
"The story will captivate readers."
San Antonio Express-News
"Magnificent. . . The Polished Hoe oozes unrequited love and seduction under duress."
Washington Post Book World
"The beauty of the novel...lies in the poetry of its telling and the marvelous voice of Mary-Mathilda...a marvelous creation. It bubbles with the voices of a now-vast literature of the African diaspora."
Austin American-Statesman
"A well-crafted novel."
Fort Worth Star-Telegram
"If the literary gods are feeling fair, Clarke will now receive attention from U.S. readers."
Houston Chronicle
"Lyrical...seductive...hypnotic....In this politically engaged novel, we are reminded that when it comes to colonialism, one never comes to any sort of final understanding."
New York Times Book Review
"Mesmerizing....steeped in slavery, colonialism, and sexual exploitation."
Booklist
"Endlessly fascinating...creatively executed....[The Polished Hoe] is certain to be met with critical acclaim in the U.S."
The New York Times
The question of Mary-Mathilda's guilt seems moot by the novel's end. Out of a single act of retribution, Clarke has in fact spun an entire history, one in which freedom, love and even languor all have their place. — Ihsan Taylor
The Washington Post
The beauty of the novel, which won Canada's Giller Prize for 2002, lies in the poetry of its telling and the marvelous voice of Mary-Mathilda. The value of the novel lies in its patient exploration of the sacrifices that are made for the sake of survival, in its careful investigation of how ordinary people must negotiate a system whose rewards depend upon the cowardice and complicity of an entire society, in how exploitation becomes ingrained in the institutions of the culture, in the depiction of slavery's true legacy -- the tragedies of how we do go on … Miss Mary-Mathilda is both a pleasure and a frightening force to contemplate. — Opal Moore
The New Yorker
This novel, by a Canadian writer born in Barbados, explores the brutality of plantation life, not as it was experienced in the fields but in the subtler cruelties inflicted on a worker named Mary, who, as a girl, catches the manager's eye and then becomes his favored mistress and the mother of his only son. Forced into a life of loveless "fooping" but also one of material comfort and privilege, Mary is separated both from her own people and from the white establishment, and spends decades in her home-prison contemplating the "ritual and arrangement of life on the Plantation." With an obvious affection for Caribbean cadence and its rum-soaked asides, Clarke unfolds Mary's story through the meandering statement she gives to the police after she has taken gruesome revenge on her "master" using the hoe of the title, the very tool that his attentions enabled her to drop.
Library Journal
Barbados-born Clarke's ninth novel, which earned him the 2002 Giller Prize (Canada's premier fiction prize) and the 2003 Commonwealth Writers Prize, is a tragic, complex story of postcolonial Barbadian life following World War II. Oppression still flourishes on Bimshire, an island controlled by "the Plantation," where women like Miss Bellfeels are basically chattel. Miss Bellfeels, known to the villagers as Mary-Mathilda, eventually escapes the toil of field labor and housework. But as the kept woman of Mr. Bellfeels, the powerful plantation manager, she is not accepted into the island's upper echelon. Her status isolates her from common folk like Sgt. Percy Stuart, her childhood friend. The 24-hour saga begins after Mary has murdered Mr. Bellfeels and Percy must record her all-night confession, an obligation complicated by his lifelong love for Mary. Through Mary's memories and thoughts, Clarke deftly reveals an abominable state of sexual oppression and racist tyranny and the revenge both can invoke. Highly recommended. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 2/15/03.]-Faye A. Chadwell, Univ. of Oregon Libs., Eugene Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
The sexual exploitation of poor black women in the British Caribbean--in a rambling, plotless tale (winner of the Giller Prize) from Clarke, a veteran West Indian writer/academic/diplomat. The colony is the author’s own Barbados (here called Bimshire), and the period is post-WWII. Mary-Mathilda is a middle-aged black woman who lives in a spacious house on the sugar plantation, where she was installed by the almost-white plantation manager Bellfeels, who lives nearby with his wife and daughters. Bellfeels’s "Outside-Woman," Mary started out, like her mother, as a fieldhand, and her fate was decided one Sunday in a churchyard when Bellfeels noticed her ripening into puberty and felt her up and down with his riding-crop, the prelude to his raping her during a church picnic, just as he had once done to her mother. For all her present material comforts, Mary has never forgotten that riding-crop, and she has been readying her old hoe for her mission of retribution and sacrifice. The story spans just a few hours on a Sunday night, when Mary summons the Sergeant to make a Statement. Has she murdered Bellfeels? The Sergeant doesn’t want to know, for Mary is a powerful woman who could end his career, and, besides he has lusted after her since childhood. So there will be no Statement, disappointing the reader who might have been expecting a modicum of suspense. Instead, the pair exchange memories of life in Bimshire. What emerges is a scorching indictment of the island’s power elite, who have connived at rape (including Mary’s) and murder, disposing of bodies and spiriting away criminals. Still, this bleak picture is warmed and softened by Clarke’s celebration of Bimshire life: its foods, plants,rum shops, and the fortitude of its regular folks as they laugh and curse in cadences that Clarke catches so expertly. We are left with a memorable landscape of oppression but a problematic central figure. Is Mary now a militant champion of women’s rights? No way to know.
