Colin Channer’s novel, Waiting in Vain, is a great book. It meets every one of my requirements for great book designation:  genuine characters, richly drawn; good plot requiring movement and struggle by the characters; change in the characters (growth or diminishment), and absolute fearlessness and honesty on the part of the author in bringing all this about.  Channer gives us compelling characters placed within evocative interior (what these people are thinking) and exterior landscapes (he paints wonderful portraits of New York, London, and Jamaica).  He gives us a marvelous plot revolving around two artists from Jamaica, one tortured by his past and one fully grounded in his, who have to make profound choices about love and friendship amidst competing pressures of artistic, ethnic, and economic identity.  And Channer also gives us great sex (and some bad sex), good food, and enticing play lists of music and books  — and lots and lots of ideas on life and how to live it.

Waiting in Vain starts out innocently enough as an intelligent man’s Romance Novel: good, sharp, illuminating prose brings us a beautiful man who meets a beautiful woman but there are obstacles placed in the path of true love, and impediments to the fulfillment of  lustful longings. But then that good prose gets the bit in its teeth and takes off, and the novel becomes much, much more than a love story.  It charges full steam ahead to deal with the big issues, like how much or how little we allow ourselves to be defined by others in terms of ethnic background, class, gender, sexual preference, and financial status; the roles that fate and destiny and free will play in our lives;  and our responsibility to self and to family, as well as to friends and to lovers.  Yes, like I said, the big issues.  A novel about love and sex becomes a novel about every important question you have ever asked yourself — and if you haven’t, you should.

This is a novel to read more than one time. The prose is too good for just one read, it has to be read carefully and fully, the issues are too many and too important.  Channer takes the ideas of his novel and probes and examines them, places them out in the harsh but vivid light provided by the very rich and dense plot. The plot is played out by intense and contradictory (REAL) characters, and deepened through their long and engaging introspections on what is the purpose of everything that we do, the work, the love, the sex, the family, the friends: what ties everything together?  This is a big question, the meaning of life really, and there is no simple answer.  As in real life, there are too many characters, with too many issues and backgrounds, secrets and burdens, for there to be one answer (although there is the Romance Novel answer:  I liked this book so much that I accepted love as an answer but I want a sequel to see how the romance works out, if it becomes a life, a marriage with children, a bonding of time and body and matter and dreams).  This novel is never simplistic (although sometimes the romantic language is a bit too simple — especially between our two main love bugs, which is why I want  a sequel to see if the trilling words of love continue through the years).  Channer never demands that we see it all from his point of view — that we accept his answer to the big question –  but only that we see all the possibilities, and make up our own minds.

That is what good books do: put it all out there, honestly and vividly, and then trust us, the readers, to reach our conclusions.  A good book does not tell you what to think, or what to see, or what to listen to or taste or touch (although this book gives some great recommendations as well as instructions).  A great book shows you the way but you have to follow the path with your own mind, and a really great book, like Waiting in Vain, takes your heart and soul along for the ride too.