The Dragon Can’t Dance

Earl Lovelace

Described as ‘a landmark, not in the West Indian, but in the contemporary novel’ by C.L.R. James, Earl Lovelace’s Caribbean classic tells the story of Calvary Hill – poverty stricken, pot-holed and garbage-strewn – where the slum shacks ‘leap out of the red dirt and stone, thin like smoke, fragile like kite paper, balancing on their rickety pillars as broomsticks on the edge of a juggler’s nose’. The Dragon Can’t Dance is a remarkable canvas of shanty-town life in which Lovelace’s intimate knowledge of rural Trinidad and the Carnival as a sustaining cultural tradition are brilliantly brought to life.