The world is wide for Felicity Alexander, an opera singer with a “red-hot career.” But as we come to realize throughout Zilla Jones’s debut novel, The World So Wide, in which Felicity plays lead diva, when doors open for you around the world, it’s harder to find one that feels like the portal to home. […] The post The World So Wide by Zilla Jones appeared first on Prairie Fire.
The world is wide for Felicity Alexander, an opera singer with a “red-hot career.” But as we come to realize throughout Zilla Jones’s debut novel, The World So Wide, in which Felicity plays lead diva, when doors open for you around the world, it’s harder to find one that feels like the portal to home. As a Winnipeg-born woman with roots in Grenada, “[t]o Felicity, home was a place where you were not, a place where you didn’t quite fit in.”
The novel opens in St. George’s, Grenada, on October 9, 1983. Felicity finds herself in the midst of a coup d’état at the home of people she knew decades earlier when studying music at the Guildhall in London, England—Neville Carpenter, now head of the Revolutionary Government of the People of Grenada, and Claude Buckingham, his deputy leader as well as Felicity’s former boyfriend and true love. Felicity is there because she’s been asked to sing at a showcase of music and arts—an attempt by the revolutionary government of Grenada to improve its standing in the eyes of foreign nations. She did not accept the offer in order to boost her career as an opera singer, in fact, she was scheduled to sing the lead in La Traviata at the Met shortly after the showcase. She accepted the offer for the chance to be close once again to Claude Buckingham, whose “absence was the one hole left in her life.”
From this point, the chapters, some of which are labelled like sections of an opera—Overture, Act I, Entr’acte, Act II, and so forth—flip-flop between Felicity’s childhood and her rise to operatic superstardom in Winnipeg, England, New York, and around the world; and October, 1983, the fictive present, during the coup d’état in Grenada. We spend most of our time in Felicity’s past and, by the end of the novel, the past sections have met up with the present-tense coup.
Throughout her life, Felicity lives with a feeling of in-betweenness, as both the Canadian daughter of an immigrant and as a mixed-race Black woman. In Canada, she’s too Black. Growing up in Winnipeg, kids teased her and told her to, “Go back to Africa!” During her rise to fame in the opera world, she’s made to feel that her Blackness is a problem. Her hair is a problem for the wig fitters, her skin is a problem for the lighting crew. But in Grenada, she’s seen as being “red-skinned,” rather than Black, and among Neville, Claude, and the revolutionary members of the West Indian Students’ Association, she’s told, “You’re part of the problem, prancing around with your light skin, like you better than us.” While any given character in this novel wouldn’t be far off assuming Felicity thinks she’s better than them—nicknamed Alexander the Great, by the end she’s a full-fledged diva—her lack of acceptance by the Grenadian community in particular is a persistent source of pain. In part thanks to Claude, Felicity learns to feel pride and comfort in who she is. She realizes her hair is “a miracle … It could do anything. It claimed space for itself” and “Grenada was a tent with its pegs planted in her heart.”
Her heart itself is filled with opera and her unrequited love for Claude. She meets him in the 1960s in London, where he’s fighting for the “Revo”—the socialist revolution in Grenada. To Felicity, Claude comes first, but the Revo is foremost in Claude’s heart. He downplays her passion for opera, asking her what the classical music she loves has “to do with us? … Our struggle. Black people.” She sticks with singing nevertheless and in opera, both Felicity and Zilla Jones thrive. Jones’ operatic and musical knowledge is evident and her descriptions of how Felicity interprets the operas, relates the dramatic emotions of the characters to her own, and translates the libretto adds another layer of depth to the novel.
When Claude ultimately breaks up with Felicity and leaves London for Grenada, he tells her, “You’re in the way of everything I’ve ever hoped for.” She spends the rest of the novel bouncing from man to man, sleeping with almost every male character, “to fuel her art or just to fill the space inside her.” This is where the novel faltered a little for me. I wish Jones hadn’t written this strong female character as one who succumbs to the stereotypical behaviour “broken” women so often lean toward in novels, films, and television. Felicity tells us her promiscuity is a source of power, but it mostly seems either devoid of pleasure or abusive. I wish also that she’d been able to find strength in female allies but, aside from her Aunt Rose in Winnipeg, all female characters Felicity encounters are, again stereotypically, sources of hostility or rivalry, either for operatic stardom or for the hearts, attention, and bedrooms of men.
The ending of the novel, during the coup in which Neville and Claude’s former ally, now rival, Mark Henry, seeks to take power from them, was my favourite part. I wish Jones had given more space to the historical element of Grenada’s political past and perhaps less space to Felicity’s singing and sleeping around, which, throughout this novel’s 400 pages, became a bit repetitive. Jones clearly did her research, guiding us expertly into the violent, bloody heart of the implosion of a revolution. Her writing, too, shines most brightly when we’re in Grenada. There, Jones uses her most dazzling imagery—“Their bodies hung in the air like black crows, a final voyage past the sun’s weary eye before they plummeted out of view.”
The World So Wide
By Zilla Jones
Cormorant Books, Spring 2025, 414 p.p., $24.95
ISBN: 9781770867758
Susan Sanford Blades lives on the territory of the Lekwungen peoples. Her debut novel, Fake It So Real, won the 2021 ReLit Award and was a finalist for the 2021 Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize. Her short fiction has most recently been published in Gulf Coast, The Malahat Review, and The Masters Review.
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