Set in the near future, when executions are broadcast on television, Cargo of Orchids is wonderful fun; terrifying, unforgettable and sui generis.

On the surface Cargo of Orchids is a conventionally structured story about a nameless woman, condemned on Death Row for ten years, who finally gets permission to write down how she got there. Her life and times and routines and rituals in the death house are as important as the series of disasters that brought the narrator to Heaven Valley State Facility for Women.

By turns blackly funny and numbingly real, Musgrave takes on the task of delineating violence done to women and violence done by women. As settings, she uses male and female prisons, and the drug-based Hell-Heaven of the Caribbean island called Tranquilandia, a place so exploitive and evil that it might have been invented by a multinational shoe or rug company.

The protagonist's actions are fueled by her vulnerabilities and her needs, but Musgrave's intent here is not allegorical. Her women are weak for understandable reasons, or they are strong and blithely murderous for equally understandable reasons. Utter disregard for the sanctity of human life when money/power/revenge must be served is the engine of this narrative. The condemned woman's life before being sentenced to death is searingly done; so is her minute-by-precious-minute existence on Death Row. The reader is taken back and forth between these two lives by a writer who knows precisely what she's doing and has the skill to do it. The black stand up routines of Rainey and Frenchy and the nameless narrator (made murderers by their rage and despair) are comic relief, but they are also a way of making the reader listen, and perhaps understand, what it is to be condemned to arbitrary deaths.

You may, as I did, find the last 435 words of the novel a bit of a shock. Perhaps Knopf persuaded the author that deus ex machina instead of the logic of the narrative would sell better. The harm, as I see it, is not terminal. You need only give yourself up to the thrust of the rest of the book and go easily into the novel's intended dark night on your own. 0-676-97285-3

[Robert Harlow / BCBW 2000]