Caryl Phillips

CROSSING THE RIVER

Bloomsbury, #15.99 (pp 237).

CARYL Phillips is one of the clutch of writers recently included in

the Best of Young British Novelists book promotion.

Following Archie Hind's review of the special Granta issue last week,

my understanding is that I was excluded because I'm too old; though

Archie's second, more important point about class, and maybe an unusual

turn of good luck, may have had something to do with it.

Which is preamble to Crossing The River. Part of this novel appears in

the promotional Granta, where it obviously reads like an extract, ending

conclusively, but leaving the impression that it has been interrupted

rather than finished. The narrative shifts from first person to third,

mainly developing a series of incidents rather than the life of its

central character, Martha.

She is a slave whose husband and son were auctioned singly when their

master died. Her family has been separated forever. Martha survives on

dreams of being reunited with her daughter. She joins a wagon train of

other blacks bound for California. Ill health forces her to abandon the

trek and she freezes to death in Colorado.

This is a controlled account. Incidents are sparely described in a

language that moves uneasily in and out of a black Virginian style

imitative of Martha's speech rhythms. This linguistic dislocation

reduces the force Phillips clearly intends each incident to carry. These

sketches are meant to have a cumulative effect, which is also diminished

by the flashes backwards and forwards which interrupt their flow.

The result is that while the horrors of Martha's life are often

realistically described, while we get a sense of her compliance, lack of

esteem, and the awful agonies she can hardly bear to face, they are

separate entities, parts of the story rather than patterns which

accumulate to form a collective picture.

Martha's experience is one of four disparate stories, told with

seductive ingenuity, using letters, memories, diaries, and journals.

Their beginning is in May, 1753, when a man sells his three children to

an English slave trader because the crops have failed. He later becomes

the guilty father of those who cross the river, a term we initially take

to mean leaving Africa, crossing the Atlantic, though it broadens to

embrace tacit emotional and spiritual dimensions. The three children are

followed into separate times. The father's lament frames the separate

children's stories.

Caryl Phillips varies the styles with the centuries, always striking

an authentic voice, always finding a convincing rhythm which, as with

Martha's story, he breaks or interrupts with a separate voice or

narration, as though he did not trust his narrators to carry the flow or

message he intends their stories to maintain. It also heightens the

density and detachment. Small incidents can take on a heroic proportion

and something which has been previously casually mentioned can be

retrieved and developed to a point far beyond its initial importance.

In the first story, The Pagan Coast, Nash Williams, born in America,

is repatriated to Liberia by the American Civilisation Society. He is an

educated Christian who has been freed by his owner and sent as a

missionary to a hostile environment. He pleads for help, money, and

materials, calling his former master Father in a series of poignantly

revealing letters home. As Nash struggles and declines, the letters

become more desperate. They are undelivered and unanswered.

Separation is at the heart of Somewhere in England. Travis is a GI,

stationed in Yorkshire during the Second World War. His story is told by

Joyce, who discovers she is pregnant when Travis leaves for the front.

They marry on New Year's Day, 1945. When Travis is killed in action,

Joyce has their son taken into care. He discovers his mother's identity

and comes walking up her garden path.

The final, title story is the journal of the slave trader to whom the

children were originally sold. James Hamilton is ruthless and efficient,

unusually similar to the African father whose lament frames these

stories. Again, their mutual dependency is suggested rather than stated.

This ability to leave a suggestion lingering is the book's great

strength. An overwhelming feeling of detachment is its weakness. These

sketches are meant to have a cumulative effect