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
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