Books This article is more than 20 years oldReviewThe sadness of strangers
This article is more than 20 years oldEngland disappoints both immigrant and native in Caryl Phillips's Distant ShoreA Distant Shore
by Caryl Phillips
302pp, Secker & Warburg, £15.99
This novel hums with ambition. "England has changed", runs the first sentence. In order to grapple with the complexity of the changes, Caryl Phillips splits his narrative voice into two. There is Dorothy, the woman from a small northern town who makes friends with Solomon, an African immigrant who is then murdered by racist thugs. And there is Solomon himself.
The novel begins with the unlikely friendship that blossoms between the two when Solomon begins driving Dorothy to and from her doctor's appointments. And then, after Solomon's death, it moves on through flashback, gradually filling in the ways they each came to wash up in the English village where they met. Each life, we come to understand, has been an arc of disappointment, even of tragedy, and that final friendship was perhaps the only uncompromised relationship that either has ever experienced. The idea of examining the state of England through this meeting of strangers looks like a pretty powerful one. But too much of the novel remains just that, an idea, and one that doesn't have enough flesh on its bones to come alive.
The two narrators couldn't be more different in background; the middle-aged piano teacher from a working-class family, and the immigrant who has been a senior officer in an African army. But the voices are only distinguished up to a point. Solomon's English is ponderous and slightly ill-at-ease, while Dorothy's style is rather chattier, but both tend to sound as if they are speaking by rote, explaining things point by point to the reader. And when, for one section, Phillips moves into the third person to describe Solomon's past, the effect is much the same - the impartial explication of information.
This sense that experiences are being explained to us rather than revealed is particularly telling during the sections dealing with Solomon's life. Solomon - at first called Gabriel - comes from a war-torn African country, where he is placed in one horrific situation after another. He is in an army given to massacring civilians, he sees his own family murdered and raped, he tries to kill a good friend to get the money for his own escape. Then he brushes with death a number of times on his journey to England, which embraces all the well-known points of such voyages - a ride trussed up in a lorry, plus being smuggled on to an aeroplane, plus a dangerous boat trip to Europe, plus a train ride through southern Europe, plus an attempt on the trains near Sangatte, plus another boat ride across the Channel. The odd thing is that these devastating experiences often seem exemplary rather than particular, as if the scenes had been built up from newspaper reports rather than from the singularity of this character, this journey, this individual life.
Much of the central section of the novel deals with how England disappoints Solomon and his fellow refugees, once they get to the end of their journey. You can't help but admire Phillips's desire to explore this disappointment, which is surely one of the great unexamined tragedies of our time. But again, there is something generic rather than particular in the moments as they pass, whether Solomon is cooped up in a police cell or being robbed by a stranger on the streets of London. Very occasionally - as when he dreams, one night in the cells, of his family and the man he killed - we catch the resonance of tragedy in the recesses of his soul. But at other times he appears to be a character who has been created to carry the weight of Phillips's political anger, and who is too weighed down by that to stand up for himself.
Clearly, this emotional blankness may be deliberate. In Solomon, Phillips may be at pains to construct a character who has shut down much of his emotional repertoire after experiencing so many blows. In the scene where Solomon watches his family being massacred, for instance, this blankness achieves a certain plangency: "While the others continue to laugh and taunt his father, Smokin Joe casually pulls the trigger and the skull explodes. Small pieces of brain fly in all directions, and Gabriel's mother and two sisters begin to scream... Gabriel is used to the sound of gunfire. The brutality is familiar to him. He looks on without emotion for he knows what is to come." But elsewhere it is hard to tell where deliberate blankness shades into the blankness of a less than fully realised life.
Oddly, the sections of the book that deal with Dorothy's life spark with more energy. Her life travels downwards from disappointment to disappointment in a small-scale echo of Solomon's. But it is in the depiction of her encroaching madness that Phillips creates by far the most subtle moments of the book. He describes a scene first from Dorothy's point of view, making it sound perfectly acceptable - and then describes the shocked reaction of others, so that you are pushed into seeing how bizarrely she is behaving. So, for instance, he describes her attempt to spark some romantic interest in a fellow-teacher at her school in a way that gains your sympathy, and then jolts you into a wildly different view of the situation when she is accused of harassment.
As he shifts in and out of Dorothy's consciousness in this way, showing how everything she sees is seen at a slightly different angle by those around her, you catch the intense flavour of her loneliness - the loneliness that she thought, for a time, she could lay down in Solomon's presence. It is this loneliness that seems to be the most brutal aspect of the England that Phillips is trying to convey to us, a loneliness that was the first thing that Solomon noticed as he saw England from the window of a police van: "It is strange, but nobody is looking at anybody else, and it would appear that not only are these people all strangers to one another, but they seem determined to make sure that this situation will remain unchanged." It is not so much in its changes, as in its resistance to change, Phillips suggests, that England's greatest sadness lies.
· Natasha Walter's book The New Feminism is published by Virago.
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