Cambridge - Softcover

Caryl Phillips was born in St Kitts, West Indies, in 1958. Brought up in England, he has written for television, radio, theatre and the screen.$$$He is the author of numerous books of fiction and non-fiction, including The Final Passage, Higher Ground, Cambridge, Crossing the River (shortlisted for the 1993 Booker Prize), The Nature of Blood, A State of Independence, Atlantic Sound and The European Tribe. He is also the editor of Extravagant Strangers and The Right Set, an anthology of writing on tennis. His adaptation of The Final Passage was directed by Peter Hall and screened by Channel Four. His awards include the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Since 1998 he has been Professor of English and Henry R. Luce Professor of Migration and Social Order at Barnard College, Columbia University. He divides his time between homes in the UK and the USA.

A further exploration of slavery and the African diaspora by West Indian-born and British-reared Phillips (The Final Passage, 1990, etc.), which, for all its ambition, reads more like a term paper than a novel. Intent on showing the pervasive and malign effect of slavery on both slave and slaveholder, Phillips has two narrators whose stories parallel but never really connect. The slave trade is ended, but not slavery, when 30-ish and unmarried Emily sails to a nameless Caribbean island to report on conditions on her father's plantations. Her feelings about slavery are confused--``I am not sure of what I am''--which is intentional, given her role as a somewhat impersonal conduit for information and observations on slave behavior, the slaves' African heritage, and life on the plantation, which is the setting for her education. Strangely isolated from the island community, Emily talks mostly to Stella, the slave housekeeper; the local doctor; and the overseer, Arnold Brown, a caricature of the type. Brown suddenly seduces Emily, who has hitherto been quite critical of him. But Emily as a beneficiary, however innocent, of slavery must suffer: Brown is murdered, and Emily gives birth to a still-born child. The other narrator, who tells a much shorter story, is Cambridge, an aging slave. On the eve of his execution for the murder of Brown, who had been molesting his deeply disturbed wife, he recalls his journey from Africa to England, where he was freed and educated, and the misfortune that brought him back to slavery. Emily is a synthetic creation, and only the slave Cambridge has some credibility, but even he is subordinated to theme. Fiction that manipulates rather than illuminates--which is pity because when he mutes the message, Phillips can write. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.