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Books by Caryl Phillips
Crossing the River /
The Atlantic Sound
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The State of Independence /
Cambridge /
The European Tribe
Extravagant Strangers /
The Nature of Blood /
A Distant Shore
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Final Passage /
Dancing in the Dark /
Forigners /
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Reviews
A Distant Shore
A Novel by Caryl Phillips
From Caryl Phillips—acclaimed author of
The Nature of
Blood and
The Atlantic Sound—a masterful new novel set in contemporary
England, about an African man and an English woman whose hidden
lives, and worlds, are revealed in their fragile, fateful
connection.
Dorothy
and Solomon live in a new housing estate on the outskirts of an
English village. She's recently bought her bungalow; he's
recently become the night watchman. He is black, an immigrant.
She is white, a recently retired music teacher. They are both
solitary, reticent outsiders. When they move tenuously toward
each other and their paths briefly cross, neither of them can
know that it will be the last true human contact either will
have.
The
novel unfolds into the past to show us how Solomon and Dorothy
have arrived at this moment: Solomon, a former soldier, escaping
the horrors of a war-ravaged African country, entering England
illegally, a non-man with no resources but his own waning
strength, and no comprehension of the society that both hates
and harbors him; Dorothy, the product of a troubled childhood
and a messy divorce, fleeing the repercussions of a desperate
obsession. In scene after resonant scene, we watch as Solomon
and Dorothy come to live inside themselves, closing off from a
world that has changed—and changed them—beyond recognition.
In
their powerfully compelling stories, Caryl Phillips has created
a brilliant and moving portrait of modern human displacement:
from home, from heart, and from self.
--Book
Jacket for A Distant Shore
Desperate,
displaced people populate the latest from award-winning
essayist, critic, and novelist Phillips (Crossing the River;
The Nature of Blood). Dorothy is a divorced retired
schoolteacher with a troubled past and an increasingly
precarious present, drifting further into depression and mental
illness in the small northern England town of Weston where she
has gone to flee the death of her sister and a series of
reckless love affairs with married men. Solomon, in his early
30s, is a survivor of a war-torn African country, witness to
events and atrocities almost too painful to recount, which
include the execution of his own family.
They
meet in a small corner of England, given one last chance at
redemption and belonging—this time with one another—before prejudice
and brute violence destroy even that. Phillips crafts his novel
with great skill, portraying his characters with a faithful eye
that reveals their inner beauty as clearly as their defects. A
true master of form, he manipulates narrative time (which skips,
speeds and sometimes runs backward) and perspective to create a
disjointed sense of place that mirrors the tortured, fractured
inner lives of his characters.
Phillips' version is of a splintered. fragile
world where little seems to have inherent meaning and love is
opportunistic and fleeting. As Dorothy reaches her tragic end,
she receives a visit from the husband who left her long ago for
a younger woman; he himself has now been abandoned. The message
of our inherent aloneness is clear. As Dorothy herself says, in
a note to one of her married lovers: "Abandonment is a
state that is not alien to man." The book expresses an even
bleaker view: that abandonment is not only a risk, but our
natural condition.
--Publishers
Weekly
An
unlikely couple seek shelter from the brutal chill of northern
English attitudes.
Anglo-Caribbean
writer Phillips (The Nature of Blood, 1997; The
Atlantic Sound, 200, etc.) continues to build his elegantly
crafted collection of work about lives in, but not of, England,
this time bringing a mentally ailing, forcibly retired music
teacher into tentative association with an African political
refugee. Dorothy Jones is a divorced, once-beautiful woman in
her 50s whose increasingly erratic behavior gave cause for her
dismissal as a school teacher. The elder daughter of a truculent
working-class father and unprotective mother, Dorothy failed
early on to lend vital assistance to her abused sister when she
needed it, and was unable to enliven her marriage with the
higher-class but ineffective banker who left her for a younger
woman.
A
couple of ruinous affairs capping this dismal history have
pushed her into near-madness. Now, her parents and sister dead,
she lives alone in a new subdivision outside her childhood
village where her only friendly neighbor is Solomon, the
neighborhood watchman and handyman. A fugitive from bloody
African political upheaval, Solomon has been even more brutally
battered than Dorothy, but he is made of stronger stuff.
Phillips backtracks to show Solomon's nightmarish stint as a
rebel soldier and equally hellish escape to England and his
painful steps to a new identity, assisted by an Irish
truck-driver and his landlords the only kindly people in the
forlorn surroundings.
The
success with this pairing of lives is mixed. Dorothy Jones comes
perilously close in some ways to Blanche Dubois without the
guts, but her surroundings are perfectly rendered, and Solomon
is drawn with Phillips' accustomed precision and depth, and,
with the calm, cool understanding of the reality of racial
foolishness, it's enough to tip the balance.
Harsh
and sad, but worth the trip.
--Kirkus
Review
"They
do not know who I am," thinks Solomon, an African man
living just outside an English village where the local racists
make their hatred known. In that lightning-bolt observation,
Phillips—an impeccable stylist and astute dramatist of
the paradoxical inhumanity of humankind and the sorrows of the
African diaspora—cuts to the quick of the conflict between
fearful Europeans and tragically displaced African and Asian
refugees. Solomon's politeness and restraint mask the traumas of
his life as a veteran of a brutal civil war, witness to the
massacre of his family, and the survivor of a perilous journey
and a treacherous exile.
But
he has met with the kindness as well as savagery in his adopted
country, and seeks a bond with his beautiful, decorous, and
solitary neighbor. Although Dorothy grew up in the village, she
does not share her neighbors' violent prejudice. Forced into a
scandalous early retirement, she, too, is plagued by anguished
memories of a lifetime of loss and betrayal.
Brilliantly
realized, these outsiders are rife with ambiguity, heartsick
over their fate, but determined to press on. The author of seven
extraordinary elegant and unflinching novels (Crossing the
River [1993] was short-listed for the Booker prize),
Phillips is a clarion realist devoted to confronting our
capacity for both cruelty and compassion.
--Donna
Seaman, Upfront: Advance Reviews
Two lonely lives intertwine in this haunting
novel set in contemporary England. Dorothy has recently moved to
a new subdivision in a small village after a forced retirement
leaves her desperate for a new life. Solomon, an illegal
immigrant escaping a violent past in Africa, is the night
watchman at the subdivision. They form a cautious friendship
despite the distrust and isolation each is experiencing in new
surroundings. Because the narrative begins at the end, it
involves frequent flashbacks, and at first the story seems
disjointed and confusing.
Once we learn
about Dorothy and Solomon, however, we see how lost and resigned
each has become to the harshness of the world, and we recognize
that their only salvation lies in the fragile connection they
have to each other. The award-winning author of Cambridge,
Phillips has created a poignant and quietly powerful portrait of
contemporary alienation. Recommended for larger public
libraries.
--Library Journal |
