Living With Books:
HICKS, GRANVILLE
LIVING WITH BOOKS 'The Emigrants' by George Lamming ?A Colorful New Novel of Alienation By Granville Hicks A COUPLE of years ago, a young native of the West Indies, George Lamming, published a...
...In the course of a slow voyage, there are love affairs and there are quarrels, but mostly there is talk...
...This development is important, for, if we did not have a strong grip on the characters, we would probably lose them in the fragmentary episodes that make up Parts 2 and 3. These episodes, which range over a period of two years or so, unfold a complex and almost fantastic drama...
...Tornado and Lilian, Philip, Queenie, and all the others...
...The emigrants have lost one homeland and failed to find another, and there is nothing to which they can cling...
...The account of the voyage occupies a little less than half of the book...
...In the course of the voy-age, they do achieve a degree of unity, simply as a result of being brought together by chance...
...It would have been easy for Mr...
...That book ended with the narrator's departure for Trinidad...
...LIVING WITH BOOKS 'The Emigrants' by George Lamming ?A Colorful New Novel of Alienation By Granville Hicks A COUPLE of years ago, a young native of the West Indies, George Lamming, published a book—one hardly knows whether to call it a novel or a memoir?entitled In the Castle of My Skin...
...Lamming continues his portrayal of the special kind of alienation that is experienced in the modern world by people born in backward areas...
...impressions of the early stages of the voyage, but then the narrator abruptly vanishes...
...In manner it is leisurely and casual, and it is only later that one realizes how solidly the author has developed his characters...
...In the end of this unhappy but eloquent fable, each stands alone...
...Lamming has brought together: the forceful and forthright member of the RAF whom the others call the Governor...
...Indeed, they would be fantasy if we did not bear in mind what we have seen of the emigrants on their ship...
...the withdrawn and ambitious Dickson...
...In the first few pages, we have some of his...
...the stowaway, called the Strange Man...
...the philosophical Jamaican...
...Now, in The Emigrants (McGraw-Hill, $3.75), Mr...
...The Emigrants necessarily lacks the idyllic quality that made itself felt in large portions of the earlier book, but it displays to even better advantage the power and the versatility of Lam-ming's prose, and probes even more deeply into some of the mysteries of man's nature and destiny...
...of course, they fail to do so...
...It was an account of boyhood on the island of Barbados, wonderfully pictorial, deeply poetic in a fresh and personal fashion...
...It is a colorful group that Mr...
...This seems good to them, and they resolve to hold together, but...
...Lamming to have told the story of the emigrants in England in realistic terms, and he does give us glimpses of their disappointments, their partial adjustments, their refuges, their baffling contacts with the English...
...This re-establishes our contact with everyday life, but then the narrator is dropped again and we are plunged back in a world of bizarre and sometimes sinister men and women...
...But, on the whole, he has chosen to suggest rather than to describe, to give an impression rather than to compile a document...
...Now, four years later, he suddenly realizes that Trinidad has given him all it has to give and that he has fallen into a meaningless routine, and he sets sail for England...
...He encounters Lilian, who gives him, in a matter-of-fact way, some account of what has been happening to his erstwhile companions of the voyage...
...It was also, as Richard Wright pointed out in the introduction he wrote for it, "the story of millions of simple folk who, sprawled over half of the world's surface and involving more than half of the human race, are today being catapulted out of their peaceful, indigenously earthy lives and into the turbulence and anxiety of the twentieth century...
...There is a passage at the beginning of Part 3 in which the "I" briefly reappears, engaged in the commonplace act of pawning a suit...
...He is perhaps to be identified with a character named Collis, but Collis is merely one of the emigrants, written about, like the others, in the third person...
...His characters are West Indians who go to England because, as one of them says, "every man want a better break...
...Miss Bis, who has been disappointed in love and satirized in a calypso song...
...As the book begins, it seems a direct sequel to In the Castle of My Skin...
...At the end of In the Castle of My Skin, the narrator is excited by a friend who has found the meaning of his life in a newly acquired sense of racial solidarity, but the emigrants are almost completely unmoved by the idea of race...
...Lamming's books has a kind of magic, for its rhythms are subtle and varied and beautiful, and yet it always seems perfectly relaxed and natural...
...Higgins, who, unlike the others, has specific plans for his life when he gets to England...
...The theme of the book, as of so many contemporary novels, is alienation...
...The talk in both Mr...
Vol. 38 • April 1955 • No. 17
