July’s book was Caryl Phillips’s 2003 novel A Distant Shore. It tells the story of two individuals who form an unlikely friendship in a small town: Dorothy a white, middle-aged schoolteacher, and Gabriel/Solomon, a refugee from an unnamed African country.

We began by focusing on the first few paragraphs of the novel, which set up a particular image of contemporary England as socially and geographically divided. A couple of readers identified a concern in the character of Dorothy with an idealised past – an image of England (and her own childhood) that perhaps never existed and that is linked with a sense of respectability and dignity shared by Dorothy and Solomon. The novel opens with the lines: ‘These days it’s difficult to tell who’s from round here and who’s not. Who belongs and who’s a stranger.’  and this question of who is the stranger began to permeate our discussion. We draw parallels between Dorothy and Solomon as both experience a sense of alienation in the small community, complicating the notion of belonging. The word ‘tribe’ stood out and ran through the discussion as suggesting not only the specific context of tribal warfare in Africa experienced by Gabriel, but also the various ‘tribes’ we fit into in Britain: class, race, gender.

The non-linear chronology and fragmented psychological realism of the novel were both challenging and engaging as readers are forced to piece together events in the protagonists’ lives and slowly build a picture of their characters through details revealed at different points in the novel. We spent some time discussing the effect of this structure and while some found it frustrating, others found illuminating points of contrast in the process of piecing events together. We considered the implications of the narrative technique of multiple viewpoints and asked if one of the effects of this is to question the possibility of ever reconstructing a ‘true’ or historically accurate version of events. While this might remind us of the fallibility of memory in texts such as Penelope Lively’s Oleander, Jacaranda, it is especially pertinent in the context of seeking asylum, where the need for a verifiable story secures the asylum seekers right to refuge.

We ended the session by returning to the question of belonging and some readers felt that this had been a theme in a number of the books we’ve been reading in the group. Perhaps, we thought, this is a question that is of particular concern for writers in the twenty-first century, who diagnose the contemporary moment as peculiarly fragmented.

FURTHER READING:

Caryl Phillips was born in St Kitts and brought up in Leeds, UK. He is a prolific author of fiction and non-fiction. His historical novels tend to address slavery and the black diaspora. Of particular interest to readers might be Cambridge (1991), Crossing the River (1993) and The Nature of Blood (1997 – about world war two and the establishment of Israel). Phillips’s non-fiction takes the form of essays collected in The European Tribe (1987 – about his travels in Europe as a black Briton) and A New World Order (2001 – in which Phillips examines his ‘roots’ in the Caribbean and Africa).