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Overview
A powerful and affecting new book from Caryl Phillips: a brilliant hybrid of reportage, fiction, and historical fact that tells the stories of three black men whose lives speak resoundingly to the place and role of the foreigner in English society.Francis Barber, “given” to the great eighteenth-century writer Samuel Johnson, more companion than servant, afforded an unusual depth of freedom that, after Johnson’s death, hastened his wretched demise . . . Randolph Turpin, who made history in 1951 by defeating Sugar Ray Robinson, becoming Britain’s first black world-champion boxer, a top-class fighter for twelve years whose life ended in debt and despair . . . David Oluwale, a Nigerian stowaway who arrived in Leeds in 1949, the events of whose life called into question the reality of English justice, and whose death at the hands of police in 1969 served as a wake-up call for the entire nation.
Each of these men’s stories is rendered in a different, perfectly realized voice. Each illuminates the complexity and drama that lie behind the simple notions of haplessness that have been used to explain the tragedy of these lives. And each explores, in entirely new ways, the themes—at once timeless and urgent—that have been at the heart of all of Caryl Phillips’s remarkable work: belonging, identity, and race.
Synopsis
From an acclaimed, award-winning novelist comes this brilliant hybrid of reportage, fiction, and historical fact: the stories of three black men whose tragic lives speak resoundingly to the problem of race in British society.
With his characteristic grace and forceful prose, Phillips describes the lives of three very different men: Francis Barber, “given” to the 18th-century writer Samuel Johnson, whose friendship with Johnson led to his wretched demise; Randolph Turpin, a boxing champion who ended his life in debt and decrepitude; and David Oluwale, a Nigerian stowaway who arrived in Leeds in 1949 and whose death at the hands of police twenty years later was a wake up call for the entire nation. As Phillips weaves together these three stories, he illuminates the complexities of race relations and social constraints with devastating results.
The Washington Post - Vincent Carretta
In this triptych of fictionalized biographies, Phillips's characters remain strangers in a strange land, alienated from their countrymen by circumstance and racism, as well as by their own behavior…Elegiac in subject and tone though they are, the stories of Phillips's "foreigners" ultimately offer hope as well as suffering and death.
Editorials
Adam Goodheart
"Caryl Phillips's new book looks back over more than 200 years of black history in Britain through the lives of three historical figures and seems intended to offer, in the process, a kind of allegory. Although presented as a novel, it's really a set of freestanding profiles, only lightly fictionalized at most, portraying in turn Francis Barber, the Jamaican servant-turned-heir of Dr. Samuel Johnson; Randolph Turpin, a mixed-race prizefighter who was briefly middleweight champion of the world; and David Oluwale, a Nigerian immigrant who died in 1969 after being brutalized by the Leeds police."—The New York Times
Vincent Carretta
In this triptych of fictionalized biographies, Phillips's characters remain strangers in a strange land, alienated from their countrymen by circumstance and racism, as well as by their own behavior…Elegiac in subject and tone though they are, the stories of Phillips's "foreigners" ultimately offer hope as well as suffering and death.—The Washington Post
Publishers Weekly
Reviewed by Kate ChristensenAlong with interest and admiration, I read parts of Caryl Phillips's new book, Foreigners, with, I confess, a mixture of bemused perplexity and thwarted expectations, wondering, what is this guy up to here? The rather stodgy historical passages coexist somewhat uneasily with the more fluid and lyrical fictionalized accounts. The three sections rub up against each other with a fierce but not quite cohesive energy. But in the end, the book is a bleakly ironic examination of what it means to be Other-historically and socially-through the stories of three very different black men in England.
The first section, "Doctor Johnson's Watch," is narrated by a late-18th-century journalist who sets out to write a piece for a gentleman's magazine about Francis Barber, the Jamaican boy who was "given" in the early 1750s to Dr. Samuel Johnson, of the famous Dictionary. Dr. Johnson raised the "negro" as his ward until his death; he gave him his freedom and a generous pension, which Barber squandered. At the end of the narrative, Barber, lying on the verge of death in a squalid pauper's hospital, offers poignant insight into the nature of freedom and otherness, insight that the journalist, despite good intentions, may not be prepared to receive.
The second section, "Made in Wales," is narrated in a hard-boiled third person that traces the rise and fall of Randy Turpin, the mixed-race boxer who beat Sugar Ray Leonard in 1951 to become, briefly, middleweight champion of the world, then fell, inevitably, the narrative suggests, into hapless debt and ruin. The third, final, most riveting and beautifully written section, "Northern Lights," istold by a chorus of voices who cobble together the mysterious life and death of David Oluwale, a 20th-century version of Bartleby, a stowaway from Nigeria who washes up in Leeds in 1949 and ends his life stubbornly homeless, willfully persecuted and in 1969, drowned.
Interestingly, Phillips goes into none of these three black men's consciousnesses or psyches. The reader stands some distance away from them with the narrators; except for Barber's piercing, frank lament, we don't get any direct emotional information from any of them. This narrative strategy is essential to the book's intent, as is, I suspect, the uneasiness it provoked in me along the way. Phillips gets at real-life complexities in a visceral, nondidactic way: there are no victims or heroes here. I finished the book hearing Melville's "Ah humanity!" echoing back through its pages.
Kate Christensen's fourth novel,The Great Man , was published last month by Doubleday.
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