A remarkable achievement of mood and emotional insight, infused with an air of melancholy and wisdom that only a lifetime of examining a subject allows. It’s a novel of regrets, not migration’s triumphs, that unfolds from the vantage point of one man’s final years.
Phillips’s best work can be practically Shakespearean in the way he uses a kind of prose soliloquy to illuminate his characters’ lives. What ensues in this book, however, is harder to celebrate. There is range...but the book’s leaps in time and place are distracting, require a lot of summarized backfill, and the result can feel like a baggy Victorian novel compressed to 200 pages. There is a lack of emotional pressure behind the words ... He seems lost in the story he tells himself, and also lost in this story told about him.
A more daring approach ... Phillips has written an absorbing tale about the difficulties of settling down and fitting in ... The drawback with this kind of storytelling is that the novel’s narrative flow is occasionally impeded and some sections are more interesting than others. Yet Phillips serves up powerful meditations on race, and brilliantly articulates his three lead characters’ ambitions, fears, frustrations and thwarted dreams. Even readers with the hardest of hearts may find they have something in their eye by the time they get to the book’s tender closing pages.
Elegiac ... The novel succeeds as a fable-like, enigmatic tale. Phillips’s outlook may appear bleak, but it’s a depiction of the unvarnished truth about his subject and about the jeopardy of migration, the fickle nature of failure and success, and a portrayal of the self-protectiveness that comes from answering to no one but yourself.
Billed as a novel but reads much more like that dreaded nonesuch, the novel-in-stories ... Phillips never makes any discernible effort to invest his characters with any personality; at no point do readers have any reason to care what happens to any of them, despite the promise of that 'become somebody else' opening.
A thought-provoking examination of colonialism and its repercussions ... This book is absorbing in its investigation of the impact of the strictures of colonial rule in the Caribbean.
Getting from the 1960s to the ’80s includes a lot of digressions into other character’s lives, and none of these characters emerges as terribly compelling—including Victor. No book this short should feel so slow.
